AWeber Price Increase: Grandfathered Pricing Eliminated, Bills Up 50-150%

AWeber made the most aggressive pricing move of any email platform in recent memory: starting December 15, 2024, it eliminated all grandfathered pricing and moved every customer onto its current rates—with increases of roughly 50–150%.

AWeber is one of the oldest names in email marketing, and many of its customers had been on the same plan for a decade or more. Those customers—the most loyal in the industry—got the biggest increases.

We run Audienceful, an AI-powered email marketing platform, and AWeber's move is the starkest example of a trend we've documented across every major ESP.

What happened to AWeber's pricing?

In late 2024, AWeber emailed customers announcing that subscription prices for grandfathered accounts would increase beginning December 15, 2024. There were no exceptions and no opt-outs: legacy plans, some dating back many years, were repriced to current tiers.

For customers on very old plans, that meant bills jumping 50% at the low end and as much as 150% at the high end—effectively overnight. Community forums filled with long-time users comparing notices and discovering their "loyalty pricing" was gone.

What does AWeber cost now?

AWeber's current structure offers a free plan (up to 500 subscribers), a Lite plan from $12.50/month, and a Plus plan from $20/month—both billed annually, and both scaling with subscriber count. At 500 contacts, Plus runs $30/month on monthly billing.

The catch is the scaling curve: past 25,000 contacts AWeber becomes more expensive than several far more modern platforms, while offering a feature set that hasn't meaningfully evolved in years.

What does this mean if you're an AWeber customer?

The repricing removed the single biggest reason long-time customers stayed: a great legacy deal. If you're now paying the same rates as a new signup, it's worth asking whether you'd choose AWeber today, at these prices, against the current market. For most people the honest answer is no—the platform's editor, automation, and reporting lag well behind newer tools at the same price point.

Before you renew:

Check your subscriber count. AWeber's tiers are based on total subscribers—pruning dead contacts may drop you a tier.
Compare the same list size elsewhere. With grandfathered pricing gone, switching costs are the only thing keeping you—and migrating a list is a one-afternoon job.

The industry-wide context

AWeber wasn't alone in ending loyalty pricing. Over the past three years: ActiveCampaign force-migrated every account with 30%+ increases, Kit raised its Creator plan 34% for existing users, Klaviyo applied its new billing model to legacy customers, Mailchimp hiked pre-2019 legacy plans, and Brevo is moving legacy plans to new pricing this September. Grandfathered email pricing is going extinct across the board.

The best AWeber alternative

If AWeber's repricing broke the deal for you, Audienceful is a replacement that's generations ahead—feature-complete, AI-native, and cheaper at scale:

A built-in AI agent: It writes emails in your voice, generates images, builds segments and entire automations from a plain-language brief, runs list hygiene, and answers questions about your data—included on every plan. AWeber has nothing like it.
A genuinely modern editor: Notion-style, real-time collaborative email building with design systems (themes)—a generation ahead of AWeber's builder.
Full-depth features without legacy jank: Multi-step automations with branching logic, segmentation, A/B testing, detailed analytics, and native Stripe and Shopify integrations.
Predictable, honest pricing: Costs scale transparently with your list—no surprise repricing campaigns targeting loyal customers.

See the numbers side by side: AWeber vs Audienceful.