Kit (ConvertKit): What It Is, Pricing and How to Use It (2026)

What is Kit?

Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is an email marketing platform built for creators: newsletter writers, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, course creators and coaches. You collect subscribers with forms and landing pages, send them newsletters (Kit calls these broadcasts), and run automated email series for new subscribers or buyers. It also lets you sell digital products and paid newsletter subscriptions without a separate store.

The pitch is simplicity for one-person and small-team businesses. Subscribers are organised with tags, segments and custom fields, so you can target emails without managing many separate lists. Around that core Kit has added a public Newsletter site for your posts and products, the Creator Network for cross-recommendations and sponsorships, and AI tools including a subject line generator and the Kit MCP, which connects AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT to your account.

The problem it solves: owning a direct line to your audience that no social algorithm controls, and turning that audience into income through products, paid subscriptions or sponsorships.

Who it is for

• Newsletter writers who send a weekly or monthly email and may want to charge for it or take sponsors.
• Course creators and coaches who sell digital products and need a welcome sequence and a launch sequence.
• Bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers turning an audience into an email list with a lead magnet.
• Small creator teams that want shared access and reporting (on Creator Pro).

Who should not use it: ecommerce brands that need deep order-based automation and predictive sending, and B2B companies that want lead scoring and a sales pipeline. A full marketing automation platform such as ActiveCampaign fits those better. Kit is also not for cold email; only send to people who opted in.

Key features

• Broadcasts. One-off emails to all subscribers, a tag or a segment, sent immediately or scheduled, and optionally published to your Newsletter site. Subject line and preview text A/B testing, templates, version history on paid plans and an archive for sent broadcasts.
• Email Sequences. Automated series with a delay before each email, used for welcome series, courses and launches. Paid plans only.
• Visual Automations and Rules. A flowchart builder with entry points (for example Joins a form or a purchase) and actions (add to a sequence, add a tag, send a webhook), plus a template library. Rules handle simple “when this, do that” triggers. Paid plans only.
• Forms and landing pages. Inline, modal, slide-in and sticky bar forms with email-typo detection, a WordPress plugin, and a landing page editor with 20+ templates, custom brand fonts and, since October 2026, Product blocks for sales pages.
• Commerce. Digital products, paid newsletter subscriptions, pay-what-you-want pricing, payment plans, coupons and checkout upsells, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link and Amazon Pay.
• Creator Network. Recommend other newsletters and be recommended after someone subscribes, earn from Paid Recommendations (paid plans) and get matched with sponsors through Newsletter Sponsorships.
• Kit AI and the Kit MCP. The AI subject line generator sits beside the subject line field. On paid plans the Kit MCP (listed under AI Connectors) lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client query your list, tag subscribers and draft broadcasts, sequences and landing pages that open in Kit’s editor for review. Kit says it does not train AI models on Kit data.
• Subscriber data and integrations. Tags, segments, custom fields, Subscriber Signals enrichment (rolling out more widely in October 2026), Webhooks 2.0 and a Kit App Store with integrations such as Shopify, Patreon, Eventbrite, Calendly, Typeform, Wix and Manychat.

Pricing

At the time of writing Kit has three plans. Paid plans are priced by subscriber count, include a 14-day free trial, and annual billing gives about two months free. The prices below are Kit’s published starting prices for up to 1,000 subscribers.

Plan	Price (up to 1,000 subscribers)	Subscribers	What you get
Free	$0	Up to 10,000	Unlimited forms, landing pages and broadcasts; tags and segments; digital products and paid subscriptions; broadcast A/B testing; API; Creator Network Recommendations; AI subject lines (5 uses)
Creator	$39/month, or $390/year	Priced by tier	Everything in Free, plus Visual Automations, email sequences, rules, RSS campaigns, AI Connectors (Kit MCP), Paid Recommendations, sponsorships, unlimited AI subject lines; 2 users
Creator Pro	$79/month, about two months free annually	Priced by tier	Everything in Creator, plus unlimited team members, subscriber scoring, Facebook Custom Audiences sync, Insights dashboards, advanced reporting, A/B testing of up to 5 subject lines and of content

Points to keep in mind:

• Bigger lists cost more. Paid plans move up a tier automatically when you pass your subscriber limit; moving down is a manual switch under Account & Billing. We could not confirm prices above 1,000 subscribers on kit.com, so use the live pricing calculator with your real list size.
• Free means broadcasts only. According to Kit’s latest help article on the Free plan, automations and sequences are paid features. An older help article listed one automation and one sequence on the free plan, so check the plan page when you sign up.
• Free stops at 10,000. Past that number you must upgrade to keep sending, though nothing you built is deleted.

How to use Kit: step-by-step

1. Set up your account and sending address

1. Sign up for the Free plan at kit.com and complete onboarding. Kit’s help center has a full new-account checklist.
2. Under Settings > Email, add your physical mailing address (required before anything can send) and a sending email address, then confirm the verification email.
3. Use an address on a domain you own rather than a Gmail or Yahoo address, and set up a Verified Sending Domain (automatic setup or manual DNS records). Kit recommends this especially if your domain has a DMARC record.
4. Import existing subscribers from a CSV or follow Kit’s migration guide for your old provider. Only import people who opted in.

2. Build a signup form or landing page

1. Open Landing Pages & Forms (under the audience growth area of the navigation, which was redesigned in June 2026) and click New.
2. Choose Form and pick Inline, Modal, Slide in or Sticky bar, or choose Landing Page for a Kit-hosted page with its own URL.
3. Pick a template, edit the headline, fields and button text, and add an incentive such as a checklist or free chapter.
4. Click Save, then embed the form with the JavaScript or HTML code or the WordPress plugin, or share the landing page link. If you need heavily tested campaign pages, a dedicated builder such as Unbounce goes further than Kit’s editor; check its integration options before you connect the two.

3. Create a welcome sequence and automation (paid plans)

1. Go to Email Sequences and create a new sequence.
2. Add the first email with a delay of 0 hours so it arrives right after signup, then add two to four more emails a few days apart.
3. Toggle each email to Published, then set the sequence to Active in its Settings tab.
4. Open Visual Automations, click New, and choose the entry point Joins a form. Select your form or landing page.
5. Add the action Add subscriber to an email sequence, choose your welcome sequence, and activate the automation. Both the automation and the sequence must be active or nothing sends.

4. Send your first broadcast

1. Open Broadcasts and create a new broadcast.
2. Choose recipients: all subscribers, a segment or a tag.
3. Write the email. Add preview text under the subject line, or click the sparkle icon beside the subject line for five AI suggestions (use Refresh suggestions for more).
4. Preview and send a test to yourself, then send now or schedule it. Optionally publish it to your Newsletter site so it works as a web post too.

Tips to get better results

• Verify your sending domain before your first big send. Authentication does more for inbox placement than any subject line.
• Tag by source. Give every form and landing page its own tag so you know which lead magnet or channel brings the best subscribers.
• Write the welcome sequence before chasing growth. New subscribers are most engaged in the first days; a short sequence that delivers the promised freebie and introduces your best work pays off immediately.
• Test subject lines on bigger sends. Broadcast A/B testing is available on the Free plan; let the winner go to the rest of the list.
• Prune inactive subscribers. Paid plans charge by subscriber count, so removing people who never open keeps costs and spam complaints down.
• Use the Kit MCP for drafts, not for sending. Let Claude or ChatGPT draft a broadcast or sequence from your notes, then edit it in Kit. Our Claude review and guide on how to write better prompts help you get better drafts.
• Repurpose long-form content. If you publish podcasts or videos, a tool such as Castmagic can turn episodes into newsletter drafts you then edit and send from Kit.

Limitations and common problems

• No automations on Free. The Free plan is effectively a broadcast tool. If you need a welcome sequence from day one, budget for Creator or use the 14-day trial to build and test it.
• Two users on Creator. Assistants and editors beyond two people require Creator Pro.
• Costs scale with the list. A fast-growing list moves you up tiers automatically. Remove inactive subscribers before each billing cycle.
• Simpler than full automation suites. Visual Automations covers creator journeys well, but there is no predictive sending or deep ecommerce attribution of the kind platforms like ActiveCampaign offer.
• “Nothing sends” confusion. The most common setup problem is a sequence email left unpublished or a sequence or automation left inactive. Check all three switches.
• AI connector data. When you use the Kit MCP, your AI provider’s data policy governs your prompts, not Kit’s. Kit asks you to confirm actions, but it does not keep an MCP-specific audit log.

Alternatives

• ActiveCampaign - deeper marketing automation, segmentation and predictive sending for small and mid-sized businesses, with no free plan.
• Unbounce - a dedicated landing page builder with A/B testing, to pair with Kit if pages matter more than email.
• Manychat - Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger automation for creators whose audience lives in DMs; it also connects to Kit.
• Beehiiv - a newsletter-first platform with its own ad network and web publishing.
• MailerLite - a budget email tool with a free plan, popular with small businesses.

See every option in our marketing tools directory.

Verdict

Sign up for Kit if you are a creator who wants to own your audience and sell to it: the Free plan is a strong start for a newsletter of up to 10,000 subscribers, and Creator is the realistic plan once you want a welcome sequence, automations and the Kit MCP. Move to Creator Pro when a team or advanced reporting matters. Skip Kit if you run an ecommerce brand that needs order-based journeys and predictive sending, a B2B funnel with lead scoring, or cold outreach to people who never subscribed.