Kit review

How much does Kit take from a paid newsletter?

Kit charges 3.5% + $0.30 per transaction in USD, and that figure includes card processing. Kit's pricing page puts its own share at 0.6%. There is no monthly fee to sell, and the rate is the same on Free, Creator, and Pro. Tips cost the same 3.5% + $0.30.

On an $8 monthly subscription, you keep about $7.42. That beats every other platform in this category for small lists. Ghost charges Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 plus a monthly plan, and Kit's extra 0.6% only costs more than Ghost's $75 Publisher bill once you pass $12,500 a month in sales.

Two details. Processing fees are not returned when you refund a sale. And other currencies carry their own fixed fee, such as 3.5% + £0.20 in GBP and 3.5% + €0.25 in EUR. Compare take-home pay across platforms on our fee comparison.

How much does Kit cost?

Kit is free up to 10,000 subscribers. Past that, or when you want automations, Creator starts at $39 a month and Pro at $79 a month for 1,000 subscribers on monthly billing. Paying yearly saves 17%.

Kit bills on active, unique subscribers and moves you up a tier automatically. Moving down is manual, from Account and Billing, after you clean your list.

The free plan leaves out visual automations, email sequences, and RSS campaigns, and the Built with Kit badge stays on. Those features start at Creator.

Kit's pricing page currently shows a first-year discount on annual Pro. The plan renews at the standard rate after that, so budget for the full price.

• 1,000 subscribers: Creator $39, Pro $79 a month
• 3,000 subscribers: Creator $59, Pro $99 a month
• 5,000 subscribers: Creator $89, Pro $139 a month
• Creator at 5,000 billed yearly: $890 a year

Is Kit good for paid newsletters?

It works, but Kit is an email marketing tool first. A paid newsletter is a subscription product. Kit's Substack migration guide has you send paid issues to paying subscribers with a filter and mark web posts as visible only to paying subscribers.

That is more setup than Substack or beehiiv, where paid tiers are part of the publishing flow. Kit's strength is everything around the newsletter: automations, sequences, tagging, and selling ebooks or courses from the same checkout.

Skip Kit if you expect to pass 10,000 subscribers soon. Past that mark the free plan stops sending, and you pay for Creator or Pro on top of the 3.5% + $0.30 per sale. Skip it too if you might switch platforms later, since paid subscriptions cannot move in or out of Kit with their card details.

Our view: Kit is the right pick if the newsletter feeds a product business. If the newsletter is the product and you want a paywalled website, Ghost or beehiiv fits better.

Can you leave Kit with your subscribers?

You can export your whole list, or any segment, as a CSV file at any time. Exports include tags, UTM parameters, and subscriber locations, and Kit emails you a download link that expires after five days.

Paying subscribers are stuck in both directions. Kit's Substack guide says there is no convenient way to bring paid subscriptions into Kit with card details. beehiiv's help center says subscriptions run through Kit and Stripe Express cannot be migrated out to beehiiv, because Kit does not expose the payment details. Leaving means canceling and asking readers to resubscribe.

Kit's pricing page lists a custom domain for landing pages on every plan, including Free. That keeps the links you share on an address you control if you ever move.

How do Kit payouts work?

Kit pays out weekly, on Fridays. Your first payout arrives 7 to 14 days after your first successful sale. You are paid in your bank account's currency, whatever currency the product is priced in.

You can sell from 39 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, and most of the EU. Kit collects VAT for you but not US sales tax or Canada QST.