Why AutoSend Doesn’t Have a Free Plan

Every week someone asks me why AutoSend doesn’t have a free plan. Now it's getting so frequent that I decided to write it down. It’s a fair question though, so here’s the honest answer I can finally link to. This isn’t a justification, but the reasoning behind a decision we thought about deeply.

Every new product seems to start with a free plan. It’s almost a default pricing strategy now. You launch, make it free for a while, get signups, figure out conversion later. It sounds like a smart growth hack, and for some products, it probably is.

When we started building AutoSend, we thought about it too. The logic was simple: lower the entry barrier, attract more users, get feedback faster. But the more we discussed it, the less sense it made.

AutoSend isn’t just another SaaS company. Every user shares the same sending infrastructure like IPs, reputation, and deliverability. In email, those things are sacred. If one sender messes up, everyone pays the price. The last thing we wanted was someone using a free plan to test random data or spam their way through Gmail, dragging everyone else down with them.

Deliverability is fragile. It’s built on trust, consistency, and good behavior. And those things are challenging to enforce with a free plan. So the decision became less about revenue and more about protecting deliverability for everyone who depends on AutoSend to reach inboxes every single time.

Removing the idea of a free plan early gave us clarity. It forced us to build for paying customers from the start. It made the roadmap simpler, the priorities sharper, and the product stronger.

There’s also the question of sustainability. AutoSend isn’t a side project. It’s something we plan to run for years. If we’re going to invest in infrastructure, support, integrations, and scale, we need to build on a foundation where paying users are the nucleus, not an afterthought.

Yogini and I actually asked ourselves one simple question during our brainstorming session: do we want a popular product or a sustainable business? The answer was the latter.

So we made the call. Not because we’re against free users, but because we’re for focus and long-term value. We’d rather serve fewer customers deeply than chase signups that churn.

For us, ditching the free plan was a commitment to quality, reliability, and trust which are extremely important for an email service provider. And that’s exactly the kind of product we want AutoSend to be!

AutoSend pricing starts with a $1 Hobby plan for transactional emails and a $5 plan for marketing + transactional emails. All Pro plans begin at $10, with every feature included and generous limits.

Unlike most providers, AutoSend charges by the number of emails you send, not how many subscribers you store, making it one of the simplest and fairest pricing models out there.