The trial

The trial runs for 14 days from the moment you register, needs no card, and includes every feature Issue Mint has. Issues sent during it are real issues going to real subscribers, not previews or samples.

Two ceilings apply to how much a trial can send. Both are shown while you are writing rather than at the moment a send fails, which is the point of them.

What the trial includes

Every feature, with nothing held back for paying accounts. Your own domain, sponsorship, the Chrome extension, click tracking, CSV imports, the archive website and hosted sending are all available on the first day.

The trial is a time limit and a volume limit rather than a smaller version of the product. If something works during the trial, it works afterwards, and nothing you set up during it has to be redone.

The two ceilings on trial sending

A trial account may send 2,000 emails in total and 500 to any single issue.

The total counts the recipients of issues you have sent since you registered, across every newsletter on the account, and it does not reset each month. Test sends to yourself are not counted, so you can check an issue as many times as you like. Between them the two figures are enough to send a real issue to a real list, and not enough to be worth abusing. Sending limits covers the ones that apply after you subscribe.

Where the ceilings are shown

Issue Mint shows both figures in the composer’s send panel, on every issue, for as long as the account is on a trial. That is deliberate: if your list is larger than the per-issue ceiling, you find out while you are writing rather than when you press send.

The billing page carries the same numbers as a bar, showing how much of the total is left, and a banner appears across the dashboard once half of the total has been used. Subscribing lifts both ceilings straight away, because the test is whether the subscription is live rather than what the date is.

Importing a list during a trial

An import of more than 500 rows on a trial account waits for one of us to look at it before the addresses go active. It is not refused, and the file is not thrown away.

Below that size, an import runs as it normally would. When an import is held explains what happens while it waits. A large list arriving on an account that has never sent anything is what a bought list looks like from the outside, which is the whole reason the check exists.

What you hear from us before it ends

Issue Mint puts a countdown banner on the dashboard for the last four days of a trial, and sends one email at the same point. When the trial ends, one more email says so.

Both emails go out once each, marked as sent, so a trial ending does not produce four days of identical reminders.

What read-only means when a trial expires

An expired trial keeps everything and stops changes. Reading works exactly as before: the dashboard, every issue report, your subscriber list and the CSV export of it are all still there, because a download is a read. Anything that writes is refused with a note saying the trial has ended.

Your website stays up and your archive stays published. Publishing an issue is blocked, the weekly digest we email you stops, unconfirmed signups stop getting their reminder, and choosing a plan is the one part of the dashboard that carries on working normally. Your own account settings sit outside all of this, so changing your password, editing your profile and signing out are unaffected. Nothing is deleted at expiry.

Subscribing, and what it changes

Subscribing lifts the trial ceilings immediately and takes the dashboard out of read-only. Plans are priced on how many people read you, so the plan you need follows your list size rather than a feature list, and the prices are the whole ladder.

Checkout refuses a plan smaller than your current list and names the one that covers it, rather than taking the money and leaving you unable to send. How the plan ladder works covers the moves up and down after that, which happen on their own as your list changes.