The Mailchimp Buyer's Checklist: Ten Questions the Pricing Page Will Not Answer

Ten questions to answer before you put a card into Mailchimp, each one with the place the vendor answers it, and each one chosen because we could not answer it from the pricing page alone.

OUR TAKE: Most buyer checklists ask about features. This product's features are not where the surprises are. Nine of the ten questions below are about billing, because that is where this vendor's own documentation is strong and its pricing page is silent, and because billing is the theme that separates its angry reviewers from its happy ones by thirty percentage points.

1. What will this cost in month thirteen?

The figure on the card is discounted fifteen percent for twelve months and the vendor says so. The rate afterwards is "the then-currently monthly list price based on your contacts and email sends"^[8], and that price appears on no page served to an American reader.

Derive it before you commit. Thirteen becomes about fifteen twenty-nine, twenty becomes about twenty-three fifty-three, and three hundred and fifty becomes about four hundred and eleven seventy-six. For Premium that is seven hundred and forty-one dollars more across a year than the card implies.

Ask the salesperson to confirm the list price for your band in writing. They have it.

## 2. Which contact band am I actually in?

Price is a function of the band, not the tier. There are twenty published bands and the selector that prices them is served disabled to American readers^[2]. Count your list, including the people who have unsubscribed, before you look at any plan.

3. Do unsubscribed contacts count?

Yes. "Subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts are included in your contact count."^[5] The pricing-tiers article says it a second time, in different words: "it's important to remember that subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts all count toward your contact limit."^[7]

This is the question most often answered wrongly in conversation, and the answer costs money at every band boundary. A list of four hundred and eighty active subscribers with ninety people who left last year is a list of five hundred and seventy for billing purposes, which is a different band from the one you thought you were in.

Non-subscribed is the category people forget entirely. It covers contacts who have interacted with your business, through a purchase or a form, without opting into marketing. They sit in the database and they count.

## 4. What does not count?

Three things, and this is where Mailchimp is better than its nearest competitor. "Archived, cleaned, and deleted contacts don't count toward your contact total or the price of your marketing plan."^[5]

Archiving is a real lever. The trade is published: the contact's data is preserved and reportable, you cannot edit or market to them, and they leave your billing tier^[15]. Build the archiving habit in month one, not in month fourteen.

5. What happens the month my list spikes?

Your service continues and your bill grows. "If your contact total or send count ever exceeds the limit of your plan, we won't interrupt your service. Instead, you'll see an additional charge on your monthly bill."^[6]

Then the rule that catches people: the bill is computed on "the peak contact total during your billing period", so pruning the list before the cycle closes does not help that cycle^[6]. Import once, early, and measure before you import again.

## 6. Will it upgrade me automatically?

No, and that cuts both ways. You choose the band, and "Your maximum contact count determines your pricing tier"^[7]. So there is no surprise tier and no unexpected jump to a higher plan.

There is also no automatic end to the surcharge. The vendor is explicit about whose job that is: "If the increase is permanent, update your pricing tier to increase your contact limit, and we'll remove the additional charges. If the increase is temporary, reduce your audience size and keep the lower contact total for a full billing cycle to avoid future additional charges."^[5]

Read the second half of that again. A temporary spike has to be unwound and then held down for a whole cycle before the charges stop. Combined with the peak-total rule, that means a single large import can cost you two months rather than one.

Somebody on your side has to notice, and the vendor has told you so in writing.

7. How many emails do I get, and is that enough?

The allowance is a multiple of your contact limit: ten times on Essentials, twelve on Standard, fifteen on Premium^[5].

Plan	Multiple	Contacts at entry	Sends included at entry
Essentials	10x	500	5,000
Standard	12x	500	6,000
Premium	15x	10,000	150,000

Divide your planned monthly sends by your list size. If the answer is above twelve, Standard will not hold you and the multiple is the reason, not the contact count.

A daily limit is published for the free tier only: two hundred and fifty a day^[5]. For the paid tiers, no page publishes one.

## 8. Can I get the annual price?

Only above ten thousand contacts, only through sales, and only instead of the discount. "For Premium and Standard 10,000+ contact plans, annual plans are available. Contact sales to learn about pricing and eligibility."^[4] And then: "Annual Paid Marketing Plans are not eligible for introductory promotional discounts or non-profit discounts."^[8]

If you ask for both, you will be choosing. Ask which is cheaper over twenty-four months, not twelve.

9. How do I get out?

Monthly plans: self-service, and the vendor publishes the path down to the final click. "Click your profile icon and choose Account & billing or Account, depending on your user type. Click the Settings drop-down, and choose Manage my plan. Click Delete my account."^[16] Pausing is available too.

Annual plans: not self-service. "If you decide you no longer want to use your annual Paid Marketing Plan during your billing cycle, you can close your account by contacting sales."^[8]

Refunds: none on monthly as a matter of right, and sixty days on annual^[8]. Note the shape of that. The term you can cancel yourself is the term with no refund, and the term with a refund is the one that goes through sales.

## 10. What is support actually going to be?

This is the answer we would want hardest before signing. Published: email support on the free tier for thirty days and nothing after, telephone support only on Premium, and customer success management gated on "select custom plans that spend at least $299 per month"^[4], a threshold that sits below the Premium card price and is not attached to Premium.

Measured, from one hundred reviews read in full and sorted by rating:

Theme	Share of 1-2 star reviews	Share of 4-5 star reviews	Gap
Support	52%	26%	+27
Locked out of the account	16%	0%	+16
Interface	3%	13%	-10

Support is the most mentioned theme among unhappy users and the second most mentioned among happy ones, so it does not differentiate as sharply as billing does. Account lockout does: sixteen percent of low reviews describe losing access to their own account, and none of the high ones do. Those accounts describe days of correspondence rather than a software fault, which makes them a support measurement.

How to price this product honestly, in four steps

None of this requires special access. All of it is arithmetic the page declines to do for you.

First, count your list the way the vendor counts it. Active subscribers, plus people who have unsubscribed, plus non-subscribed contacts who arrived through a purchase or a form. Exclude archived, cleaned and deleted ones. That total, not your mental one, picks your band.

Second, divide your planned monthly sends by that total. If the answer is above ten, Essentials is out. Above twelve, Standard is out. The send multiple rules you out of a tier before the contact count does, and almost nobody checks it first.

Third, take the card price for your tier and divide it by nought point eight five. That is month thirteen, derived from the vendor's own published percentage. Budget that figure. The method checks out against the European rendering of the same page, where both numbers are printed and the implied discount computes to fifteen point nought three, fourteen point nine nine and fifteen point nought percent across the three tiers.

Fourth, ask sales two questions in writing: the list price for your band, and the annual price for your band if you qualify. Then compare the discounted monthly figure over twenty-four months against the annual one over the same period. Twelve months is the comparison the promotion is designed to win.

## A note on the ratings you will see quoted

If you research this product you will meet a wide spread of scores, and the spread is not noise.

Trustpilot displays two point five from one thousand five hundred and thirty-eight reviews. Gartner Peer Insights displays four point three from one thousand two hundred and sixty-eight. TrustRadius shows eight point four out of ten from two thousand eight hundred and eighty-five. The App Store shows four point nine from fifty-one thousand six hundred and fifty-four ratings, and Google Play four point seven from twenty-three thousand three hundred and twenty-nine.

Two cautions, both measured rather than assumed. The first is that a displayed score is not the average of the platform's own published distribution. On Trustpilot the histogram averages two point nought eight against a displayed two point five. On Gartner it averages four point four against a displayed four point three. Both platforms weight toward recent reviews, and here the weighting runs in opposite directions on the two sites.

The second is that the app stores and the review platforms are measuring different things. The stores rate the application and carry seventy-five thousand ratings; the review platforms rate the commercial relationship and carry a fraction of that. When a product scores four point nine in one place and two point five in another, the honest reading is not that one is wrong. It is that people like using this software and dislike buying it.

Four of the nine review properties we tried refused to be read at all, including two of the three the vendor itself cites when it claims thirty-three thousand reviews. We did not substitute figures from search snippets for those.

11. Am I buying the plan or the product?

Five priced lines carry this brand, and they are not variants of each other. Marketing plans are a subscription priced on contacts. Pay-as-you-go is a credit balance priced on sends. SMS credits are a monthly add-on that expires. Transactional email is a developer product on a volume ladder. A dedicated sending address is a flat monthly fee of twenty-nine dollars ninety-five.

Two of those five publish a complete price. The one most buyers arrive for publishes three promotional figures and a blank.

So settle what you are actually sending before you choose. Campaigns to a list point to the marketing plans. Receipts, password resets and order confirmations point to the transactional product, where the unit is twenty-five thousand emails and the rate runs from eighty cents per thousand down to forty^[12]. Seasonal sending points to credits, with the caveat that the rate is visible only inside the product and that two years of inactivity forfeits the balance.

Eleven things that are not published

We looked for each of these and did not find them. They are the questions to take to a salesperson, because the website does not answer them.

The monthly list price of any tier, which is the figure that applies from month thirteen. The price of eighteen of the twenty published contact bands. The price of an add-on contact block, which is the unit every overage is charged in. The price of an annual plan on any tier. Any price above two hundred and fifty thousand contacts. The price of a pay-as-you-go credit. The price of an SMS credit block. The daily send limit on any paid tier. Which of the five published Premium ceilings is the real one. Whether a customer paying the Premium card price qualifies for customer success management. And why the SMS page calls the same twelve-month offer eleven months.

That is not a complaint about secrecy. Several of those figures clearly exist inside the product, and the vendor says as much about the credit rates. It is a list of the arithmetic you cannot do before you buy.

What the vendor gets right, in fairness

A checklist of risks reads harshly, so here is the other column, and it is not short.

The documentation answers the expensive questions without being asked. That the bill runs on the peak contact total. That archived and cleaned contacts leave the invoice. That the send allowance is a multiple and what each multiple is. That the overage mechanism carries its own send allowance with it. The cancellation path is published through to the final click, which is rarer than it should be: the nearest comparable product in this category requires a telephone call to cancel at all.

The free tier is a real tier rather than a trial, and it is the only place in the product where the bill cannot move. The interface is the one theme that reviewers name more often in praise than in complaint. And across the two app stores, seventy-five thousand ratings average above four and a half.

On our scale this product earns 3.46, with the highest documentation mark we have given anything and the lowest support mark on any of its own eight axes. That gap is the product in one sentence: it explains what will happen to you clearly, and answers slowly when it happens.

Three questions that are not about money

Will the interface be a problem? Probably not, and this is the one axis where the evidence favours the product. Seventy-five thousand app store ratings average above four and a half, and the interface is the only review theme that appears more in praise than in complaint.

Do you need the templates? The free tier gets "A limited selection of basic, featured, and themed email templates"^[5], and custom-coded templates can be created but not sent without upgrading.

Are you buying the right product? Five priced lines share this brand: marketing plans, pay-as-you-go credits, SMS credits, transactional email and a dedicated IP. If you are sending receipts rather than campaigns, the transactional product has a complete published ladder and a different price structure entirely^[12].

## What we could not answer

In fairness to the next buyer, here is what the research did not settle. The ceiling of the Premium tier has five different published answers across four pages and one data payload. The price of an add-on contact block is not published anywhere, although every overage is charged in them. The price of a pay-as-you-go credit and of an SMS credit are both absent from their own pricing pages. And the SMS page describes the same twelve-month promotion as eleven months, twenty-four times^[13].

Take those four to the salesperson. They are the questions whose answers are not on the website.