Most people who decide to “get serious” about email marketing hit the same wall within a week. They sign up for a well-known platform, import their list, design a decent newsletter — and then discover that the free plan allows them 250 contacts and 500 sends a month. Enough for a test. Not enough for a business.
That gap between trying email marketing and actually doing email marketing is exactly what Mailrelay removes. Its free account allows you to store up to 20,000 contacts and send up to 80,000 emails per month, at no cost, with no trial countdown and no credit card. Not a 14-day taste of the premium features — a permanent plan that includes automation, real-time statistics, an AI-assisted editor and human technical support.
The point of this article is simple: to show that professionalising your email marketing does not require an initial investment, and that when you eventually do outgrow the free tier, you will not have to migrate anywhere.
The renewed Mailrelay dashboard, with the global search bar for jumping straight to any campaign, contact or automation.
The numbers, in context
It is easy to say “generous free plan”. It is more useful to see what the rest of the market currently offers. Free tiers have been shrinking steadily over the last three years, and 2026 has been a particularly bad year for anyone relying on them.
| Platform | Contacts (free) | Emails/month (free) | Automation free? | Support on free plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailrelay | 20,000 | 80,000 | Yes, full flows | Yes – phone, chat, tickets |
| Mailchimp | 250 | 500 (max. 250/day) | No | Email, first 30 days only |
| MailerLite | 250 | 2,500 | Limited (3 automations) | Trial period only |
| Brevo | Unlimited storage | ~9,000 (300/day cap) | Basic | Limited |
Competitor figures reflect their published free-plan limits as of mid-2026; these tiers change frequently, so it is worth re-checking before committing to a platform.
The scale of the difference is the story here. Mailrelay’s free plan sends 32 times more email per month than MailerLite’s and 160 times more than Mailchimp’s. Even against Brevo — the closest competitor on paper, because it stores unlimited contacts — Mailrelay gives you roughly nine times the monthly volume, and without a daily cap that forces you to split a single campaign across a week.
That last detail matters more than it looks. A daily sending limit means you cannot send one newsletter to 5,000 people on a Tuesday morning. You have to drip it out over two and a half weeks, which destroys any campaign tied to a launch, an event, a sale or a piece of news.
What “free” actually includes
The usual trick with free tiers is to leave the volume looking respectable while quietly removing everything that makes the tool useful. Mailrelay’s free account works the other way round: it is functionally close to the paid plans, and the main difference is sending volume.
Contact management that scales
Contacts are organised through groups, segments and tags, which is the combination you need to do anything beyond blasting one list. Groups handle the broad structure — customers, leads, newsletter subscribers. Segments filter dynamically on conditions such as location, signup date or engagement. Tags record behaviour: downloaded the guide, attended the webinar, clicked the pricing link.
Bounce and unsubscribe handling is automatic, so your list stays clean without you auditing it manually. That directly protects your sender reputation, which in turn protects your inbox placement.
Automation flows, not just autoresponders
This is where most free plans stop, and it is included here. The flow builder supports multiple actions, conditions, tags and branching, and it is multichannel — you can combine email and SMS in the same sequence. In practice that covers the workflows most businesses actually need:
- Welcome and onboarding sequences — a drip campaign that introduces your product over five emails rather than one overwhelming message.
- Event-based triggers — someone visits a page, clicks a specific link, or is added to a group, and the flow fires.
- Birthday and date-based campaigns — automatic and personalised, set up once.
- Re-engagement flows — a condition checks whether a contact has opened anything in 90 days, and branches accordingly.
Because conditions can be layered, the same flow can send one message to people who clicked and a different one to people who did not, then tag both groups for future segmentation.
A drag-and-drop editor with AI built in
The editor is visual, with reusable blocks you can save once and drop into any future campaign, plus conditional blocks that show different content to different segments within the same send. If half your list is in Spain and half in Mexico, one campaign can carry two versions of the offer.
The integrated AI assistant handles the part most people dread: writing. Give it the subject of the campaign and it drafts the copy, which you then edit rather than starting from a blank canvas. For a small team without a copywriter, this is the difference between sending a newsletter this week and postponing it again.
Automation flows support conditions and branching, and combine email with SMS in the same sequence — all available on the free account.
Real-time statistics, in full
Analytics are complete rather than trimmed down: opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, a heat map of where people clicked inside the email, and a ranking of the most effective links — updated in real time as the campaign goes out.
The heat map is the underrated one. It tells you whether people clicked the primary call to action or the logo in the footer, which changes how you design the next campaign. Free plans elsewhere typically show you an open rate and stop there.
A renewed, searchable interface
The interface was rebuilt around a global search bar. Rather than remembering which menu holds which report, you type the name of a campaign, a contact or a flow and go straight there. It sounds minor until you have 40 campaigns and three automations running.
The parts that matter when you grow
A free plan is only worth building on if the platform underneath it can carry a serious operation later. Three things make Mailrelay a safe place to start.
Deliverability infrastructure. Mailrelay operates its own IP ranges and delivery algorithms, and the platform is built for high-volume sending — clients dispatching millions of emails. Deliverability is the one variable you cannot fix with better copy: if the message lands in spam, nothing else you did matters. Starting on infrastructure designed for volume means you are not going to hit a ceiling and have to migrate your list, warm up a new sender reputation and rebuild your automations from scratch.
Support in Spanish, from actual people. Mailrelay is a Spanish company with a Spanish-language dashboard and support by phone, chat and ticket — available to free users too. This is genuinely unusual. Most competitors either restrict free support to a trial window or route everything through a chatbot and a help centre. When a campaign fails to send an hour before a launch, the ability to phone someone who speaks your language is worth more than any feature comparison.
Room to expand technically. As your setup matures, the platform expands with it: transactional emails via SMTP or API (a contractable add-on module) for order confirmations and password resets, SMS with tracking and WhatsApp for multichannel campaigns, and integrations through Make.com connecting Mailrelay to your CRM, ecommerce platform or internal tools without writing code.
Who this is for
If you are a blogger or creator, 80,000 monthly emails covers a list of 20,000 people receiving a weekly newsletter — well past the point where most people start monetising.
If you run an SME or an online shop, you can operate welcome flows, abandoned-interest follow-ups, seasonal campaigns and a monthly newsletter simultaneously, on a real list, without a software line in the budget.
If you are an agency, you can build and demonstrate a complete email programme for a client before asking them to approve any spend.
And if you are a large company evaluating platforms, the free account is the most honest trial available: not a restricted demo, but the actual product at a volume high enough to test deliverability, automation logic and reporting against your real data.
The takeaway
The reason most businesses under-invest in email marketing is not that they doubt it works — email remains one of the most predictable and profitable channels available. It is that the tooling has traditionally demanded payment before proving anything.
Mailrelay inverts that. You get 80,000 emails a month, 20,000 contacts, full automation, complete real-time analytics, an AI-assisted editor and human support in Spanish, before spending anything. The only reason to upgrade is that you have grown past 80,000 monthly sends — and if you have, the platform is already paying for itself.
