Recently, I've was in the same boat as you, trying to find a good, free or affordable email newsletter for my popular WP site. There's two main parts to this, 1) The collecting of the emails (contacts) and creating the newsletters. 2) The second part is the service you need to pay for to have the email delivered to their inbox and not their spam folder, etc.
After trying a few of the services that you mentioned above, here's what I went with.
My WP theme is Divi and it comes with the plugin called Bloom which has nice pop-ups to collect emails/contacts. This integrates nicely with SendFox which delivers the emails safely to their inboxes and not their spam folder. Plus it handles bounced emails, unsubscribed emails, etc.
Now, the reason that I went with SendFox is that it was cheap! It's a
one-time purchase for
unlimited email collection and unlimited email sending. I happened to have a 10% off coupon so I got it for a
one-time payment of $44 forever.
If you are interested here's a link:
https://sendfox.com/trk/click/k6jn2gv9/lrrje0
This is the same company that is AppSumo which also sell great services for a really good price with lifetime deals. They are a really good company. I don't work for them or am I affiliated with them, I'm just a happy customer and wanted to share my experience.
