Henrik Refsnes

In the interest of time, I will preface this post by saying it is only relevant if you are hosting your site at WordPressdotcom. You can also stop reading if you’re good with shelling out $25 a month for the Business tier—then you’re all set. It is also not a comparison of features, but we’ll get to that.

I’ll just be honest and call it a rant.

If you’re like me—just another poor soul attempting to connect with your WordPress audience through a newsletter—then let me save you some blood, sweat and tears. I stubbornly went down a rabbit hole (that damage is already done) but there is no reason you need to join me in the pit of despair.

The Mailchimp free tier used to be the no-brainer choice for anyone not rolling in Benjamins and who wanted to build their author platform by gathering subscribers. Arguably, that’s a pretty large crowd, and obviously they can’t be allowed to have nice things. After all, monetization must happen. 2000 contacts were slashed to 500 and basic segmentation transformed into a less than useful arbitrary “star” system.

Strictly speaking there are many alternatives, most of which are better bang-for-buck even in the priced tiers (but let’s not get bitter just yet). If you are paying for the WordPress Business tier you have access to plugins, and with that the pick of the litter. In this post however, I’m going to stick to the free tiers as my author budget currently—and barely—covers coffee.

You’ve probably already figured out that WordPress users subscribing to your blog doesn’t give you the email list you want and manually transcribing form responses is also a less than preferable option. Let’s also assume that you ruled out Mailchimp (for now) and turned your attention to MailerLite (and rightfully so). When it comes to free tiers, MailerLite is the current king of the hill and an argument could be made for priced tiers as well.

Armed with that knowledge, at this point your morale is probably relatively high as you set sails for the better option. That is until you realize the MailerLite widget doesn’t work in the new and posh blocked themes that use the WordPress site editor. In fact, you have to have a classic theme for that to work. Oh, and also, the widget only supports MailerLite Classic, which you don’t have unless you registered your MailerLite account before March 2022 (but hey, if you just activate WordPress plugins it’s not a problem…) 

Better start bailing at this point, because this ship is going down.

Wait, wait. Hold on dammit. Let’s outside-the-box this shit. What about embedding an email signup form?

Well, and this may sound like a broken record, but if you don’t have a plugin-enabled site, security policy does not allow that. So, that’s a no… unless you use Wufoo, Jotform or Google Forms, which WordPress will allow. At a glance, Jotform has a free integration to MailerLite and you might be tempted to give that a go.

Don’t do it.

Your free tier Jotform will take the appearance of 20% form, 30% white space, and 50% Jotform branding when you embed it on your WordPress site. Or, you know, if a cockamamie visual where your site visitors think they are signing up to create Jotforms and not your newsletter is what you’re going for, then by all means do. Add to that it’ll cost you a whooping $40 a month to remove the branding.

$40 fucking dollars, a month. What the actual fuck?

Jotform somehow takes the price as the worst possible option that you could consider. At that point, for the love of God, just buck up the $25 subscription to WordPress and get the comparative Bugatti Veyron instead of this rusty old bicycle.

But let’s not give up just yet. Surely, Google can ride to the rescue here? Google is so almighty it has entered the language as a verb for crying out loud. A simple embedded form is nothing.

Well, maybe not, if we go off the I’m-not-a-techie reservation and look at tools like Zapier or Make (which you can use to integrate Google Forms with MailerLite). But past all that, once again the devil is in the details. Zapier free tier will only allow 100 operations in a month, meaning only the first 100 who sign up to your email list in a month actually make it to your list. Perhaps not the end of the world, though Make wins out with 1000.

Still, Google Forms has a very distinct look that you can do nothing about, which most definitely will not make your site look professional (or anything in line with that posh WordPress theme you selected). To be fair, you can change the look of the form with something like Formfacade, but only as long as you fork up those Benjamins.

If you turn to Wufoo, the last on the list, you get lots more control over form design. It also comes with the option to use tools like Zapier and Make to get those precious signups over to MailerLite. All good, that is until you read that Wufoo free tier only allows 100 form entries per month (completely negating Make’s 1000 limit).

Yet again, to any author with at least a modicum delusion of grandeur, it’s a tad bit too close for scalable comfort. Not to mention a wayward AI bot will ruin your day real fast (and we all know those are here to stay).

Ultimately, you have to compare all of this to the (however diminished) free tier of Mailchimp. My advice is save yourself some long, long hours of research, trial and frustrating error and realize that only have two viable options:

• Suck it up and pay for the WordPressdotcom Business tier to get plugins.
• Or sign up for the Mailchimp free tier (and suck it up).

I suppose you could always move your site off WordPressdotcom to a (free?) alternative, but that seems like a post for another day. Right now this has been so unproductive that I’m about to lose my shit (I’m looking at you Jotforms).

And I really, really, need to get back to writing.