If you want to start an email list but don’t have money to invest in a paid plan, then Aweber’s free plan is a great place to start.

With this plan, you can send up to 3000 emails per month to 500 subscribers. The only catch is, you can only use one list profile. 

Although this plan has a low cap on the number of subscribers, it still gives you access to most of the email, landing pages, list building, segmentation, ecommerce, account management, reporting, customer support and integration features available on the paid subscriptions. 

These include: 

• Integrations with Facebook, PayPal, Woo commerce, Shopify, Word Press and hundreds of other services. 
• 24/7 live support on phone, chat and email. You also get free migration
• Unlimited team members on your account 
• Ecommerce features such as purchase tagging, sales tracking, payment plans and subscriptions 
• Access to unlimited landing pages, including video landing pages
• List building through sign up forms or word press plugin 
• Segmentation features such as tagging subscribers and sending to segments 
• Easy Email Template Creation + Editing. You can choose from more than 700 mobile responsive email templates and customize them with our easy-to-use Drag & Drop Email Editor. Add images, videos, text, buttons and more!
• Email Automation. This allows you to create a series of messages to be sent out automatically over time. Use this feature to build relationships with your subscribers, create a welcome message for new subscribers, promote products and more!

These features are powerful and make up most of what you need to start building a brand from scratch. However, when using the free plan, you will not get access to some useful features that any business requires to scale fast online. 

• You wont for instance get A/B testing for you sign up forms. Without this feature, you will have a difficult time increasing your sign ups. 
• The reporting feature is also pretty basic, and denies you access to the more advanced performance reports that you would need to make critical business decisions.
• You also cannot create custom segments. This may likely result in a low email open rate. It may also result in unsubscribes due to low message relevance. 
• Cart abandonment is also missing on the free plan. Without this feature, your customers are as good as gone once they exit your page. 
• Behavioral automation is also another feature that makes quite a difference when you want to build a successful business online. 

There are a few more useful features missing on the free plan, but the ones mentioned here should paint a pretty good picture of why you need to upgrade to Aweber pro as soon as possible.