Mailchimp pricing: what it really costs

Which Mailchimp plan actually fits your contact list?

Under 250 contacts, Free costs nothing and needs no automation to run. Past that line, or once you need any automation at all, $13 a month buys Essentials, the plan that fits a freelancer, a solo consultant, or a small business running one contact list with one or two people managing it. Its 3 included seats and up to 4 automation-flow steps cover a basic welcome or follow-up sequence, though not Mailchimp’s full Marketing Automation Flows.

Team size, more than contact count, is what actually pushes a small business past Essentials. A third or fourth person needing their own login runs into Essentials’ 3-seat cap regardless of how small the list still is, forcing an upgrade to Standard at $20 a month; a sixth person does the same thing to Standard’s own 5-seat cap. Only Premium, at $350 a month, drops the seat limit entirely. Budget by how many people need to log in before you budget by how many contacts you have.

What actually pushes a Mailchimp bill higher than the sticker price?

Every plan’s price rises in fixed contact bands rather than a smooth per-contact rate, so the jump at each boundary is real money, not a rounding effect. Essentials starts at $13 a month for up to 500 contacts; one real signup that pushes the account to 501 contacts moves the same plan to $26.50 a month, about twice the starting rate, because 501 lands in Mailchimp’s next published band. That shape repeats at every boundary all the way up; a pricing page that only shows one band at a time never makes the size of the next jump obvious.

What counts toward a band matters as much as the count itself. Mailchimp’s help center explains that unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts still count toward your plan’s limit, the same as active subscribers — only cleaned, pending, archived or deleted contacts are excluded. An audience full of people who unsubscribed months ago is still billed as if they were active; archiving them, not just leaving them unsubscribed, is the one action that actually removes them from what you’re charged for. On top of that, every plan card carries a footnote that overage charges apply once you exceed your contact or send limit, but neither Mailchimp’s pricing page nor its comparison page states what that overage actually costs, so there is no way to price the risk of drifting over a limit in advance. SMS and MMS marketing have the same gap: sending them needs an application and a monthly credit purchase, and the per-message rate varies by the country you are texting rather than appearing anywhere as a flat number, so get a quote from Mailchimp directly before counting on texting as part of the budget.

Could your team get away with a cheaper plan than the bills above show?

The three bills above default to the plan a business that size actually needs for logins, which is not always the plan its contact count alone would require. At 10,000 contacts, Essentials’ own band reaches $110 a month, but Essentials caps out at 3 seats, so the five-person team behind the small-team bill pays $135 for Standard instead, mostly for the extra logins rather than the extra contacts.

The same pattern repeats at the top end. At 50,000 contacts, Standard’s own band reaches $450 a month, well under the $815 the growing-team bill above pays for Premium, but Standard’s 5-seat cap is exactly why a 15-person team needs Premium at all, not the size of its list. If your own team is smaller than the headcount a bill above assumes, check whether a cheaper plan’s seat count actually covers you before assuming its bigger number is what you will pay. Mailchimp’s plan-comparison page separately states that Standard’s own published self-serve ceiling reaches 100,000 contacts at an $800-a-month tier, a figure we have not independently re-verified at that exact band, which is worth knowing before assuming a list that size needs Premium’s custom quote instead.

Does paying yearly actually save you anything on Mailchimp?

Below 10,000 contacts, no. Essentials and Standard show only a flat monthly price at every band under that mark, and the option to prepay annually does not appear on the page at all until an account reaches 10,000 contacts — Mailchimp’s own footnote on annual plans even says to contact sales for pricing and eligibility at that point, despite the page itself showing a specific annual figure with a self-serve checkout button. Once a Standard account does reach that 10,000-contact band, the same tier that costs $135 a month billed monthly drops to $114.75 a month paid annually, a real discount, just one that only shows up once your list is already fairly large.

Premium works differently. Its roughly 15%-off annual rate, $297.50 a month against a $350 monthly price, is available from the plan’s very first contact band, not gated behind any minimum the way Essentials and Standard are. A freelancer or small business on Essentials simply has no yearly-billing decision to make at all; the choice only becomes real once a list, or a reason to want Premium’s uncapped seats, gets that large.

How does Mailchimp’s bill compare with Klaviyo, Kit and ActiveCampaign?

Kit is the sharpest contrast on the free tier: its free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with no card required, dwarfing Mailchimp’s 250-contact ceiling. Kit’s paid tiers start at $39 a month for up to 1,000 subscribers, and Kit does not publish the rate above that tier in its Help Center; it appears only inside kit.com’s own pricing calculator. Klaviyo prices by active-profile count instead of named plans, with no seat limit at any size; at the small-team contact count above it runs $150 a month against Mailchimp’s own $135, though Klaviyo adds SMS, an AI agent and other tools as separate paid add-ons rather than folding purchase-behavior tracking into every plan the way Mailchimp does. See Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp for where each bill actually goes at every size.

ActiveCampaign is the pick for a business that wants a CRM bundled with its email: Starter runs $15 a month for 1,000 contacts, billed annually, since ActiveCampaign publishes no month-to-month rate at all. None of the three is a strict upgrade over Mailchimp. Kit’s free tier is more generous but drops automation until you pay; Klaviyo’s per-add-on pricing is transparent but adds up quickly across Composer, Customer Hub and Reviews; ActiveCampaign bundles a CRM but publishes no month-to-month rate at all. Each is worth the switch only for the one thing it does better than Mailchimp, not as a wholesale replacement.