Email Octopus[1] are great, and 50% cheaper again than MailerLite

for 5k-10k people, on monthly plan:

Mailchimp: $80

MailerLite: $50

EmailOctopus: $24

[1] https://emailoctopus.com

Thanks I'll check it out! What doesn't sit well with me is that someone can send weekly emails to 2k subscribers for free, but if I want to be respectful of people and not spam them all the time, I end up paying much more to send way fewer emails.

I’m in the same boat here. I had a list of ~15,000 blog readers at some point, but gave up sending emails when most services wanted to charge me $1000~$2000/year, even when I only wanted to send 1-2 emails a year.

If there are any services that allow me to import my previous list and email them (very) occasionally for a reasonable price, I’d love to know about them.

If the source of the email signups was a blog, I feel like you can very reasonably use substack. I feel a little dicey doing so for my startup, but I may end up doing it and sending out hybrid email updates/blog posts.

This looks like it's slightly cheaper than MailChimp for transactional emails, at least for the 'starter' level subscription.