OfficeClip Campaigns module can be used to send campaigns and newsletters for free as long as you have a SMTP account to send emails. If you are not sending huge number of emails, you can use your company smtp account (or even a free account like Gmail).
Bulk email providers like Elastic Email or Amazon SES are very cost effective for sending large number of emails. Make sure that when sending bulk emails, you should setup DKIM or other mechanism to authenticate yourself.
OfficeClip Campaigns module provides features for creating good looking html emails from templates. It can also track when the user received or open emails. Currently its feature set is not as extensive as other commercial providers where you pay anything between ten to hundreds of dollars.
Here is a video on how to create and send campaigns with OfficeClip, which I created while helping a customer on this issue.