AWeber

AWeber has been running since 1998 and serves approximately 120,000 customers — one of the oldest names in email marketing. Founded by Tom Kulzer in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, the platform built its reputation on reliable deliverability, deep automation, and 24/7 live support. Its most author-relevant features today are RSS-to-email automation (blog posts automatically become newsletters), an AI Newsletter Assistant that learns your writing style, and built-in digital product sales.

Plans and Pricing#

Important: AWeber raised prices 50–150% in December 2024, eliminating all grandfathered legacy rates. Long-term customers were moved to new pricing simultaneously.

• Free: 500 subscribers, 3,000 emails/month, 1 automation, 1 landing page — adequate for testing but outgrown quickly. Some third-party reviews incorrectly claim AWeber removed the free plan; it still exists, though AWeber's main pricing page now downplays it in favor of a 14-day trial of paid features.
• Lite: From $15/month monthly billing or $12.49/month annual (500 subs) — capped at 3 automations and 3 landing pages; 1% ecommerce fee
• Plus: From $30/month monthly billing or $19.99/month annual (500 subs) — unlimited automations, landing pages, and segments; 0.6% ecommerce fee; Plus at 5,000 subs = ~$90/month; at 10,000 subs = ~$135/month
• Done For You: $20/month annual + $79 one-time setup — AWeber's team builds your email system in 7 days, including branded templates, landing pages, signup forms, weekly newsletter drafts, a 1:1 setup call, and 30 days of unlimited edits
• Unlimited: $899/month flat — any subscriber count, dedicated account management; not shown on the main pricing page but still available via sales for 100,000+ subscriber lists

Annual billing saves ~17% on Lite and ~33% on Plus compared to monthly rates.

AI Features#

• Newsletter Assistant (all plans including free): The flagship AI feature, updated October 2025. AWeber analyzes your past emails and website URL to learn your writing style, then generates a complete weekly newsletter draft in your voice. The draft arrives in your email inbox — you edit via email reply, no platform login needed. Users report the output "did sound like me but better."
• AI Email Writer: Generates full email drafts from prompts in under 15 seconds; creates subject lines, summarizes blog posts for email, adjusts tone on request
• Smart Designer: Auto-generates branded email templates by analyzing your website URL, extracting your logo, colors, and imagery — results vary by site complexity

The Newsletter Assistant distinguishes AWeber from most competitors: rather than generating email fragments on demand, it proactively creates ready-to-send drafts on a schedule without prompting.

Key Features for Authors#

• RSS-to-email (Auto Newsletter): Connect your author blog, podcast, or YouTube RSS feed; set a publish schedule; new content automatically emails your list. Kit has no native equivalent — this is AWeber's clearest remaining advantage for active bloggers.
• Digital product sales: Sell ebooks, courses, or paid subscriptions directly from AWeber landing pages via Stripe/PayPal; 0.6–1% AWeber platform fee (Plus/Lite) on top of Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30.
• 700+ email templates: Canva integration and Unsplash stock photos built in.
• Workflows (updated June 2025): AWeber's visual automation builder added split paths (conditional if/then/else logic), built-in A/B testing, and a redesigned interface. Before this update, automation was linear drip only.
• 24/7 phone + chat + email support: All plans including free — uncommon in the industry at any price point.

Limitations#

• Deliverability is below industry average. EmailToolTester's independent bi-annual tests rank AWeber 11th out of 15 platforms. Gmail primary inbox placement: ~81–83%, compared to MailerLite's ~94%. Roughly 1 in 7 AWeber emails misses the inbox by independent measurement.
• List-based architecture. Unlike Kit's tag-based model, AWeber organizes subscribers into separate lists. If a reader joins your main newsletter list and your book launch list, they count — and you're billed — twice. This inflates subscriber counts and costs for authors running multiple opt-in offers.
• Free tier is thin. 500 subscribers vs Kit's 10,000-subscriber free tier. For new authors, this gap is significant.
• Cancellation requires a phone call. Multiple independent reviews flag that canceling an AWeber subscription is deliberately friction-heavy. This is a trust consideration before committing.
• Lite plan automation cap (3 Workflows) is restrictive. Authors who need more than a welcome sequence and two other series need Plus — which at 10,000 subscribers costs $135/month, notably higher than Kit's Creator plan ($59/month for the same list size).

Alternatives#

Kit is the more logical choice for most indie authors — free up to 10,000 subscribers, tag-based segmentation that avoids duplicate billing, and stronger community recommendation. MailerLite matches or beats AWeber's pricing with better deliverability. AWeber earns its place for authors with active blogs who need automatic RSS-to-newsletter delivery, or those who specifically value live phone support at no extra cost.