Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Kit — or the tool you're already paying for
· 3 min read
A few thousand contacts on a dedicated email platform can run $75–100+/mo on its own. SESH's marketing tab is bundled into a plan you likely already have.
A studio's mailing list is usually small by the standards of the platforms built to sell to it — a few hundred followers, a list of past clients, maybe a couple thousand names if the studio's been around a while. That size sits right in the range where a dedicated email tool starts charging real money for what is, for a studio, a fairly occasional send: a new-gear announcement, a slow-month discount, a "we're still open" nudge every so often.
What the standalone tools actually cost
Pricing on all three of these changes over time, so treat this as a snapshot rather than gospel, but the shape is consistent: free or cheap at the very bottom, then a real jump as soon as a list crosses a few hundred to a couple thousand contacts.
Mailchimp has a limited free tier (250 contacts, 500 sends a month), then an Essentials plan starting around $13/mo that climbs toward $75/mo by the time a list reaches roughly 5,000 contacts. Its Standard tier runs higher still at the same list size.
Constant Contact has no free plan at all. Its entry Lite tier starts near $12/mo but jumps sharply — to around $30/mo — once a list passes about 1,000 contacts, with Standard and Premium tiers running $35–80+/mo on top of that.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) starts its paid Creator plan around $39/mo for 1,000 subscribers and climbs toward $89/mo at 5,000. It does offer a free "Newsletter" plan up to a much larger subscriber count, but with fewer of the automation and segmentation features a paid plan unlocks.
None of that is a knock on those tools — they're built for a very different customer, someone running email as the core of their business, with automation flows and A/B testing and deliverability tooling a studio doesn't need. A studio sending a handful of campaigns a month is paying for capability it mostly won't use.
What it looks like bundled instead
SESH's Marketing tab is included in Boost, Premium, and Top Shelf, with a monthly send allowance built into the plan — 500 sends on Boost, 2,000 on Premium, 8,000 on Top Shelf — rather than priced separately by contact count. There's a real formatting toolbar, a hero image, audience segments (followers, past guests, anyone who's saved a listing, or your own uploaded list), and on Top Shelf the ability to schedule a send for later. See what it actually looks like to send one.
The pitch isn't that it's a more powerful email platform — it isn't trying to be. It's that a studio already paying for calendar sync, accounting, and inventory tools doesn't need a second bill and a second login just to tell its own list about a discount. Run all your studio's work through one place, and the marketing tool is already sitting there when you need it, at a cost that doesn't move with your list size the way the standalone tools do.
Where a dedicated tool still makes sense
If email actually is a serious part of how you run your business — a large list, automated drip sequences, real segmentation experiments — a dedicated platform's depth is worth its price. This isn't that case for most studios. It's for the studio that wants to tell people about a new mic or a slow-Tuesday rate without opening a third tab to do it.