Mailchimp Pricing in 2026: Four Numbers on the Page, and the One That Starts in Month Thirteen

Twelve dollar amounts appear in the visible text of Mailchimp's pricing page as it is served to an American reader. Four of them are distinct prices. The page runs to 607,797 characters of markup to deliver them^[2].

That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is which number is missing, and that the vendor tells you it exists.

OUR TAKE: Every paid figure on this page is a promotional rate for twelve months, and the rate that follows is the one you will live with. The vendor publishes the rule for it in two separate legal documents and renders the figure as an empty space. Below, the whole ladder as far as it is published, the arithmetic for month thirteen marked as our derivation, and the five prices that are not published at all.

The four numbers on the page

Free is nought. Essentials is thirteen dollars, Standard is twenty, Premium is three hundred and fifty^[2]. A fifth figure, two hundred and ninety-nine dollars, appears in a footnote about support rather than as a plan price.

Every paid figure carries the words "per month for 12 months". None of them is the price you pay in month thirteen.

## What the twelve months actually mean

The vendor's standard terms set it out: an introductory promotional discount of "15%, 25%, or 50% off the monthly base price of Mailchimp Premium, Standard or Essentials plan for the first 12 (twelve) months of service, starting from the date of enrollment followed by the then-currently monthly list price based on your contacts and email sends"^[8].

Three more published consequences follow from that. Cancelling during the period forfeits the offer. Pausing does not pause it: "Pausing your account does not pause the promotional period and the promotion will expire 12 months from when it was originally applied to your account."^[8] And changing plan does not extend it. The twelve months run on the calendar, whatever you do.

Month thirteen, derived

The vendor publishes the percentage and withholds the figure, so the following is our arithmetic on the vendor's own number, and we label it as such wherever it appears.

Plan	$ on the card	$ derived list price	$ more per month	$ more per year
Essentials	13	15.29	2.29	27.53
Standard	20	23.53	3.53	42.35
Premium	350	411.76	61.76	741.18

The method can be checked, because the same page served to a European reader publishes both figures for all three tiers:

Plan	€ promotional	€ list	Implied discount
Essentials	9.95	11.71	15.03%
Standard	15.31	18.01	14.99%
Premium	267.92	315.20	15.00%

Fifteen percent, three times over, on the vendor's own published pairs. The derivation is sound. It is still a derivation.

## The ladder, and where its ends are kept

Price is a function of the contact band. The page publishes twenty bands, from nought to five hundred up to over a million^[2]. The selector that would reveal what each band costs is served to an American reader with the disabled attribute set in the markup, and to a European reader without it.

Two ceilings are published, on the comparison page rather than the pricing page. Standard: "Up to 100,000 contacts with our $800/mo tier". Essentials: "Up to 50,000 contacts with our $385/mo tier"^[3].

Plan	Promotional, 12 months	Contacts at that price	Published ceiling	Contacts at the ceiling	Span
Free	Free	250	not published	250	—
Essentials	$13	500	$385	50,000	29.6x
Standard	$20	500	$800	100,000	40.0x
Premium	$350	10,000	not published	200,000	—

Premium's thirteen hundred and fifty is not comparable with the other two. Its floor is ten thousand contacts, which the help centre states and the page's data payload records^[5]. We note it because reading the column downward is the obvious mistake and it would be a large one.

The rate falls, the bill multiplies

Plan	$ per 1,000 contacts at entry	$ per 1,000 contacts at the ceiling	Change
Essentials	26.00	7.70	-70%
Standard	40.00	8.00	-80%

Growing your list gets cheaper per contact and more expensive in total. Both are true, the page shows you only the cheapest end, and the eighteen bands between the two ends carry no published price at all.

## What the money includes, in sends

The allowance is a multiple of the contact limit, and the vendor states each multiple in its own sentence: ten times on Essentials, twelve on Standard, fifteen on Premium^[5].

Plan	Multiple	Contacts at entry	Sends included at entry	Contacts at ceiling	Sends at ceiling
Essentials	10x	500	5,000	50,000	500,000
Standard	12x	500	6,000	100,000	1,200,000
Premium	15x	10,000	150,000	200,000	3,000,000
Free	not a multiple	250	500 a month, 250 a day	250	same

The multiple also applies to overage blocks, so one block of a thousand extra contacts on Standard brings twelve thousand extra sends with it^[6].

Going over, and what it costs

On a paid plan the service continues and the 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] The unit of that charge is an add-on contact block. Its price is not published.

One rule deserves to be read twice, because it changes how you manage a list: "We calculate your monthly bill based on your feature plan and pricing tier, as well as the peak contact total during your billing period."^[6] The peak, not the closing figure. A list you grow and then prune inside one cycle is billed at its largest.

On the free tier the mechanism inverts. Sending is held until you upgrade or cut the list^[5].

## The levers you do have

Two statuses come off the invoice, and the vendor documents both. Cleaned contacts, meaning addresses that have failed, do not count^[14]. Archived contacts do not count either, and archiving is a deliberate action with a published trade-off: the data is preserved, the contact cannot be edited or marketed to, and the billing tier no longer includes them^[15].

That is a documented way to reduce your own bill. It is worth knowing that the nearest comparable product, ActiveCampaign, publishes the opposite rule.

The annual rate, and why you probably cannot have it

Annual billing exists. Its price does not appear on any page: "For Premium and Standard 10,000+ contact plans, annual plans are available. Contact sales to learn about pricing and eligibility."^[4] So the annual term is available only above ten thousand contacts, and only through a conversation.

Then the terms close the other door: "Annual Paid Marketing Plans are not eligible for introductory promotional discounts or non-profit discounts."^[8] A buyer chooses between a published discounted monthly price and an unpublished annual one. Not both.

The refund position differs by term as well. On monthly plans: "You won't be entitled to a refund or credit from us under any circumstance on monthly Paid Marketing Plans."^[8] On annual plans there is a sixty-day money-back guarantee^[8]. The guarantee attaches to the term whose price is not published.

## Four more prices that are not published

The pay-as-you-go plan. Its page carries no amount of money at all, in 329,312 characters of markup, while asking you to choose a credit package^[10]. Nine credit quantities are published in the help centre and no rate for any of them, because the rates live inside the product^[11].

SMS credits. The SMS page publishes forty-four dollar amounts and none of them is the price of an SMS credit block^[13]. Credits are an add-on to a paid plan, they expire monthly and do not roll over, and purchase requires approval.

Anything above two hundred and fifty thousand contacts on Premium: "Please contact sales for further details and pricing."^[4]

And customer success management, which is gated by spend rather than by tier: "Customer Success is included with select custom plans that spend at least $299 per month with Mailchimp."^[4] That threshold sits below the three hundred and fifty dollars the Premium card displays, and it is attached to select custom plans rather than to Premium, so the page cannot tell a Premium customer whether it applies to them.

The two credit products, and what a credit is

Two of the five priced lines are sold in credits rather than subscriptions, and both are worth understanding before you assume a subscription is the only way in.

Pay-as-you-go buys email sends outright. The unit is simple: "Each email you send costs one credit, so an email sent to 100 contacts costs 100 credits."^[10] The feature set matches the middle tier: "The Pay As You Go plan comes with the same set of features as the Essentials plan."^[10] The help centre publishes nine credit quantities, from five thousand up to twenty-five million, and no price for any of them^[11].

Two conditions attach to it. Unused credits are not refundable: "Yes, but we don't provide refunds for unused credits."^[10] And if you later move to a monthly plan, remaining credits convert to a proprietary balance the vendor calls MonkeyRewards and are applied against the monthly bill rather than returned^[10].

SMS credits work differently again. They are an add-on to a paid marketing plan rather than a standalone purchase, they renew monthly, and they expire: "Unused credits will expire each month and do not roll over."^[13] Purchase requires approval before it completes. SMS is not available on the free tier at all.

## One rule that applies to every term

Tucked into the termination section of the standard terms is a clause that applies regardless of which product you bought: "If your account is inactive for 24 or more months, we may terminate your account and you won't be entitled to a refund for any prepaid amounts or reimbursement for unused Pay as You Go Credits."^[8]

That is the only published expiry on pay-as-you-go credits, and it is in the terms rather than on the pay-as-you-go page. If you buy credits as a seasonal sender, which is precisely the use the vendor describes for that plan, two quiet years costs you the balance.

The one complete price list

Transactional email, on a six-step ladder with the unit stated^[12]:

Blocks	Emails per month	$ per block	$ per 1,000 emails
1 to 20	1 to 500k	20	0.80
21 to 40	500k to 1M	18	0.72
41 to 80	1M to 2M	16	0.64
81 to 120	2M to 3M	14	0.56
121 to 160	3M to 4M	12	0.48
161 and above	4M and above	10	0.40

One block is twenty-five thousand emails. Eighty cents per thousand at the bottom, forty at the top, a span of exactly two. A dedicated sending address costs twenty-nine ninety-five a month.

It is a developer product, and it is the only part of this catalogue where you can price your own usage from the page.

What the page does show you, and how we know what it hides

It is worth being precise about the mechanics, because the gap between what this page contains and what it displays is the whole story of its pricing.

The page ships a currency selector offering sixteen currencies, from Australian dollars to South African rand, and the selected value is set on the server from the reader's own address^[2]. So there is not one pricing page, there are sixteen renderings of one, and they do not carry the same information. Read from Ashburn, the page yields twelve dollar amounts. Read from Europe, the same URL yields nineteen euro amounts, and the extra seven are the post-promotional rates for every tier.

The contact selector tells a similar story. Twenty bands are published in both renderings, inside the same HTML element. In the American copy that element carries the disabled attribute. In the European copy it does not.

Neither of those is a secret, and neither required anything unusual to find. They are in the markup the vendor sends to the browser. The point is only that the figure a buyer most needs is present in the vendor's own system, rendered on request to some readers, and absent for others.

The comparison page is the one place where the ladder's upper end surfaces, and it is worth opening even though nothing links to it from the cards. It publishes 225 cells across the four tiers, counted, and two of those cells carry the only high-band prices this vendor prints anywhere^[3].

## What to do with all this

Work out your contact band before you compare tiers. On the lower half of the ladder the band moves the price more than the tier does, and Essentials and Standard share the same entry band, so the seven dollars between them buys capability rather than capacity.

Then price month thirteen yourself, using the vendor's fifteen percent, and budget that figure rather than the one on the card. For Premium the difference is seven hundred and forty-one dollars a year.