SendFox and Emailit both ran lifetime deals on AppSumo and both send email, so they get compared a lot. A year or two ago the answer was simple: SendFox for newsletters, Emailit for delivery infrastructure. Both products have grown towards each other since, so it is worth looking again at what each does today, what it costs, and which kind of business each one suits.
SendFox vs Emailit comparison at a glance
SendFox is an email marketing tool built for creators. It is an AppSumo Original, made by the AppSumo team, and the vendor says more than 100,000 creators use it. Its focus is simplicity: a clean editor, landing pages and forms, welcome sequences and Smart Campaigns that turn your latest blog post or video into a newsletter automatically.
Emailit is an email platform for sending transactional and marketing email from one account. Developers send through a REST API or SMTP relay and can receive inbound email as JSON. Marketers get audiences, campaigns, forms and visual automations on the same contacts and templates. Emailit runs its own data centre in the EU.
SendFox key features for creators and small business
- Editor: drag-and-drop editor with images, buttons, columns, merge tags, saved templates and reusable sections, plus an AI email writer that drafts from a link or an idea. Pro adds a full HTML editor.
- Smart Campaigns: connect your blog RSS or socials and SendFox builds and schedules a newsletter from new content.
- List growth: hosted Smart Pages, embeddable forms, popups, slide-ins and sticky bars, referrals and a public newsletter directory.
- Automations: welcome sequences, tag triggers and yes/no branches based on opens, clicks or tags.
- Other: per-email reports, contact tags, teams with separate logins, an MCP integration for Claude, imports from Mailchimp, Kit or CSV, and paid newsletters through Stripe on Pro.
Emailit features, automation and deliverability
- Transactional email: REST API and SDKs, a drop-in SMTP relay, inbound email processing, full message logs and signed, retried webhooks.
- Marketing: audiences with hosted signup, contact profiles with custom fields, campaigns with A/B tests and personalisation, double opt-in and welcome emails, and a manage subscriptions page.
- Forms and automations: popup, flyout, banner, full-page and embedded forms (in beta) and visual automations triggered by events.
- Deliverability: SPF, DKIM and DMARC enforced, automatic suppressions, shared IPs for clean senders, dedicated IPs as an add-on, and DMARC reports and advanced analytics on Pro.
- Verification: email list verification and a verification API on credits.
Pricing and plan breakdown
SendFox
SendFox has a free plan with 1,000 contacts and 3,000 sends a month. Pro starts at $19 a month for 5,000 contacts with 100,000 sends a month, removes SendFox branding, adds a VIP sending IP and scales to 250,000 contacts. At the time of writing the lifetime deal is live on AppSumo for $29, with a 60-day refund window. It includes 5,000 contacts and 300,000 total sends for life (not per month), unlimited automations, Smart Pages and forms, full API access and the AI email writer. A small SendFox footer stays on lifetime emails unless you upgrade.
Emailit
Emailit charges in credits: 1 per API or SMTP email, 2 per campaign email, 3 per automation run and 5 per email verification. The free tier includes 3,000 credits a month with a 100-emails-a-day limit. Pay as you go costs $2 per 10,000 credits (from $20), and purchased credits never expire. Pro is $25 a month ($20 billed yearly) with 100,000 credits, and Business is $250 a month ($200 yearly) with 2.5 million credits and a 99.9% uptime SLA. Emailit’s AppSumo lifetime deal is sold out at the time of writing.
What that means in practice
For a creator sending a weekly newsletter to 2,000 people, SendFox’s lifetime deal covers roughly 150 sends of that size, which is close to three years at that pace. On Emailit, the same weekly campaign uses about 17,000 credits a month (2 credits per campaign email), or roughly $3.50 a month at pay-as-you-go rates before the 3,000 free monthly credits, bought in packs from $20 that never expire. Both are cheap. The difference is the tooling around the emails, not the cost.
Strengths and weaknesses of each marketing platform
SendFox is very easy to use and has the features a creator actually needs, and the lifetime deal is good value if your list is under 5,000 and you send at a steady pace. The limits are a fixed pool of lifetime sends, fewer advanced marketing features than bigger platforms, and branding on the free and lifetime plans.
Emailit is strong for products that send receipts, login codes and notifications, and it is unusual in sharing contacts and templates between transactional and marketing email. The free tier is mainly for testing, and some marketing features, such as segments, are still listed as coming soon.
Other email marketing tools to compare
If neither fits, the usual alternatives are worth a look. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is built for creators who sell digital products and want stronger automation. MailerLite is a well-priced all-rounder with a free tier, landing pages and automations. Mailchimp is the best known name, with a large integration list, but it gets expensive as your list grows. On the transactional side, SendGrid, Amazon SES and Resend are common choices for developers.
Which should you choose?
Choose SendFox if you are a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber or small business owner who mainly sends a newsletter, you want something you can set up in an afternoon, and you like the idea of paying once.
Choose Emailit if you run a SaaS product or app and need reliable transactional email first, with campaigns and automations as a bonus, or if you want EU hosting and usage-based pricing that grows with you.
Use both if you have a product and an audience. Some teams send product email through an API provider and their newsletter through a creator tool. Now that SendFox has its own transactional API, smaller projects may be able to manage with SendFox alone.
Verdict
There is no single winner. For creators, SendFox’s $29 lifetime deal is hard to beat while it is live, as long as 300,000 total sends fits your plans. For developers and SaaS teams, Emailit is the more capable email platform and stays cheap at low volumes.