The five plans

Issue Mint has five plans, and which one you need is decided by one number: how many active subscribers your account has in total. Prices run from $19 a month to $249 a month, every plan includes every feature, and the plan moves up and down on its own as your list changes.

Pricing is per account rather than per newsletter. Three newsletters on one account have their subscribers added together, and one plan covers all three. The pricing page carries the same ladder, because both read the same figures out of the application’s configuration.

The five plans

Each plan is a monthly price and a subscriber ceiling, and the ceiling is the only thing that changes between them.

• Starter, $19 a month, up to 1,000 active subscribers.
• Growth, $39 a month, up to 5,000.
• Pro, $79 a month, up to 15,000.
• Scale, $149 a month, up to 40,000.
• Summit, $249 a month, up to 100,000.

Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars, with no setup fee and no charge per email sent. Your billing page shows the plan you are on, the ceiling that comes with it and the subscriber figure Issue Mint is currently counting, so the number your bill rests on is never hidden from you.

What counts as an active subscriber

An active subscriber is a confirmed address currently receiving one of your newsletters. Nothing else on your list counts towards the plan.

Addresses waiting to confirm a double opt-in, addresses held while a large import is reviewed, people who have unsubscribed, hard bounces and anybody who marked an issue as spam are all excluded. They stay on your list and stay visible in the dashboard, because the history is worth keeping, but none of them is billable. Your subscriber list explains what each status means, and the active subscriber entry in the glossary is the short version.

This is the figure worth checking against any other platform’s pricing page, because two products quoting the same price can mean quite different things by a subscriber. A list of ten thousand signups is often seven thousand active addresses.

One plan covers every newsletter you run

Issue Mint puts no limit on the number of newsletters an account may run, and every plan can run as many as you like.

The subscriber total that decides your plan is the sum across all of them, so a publisher running a main newsletter and a small spin-off pays once. Each newsletter keeps its own list, its own website, its own sponsorship inventory and its own schedule; billing is the one thing they share. Practically, this means starting a second newsletter costs nothing until the combined list crosses a ceiling.

Every plan includes every feature

There is no feature held back for a larger plan, and no part of Issue Mint that appears once you pay more.

Your own domain, sending from your own address, sponsorship inventory and the sponsor enquiry inbox, the browser extension, click tracking, reader submissions, CSV imports, the archive website and its RSS feed are all included on Starter and all included on the trial. The things you would expect to be sold as an upgrade, chiefly selling sponsorships and tracking which links your readers click, are not sold that way here.

What a larger plan buys is headroom. That is the whole difference.

Which plan checkout will sell you

Checkout refuses a plan smaller than your current list, and names the one that covers it instead.

A plan you have already outgrown would be sold and then upgraded the same night, which is a worse experience than a clear refusal, so the plan cards below the one your list needs are visible but not selectable. This matters most to somebody importing a list before subscribing: import first and the ladder offers you the right rung, rather than the one you were expecting.

Above the top of the ladder

Summit covers 100,000 active subscribers, and there is nothing above it on the public ladder.

An account whose list grows past Summit stays on Summit and is asked to get in touch so we can work something out, which is an honest description of a conversation rather than a hidden price. Going over the top of the ladder does not stop new readers signing up and does not stop your issues going out.

What your plan does not decide

Your plan decides your bill. It does not decide how your issues are sent, or how many of them Issue Mint will carry.

Hosted sending has its own boundary at 15,000 active subscribers, along with a monthly email allowance, and both are described on the limits on hosted sending. Those are sending boundaries rather than billing ones, and a larger plan does not lift either. The cap is not your plan limit is worth five minutes if you are anywhere near 12,000 subscribers, because the two boundaries happen to share a number and arrive as two quite different messages.