Flodesk Increases Prices, Kills Unlimited: Here's Why and The Best Alternatives

Flodesk has officially announced their Unlimited Plan, where customers can send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts for a flat fee, will be ending.

If you rely on Flodesk for email marketing, this change may come as a shock. However, there are good reasons Flodesk is following the rest of the industry in charging for contacts.

We run Audienceful, an AI-powered competitor to Flodesk, and many years ago we debated about following their pricing model. Instead we learned from first principles why the email marketing space is structured/priced the way it is.

Why is Flodesk increasing prices?

The flat-fee unlimited model attracts beginners and hobbyists who rarely send campaigns and would be priced out of more traditional platforms, but it also risks serious deliverability issues for any business relying on Flodesk:

Risky IP pools: Platforms that don't charge for list size attract senders who never clean their lists and send rarely. This leads to list rot (as high as 25% per year), more bounces, spam complaints, and poor sender reputations across the board. Hurting deliverability in Gmail/Outlook for all users on the platform, who have to send from the same IPs.
Incentivizing Bad Practices: If it costs nothing to add contacts, store contacts or send emails, you're incentivizing users to become spammers in the eyes of Gmail/Outlook. With Gmail cracking down on spam and tracking engagement like a hawk in their algorithm, this creates an uphill battle for good reputation sending infra. It's also a recipe for unhappy customers complaining about you on social media (even if it was their own poor practices harming their domain reputation).
Beginner userbase & unrealistic expectations: Beginners love pretty templates, but this leads to overpromising a level of design that Gmail and Outlook don't actually support. Flodesk has to export your entire email as images (text and all!) to display custom fonts for Gmail/Outlook, instead of admitting web fonts in email are non-viable. Not using live text means emails aren't responsive, have poor accessibility, don't work with Gmail language translation, don't work on dark mode, and may land in spam since spam filters can't read images.
Rising Costs to Email Sending: Flodesk doesn't send their own emails and uses 3rd party APIs on the backend (not inherently a bad thing, most ESPs do this). So their ability to keep prices low is dependent on infrastructure providers keeping their prices low. Given the big API-based email senders are publicly traded, their pricing going up is an inevitability.

In other words, unlimited might have appeared cheap—but customers were paying in other ways.

When do Flodesk's prices increase?

Starting November 28, 2025, new customers will be moved onto a contact-based pricing model, where the price you pay will scale with the size of your customer base and email list.

The broadly matches the rest of the email marketing industry, and as discussed above, will likely help fix the spam incentive issues and deliverability risks of unmetered email blasting.

Can existing customers keep their plan?

For now, existing Flodesk customers can keep their Unlimited plan. But let's be real: when a company shifts its business model like this, it's only a matter of time before legacy customers are forced into new pricing plans too. But as we've stated, this is likely the right move for Flodesk and their customers long term.

So what does this mean for you? And if you're on Flodesk, should you stick around?

Which email platforms haven't raised prices?

Very few. Audienceful is one of them: since our founding in 2021, we've never raised prices once—and we don't plan to in the future either. Because we priced reasonably from the start, based on the actual costs of running an email marketing platform (the same first-principles math discussed above), we've never had to walk back an unsustainable model the way Flodesk is doing now. We're also not being bought and sold by private equity like much of this industry—we're still 100% founder-owned and operated.

The Best Flodesk alternative for Email Marketers

If you're evaluating options after the Flodesk pricing change, Audienceful is a modern, AI-native alternative that has leapfrogged hobbyist platforms on functionality:

A built-in AI agent, not just AI writing: Audienceful's agent 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.
Feature-complete where Flodesk is thin: Multi-step automations with branching logic, real segmentation, A/B testing, detailed analytics, and native Stripe and Shopify integrations.
Next-gen, real-time collaborative editor: We've spent years crafting our Notion-style email builder from the ground up to render beautifully across Gmail, Outlook, and more—enabling good design workflows and email design systems (themes) without gimmicks.
Honest Pricing and Deliverability: No unsustainable unlimited promises. Our pricing scales with your growth, but remains predictable and transparent.
Equipped for both startups and serious businesses: Audienceful is powerful enough for businesses that rely on email as a core communication and revenue channel, so it scales beyond hobbyist platforms like Flodesk.