What does a newsletter actually cost?
A fair comparison is like-for-like: full newsletter platforms that manage your list, turn your RSS feed into email, send it, and handle unsubscribes and analytics. Most bill by how many subscribers you have; emit bills by how many emails you send. Slide to your numbers and compare — raw sending APIs (which do far less) are shown separately.
Assumptions & how this is calculated
Per-subscriber platforms are charged at their cheapest plan that supports your list size; pay-per-email platforms (emit) are charged for 20,000 emails/month (subscribers × sends). Hakanai is priced in EUR (€5/€9/€40, converted at ≈$1.08/€) and its plans cap sends at 4 emails/subscriber/month, so beyond that frequency — or above 5,000 subscribers — it shows as Custom. Substack is free to send but takes 10% of paid-subscription revenue, so its send cost shows as $0. The "Roll your own" line is Amazon SES ($0.10/1k) plus a ~$20/mo AWS baseline (a Lambda feed-poller, a subscriber database, a signup API, and logging); it does not include the engineering to build or maintain it. Real invoices vary with annual discounts and add-ons — treat this as a directional comparison, not a quote.
Where emit lands
Against the closest apples-to-apples product — Hakanai, the other RSS-to-email service — emit is cheaper across the board and keeps scaling past where Hakanai stops publishing prices. Against the big per-subscriber platforms, emit wins whenever you have a large list you mail on a schedule, because you pay per email ($1.60 per 1,000, prepaid, no tiers, no minimum) instead of per subscriber.
Raw sending APIs like SES and Resend are cheaper in pure dollars — but they're just a pipe. emit runs on Resend and adds the whole newsletter on top: list management, RSS→email rendering, sending from your own domain, signup forms, unsubscribe and bounce handling, and analytics. Rolling that yourself means a database, a poller, an API, and the engineering to keep it alive. See the full comparison, the pricing, or read emit vs Mailchimp / vs Substack.