CountingDownTo is a countdown company. Alterable is an email company that makes countdowns among other things. That sounds like hair-splitting until you look at what each one charges for, at which point it turns into the whole decision.
Key differences
| Feature | Alterable | CountingDownTo |
|---|---|---|
| What it makes | Eight content types, for email | Countdowns for web, hosted pages and email |
| Published price | Free, $49/mo, $199/mo, metered | $28/mo or $195/yr, no usage limits |
| Free tier | 10,000 impressions, no branding | Free countdowns carry their branding |
| Timer deadline | A target date, or evergreen per recipient | A target date, or a repeating cycle |
| Beyond the timer | Images, products, maps, surveys, scratchers, slideshows, critical messages | Count-up, eight styles, many fonts |
| Beyond email | Website widgets and hosted pages |
What CountingDownTo actually is
A countdown you build once and then put wherever you need it: an embeddable widget for your site, a hosted countdown page, or an email countdown.
The email version works the way this whole category works, and they explain it plainly: the image is generated when it is viewed rather than when it is sent, because “the animated gif needs to be generated by our system at the time it’s viewed in order for it to be accurate”. Same mechanism as Alterable’s timers.
What they put their effort into is the countdown itself. Eight styles including Animated, Sketch, Textured and Thin. A long list of fonts running from Typewriter to Script to Blocky. Count-up as well as count-down. Repeating schedules on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly cycle. Timezone and locale support.
Their pricing is $28 a month or $195 a year, and both plans state no usage limits, no CountingDownTo branding, and 60-day refunds. Free countdowns carry their brand name.
Where CountingDownTo is the better buy
- The same deadline in more than one place. If a sale needs a countdown in the email, on the landing page and on a page you can link to from social, that is one object here and three problems elsewhere. Alterable does email and nothing else.
- Flat pricing with no metering. $28 a month with no usage limits is less than Alterable Pro at $49, and the gap widens the more you send. If timers are all you want and you send a lot of them, they are cheaper and it is not close.
- Count-up and repeating countdowns. Counting up from a date, or a countdown that resets every week, are things Alterable does not offer.
- More typographic control over the clock itself. Eight styles and a dozen fonts is a deeper set of options than most tools in this category ship.
If the job is “put a good-looking countdown in front of people, in several places, for a flat fee”, this comparison ends here and they win it.
Where Alterable is the better buy
The timer stops being the interesting part.
- Everything else in the email. Alterable makes countdown timers, dynamic images, dynamic products, local maps, surveys, scratchers, slideshows and critical messages, all on every plan including the free one (critical messages switch on from Pro). Free is 10,000 impressions a month with no card, Pro is $49 for 500,000 and Scale is $199 for 2.5 million.
- No watermark on free. A free CountingDownTo countdown carries their brand name. Alterable’s free tier renders without one, which matters once you test on real sends rather than on yourself.
- Per-recipient deadlines. An evergreen timer (on Pro) starts when each recipient’s email is sent, on email platforms that pass the send time, and holds that deadline on every later open, which is what a welcome series or a win-back sequence actually needs.
- Automation. CountingDownTo is a paste-the-embed tool with no Zapier app or MCP server. Alterable’s Pro plan has a published API, an MCP server so an assistant like Claude or ChatGPT can create the timer for you, and a Zapier integration in private beta.
How to tell which one you need
Count the surfaces, then count the content types.
If the countdown needs to appear somewhere that is not an inbox, they have built for that and Alterable has not. A website widget is not something you can fake with an email image tag, and the hosted page is genuinely useful for a campaign that runs across channels.
If everything happens in the email, the question becomes what else goes in it. A timer alone is worth $28 a month to plenty of senders. It stops being the right purchase the moment somebody asks whether the products in the email can show what is actually in stock, or whether the hero image can carry the reader’s nearest store, because that is a second vendor on a single-purpose tool and an existing plan on this one.
Worth being honest about the volume case: if you send enough timer impressions, their flat fee beats Alterable’s metering on price alone. What you are weighing is whether the other seven content types are worth the difference.
What switching looks like
Nothing to export, because these timers are generated when they are opened rather than stored. Rebuild the timers you use (the free countdown generator is the quickest way to match one), swap the image tags using the setup guide for your ESP in your templates, and your ESP never notices.
Two things to check before you move. If you are using the website widget or a hosted countdown page, those have no Alterable equivalent and you would be keeping a subscription for them anyway. And if you are relying on count-up or a repeating schedule, neither of those exists here.
If what you actually run is a target-date timer in an email, that is a handful of URLs across a handful of templates, and the free tier is enough to check it renders the same before you commit to anything.
Competitor figures come from each tool’s own published pricing, and prices change. Check theirs before you decide.