The question nobody answers
How much does a newsletter service cost?
Almost every vendor in this category hides the number behind a sales call. Here are the ones that publish, what print and postage really cost, and how to work out your own figure before you talk to anybody.
The short version
A done-for-you newsletter has two bills, and confusing them is where most budgets go wrong. There is a production fee — writing, design, proofing, scheduling, the digital edition — and there is print and postage, which is a per-piece cost that scales with your list and has nothing to do with the agency.
Production fees from vendors that publish a price sit roughly between $80 and $400 a month. Print and mail, if you mail, realistically adds $1.10 to $2.00 a piece all-in for a small run. On 500 names that is more than the production fee. Anyone quoting you one all-in number without asking how many people you mail has not costed your job.
If a vendor won’t separate those two lines for you, ask them to. A blended number hides whether you are being marked up on postage.
Vendors that publish a price, and what they publish
This is not a ranking and it is not exhaustive. It is the list of newsletter and client-communication vendors we could find an actual published figure for, so you have something to anchor against. Prices are as published by each vendor and worth re-checking before you sign anything.
- Insurance ProShop — $79.95 a month.
- CPA Site Solutions — around $90 a month.
- Potions — $169 to $242 a month.
- MSP Marketing Edge — about $199 a month.
- newsletterasaservice.com — around $297 to $399 a month.
- Funeral Futurist — $395 a month.
- FMG Suite — $178 to $999 a month, plus a setup fee of roughly $994 to $2,999.
- ReminderMedia — $4.49 to $6.99 per magazine with a 50-piece minimum, plus a $299.99 activation fee.
ReminderMedia is priced per piece rather than per month because the magazine is the product. At 500 names that is a very different bill from the monthly-fee vendors above, so compare like for like: multiply out.
What print and postage actually cost in 2026
This is the part vendors are vaguest about, and it is the part you can calculate yourself. A four-page full-color newsletter at 500 copies runs roughly 50 to 80 cents a piece to print. Addressing and insertion adds 15 to 30 cents.
Postage is the swing factor. A First-Class metered letter is about 78 cents in 2026. Marketing Mail presort letters run about 46.7 cents. Nonprofit Marketing Mail is about 25.7 cents. Those gaps are large enough to change what you can afford to send.
- Marketing Mail requires a 200-piece minimum.
- First-Class presort requires 500.
- Below those thresholds you pay retail rates, which is why small runs sit at the top of every range.
All-in for a small drop: realistically $1.10 to $2.00 a piece. Budget $2.00 and be pleasantly surprised rather than the other way round.
The four things that move your number
Two firms can get quotes three times apart and both quotes be fair. It is almost always one of these four.
- How many people you mail. Five hundred names and five thousand are different businesses to run, and the postage line moves ten-fold.
- How much writing is from scratch. A fully ghostwritten issue costs more than one assembled from material you already publish.
- Print, digital, or both. Digital-only removes the entire per-piece line. It is the cheapest honest way to start.
- Whether there’s a mess to fix first. A list living in three systems, or a site the newsletter has to link to, is set-up work and should be quoted once, separately.
How to tell an expensive vendor from a badly-priced one
Price alone tells you very little. A $400 fully-ghostwritten issue can be better value than a $90 template you have to fill in yourself, because the $90 one has a hidden cost: your time, every month, forever. And the failure mode of a newsletter is never quality. It is month four, when everyone is busy and the issue quietly skips.
The useful questions are about who does the work and what happens when you go quiet.
- Is the content written for me, or is it a shared library everyone in my industry also mails?
- How much of my time does an issue take, honestly, in minutes?
- Who writes it — a named person, or whoever is available that month?
- What happens if I miss the deadline for my input? Does the issue still ship?
- Is there a minimum quantity or a contract term?
- Is print billed at cost, or marked up?
Why so few vendors publish anything
There are two honest reasons and one less honest one. The honest ones: the same newsletter genuinely costs very different amounts at 300 names and 5,000, and print is a pass-through that moves with paper and postage rates. The less honest one: a published number lets you leave without talking to anyone.
We don’t publish a monthly figure either, and it would be dishonest to pretend our reason is nobler than anyone else’s — a range on a page anchors every conversation to the bottom of it. What we do instead is give the whole number on the first call rather than after three meetings, and publish the pass-through costs so you can see there is no markup on them.
A sanity check before you buy anything
A newsletter is a retention spend, not an acquisition one. Harvard Business Review has reported that acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times what retaining an existing one does. That is the whole economic argument for mailing people who already know you, and it is why a newsletter can look expensive per piece and still be the cheapest line in the budget.
The test is simple: what is one more matter, job or policy worth to you? If your list is 500 people and the year costs a few thousand dollars, you need very little to happen for it to pay. If your average client is worth $200 and you have 200 names, be honest with yourself — the math might not be there yet, and a vendor worth hiring will tell you so.
Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to twenty-five times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Harvard Business Review
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
Among vendors that publish a figure, production fees run from about $80 a month at the template end to around $400 for fully written work, with FMG Suite reaching $999 at the top of its range. Print and postage are separate and often larger than the fee itself.
Digital is dramatically cheaper, because it removes the per-piece cost entirely. A print run of 500 can add $550 to $1,000 a drop before anyone has written a word. Digital-only is the sensible place to start if the budget is tight, and print can be added once it is earning.
Partly because list size genuinely changes the cost several-fold, and partly because a call converts better than a price page. Both things are true at once. You can shortcut it: tell them your list size and whether you want print, and ask for a number in writing before you agree to a meeting.
Often, yes. FMG Suite publishes roughly $994 to $2,999 and ReminderMedia publishes a $299.99 activation fee. Ask what the setup covers — if it is design and list import, that is real work; if it is an account being switched on, negotiate it.
It varies and it matters. ReminderMedia requires 50 pieces. Newsletter Pro requires 500. USPS itself has minimums — 200 for Marketing Mail, 500 for First-Class presort — so below those you pay retail postage regardless of vendor.
Keep reading
Related pages
Want a real number for your list?
Tell us how many people you’d mail and whether you want print. You’ll get the figure on the first call, split into our fee and the pass-through costs, and if the list is too small to be worth it we’ll say that instead.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.