Mailchimp publishes the floor of its price ladder on one page, the ceiling on another, and nothing in between on any page at all. Open the pricing page from an American address and you are shown three numbers. Open the comparison page and you are shown two more. Between those two sets sit twenty published contact bands, and the price of eighteen of them exists nowhere you can read it.
That is the first thing. The second is stranger. Every paid figure on the page is discounted for twelve months, the page tells you so, and it also tells you that a different price applies afterwards. It does not tell you what that price is.
OUR TAKE: This is the most widely used product in its category and it earns a 3.32 on our scale, with the best documentation we have measured anywhere and the weakest support score of any axis we have given it. Both of those are real. The vendor explains what will happen to your bill with unusual care, publishes the rules that cost you money, and then renders the one number you need as an empty space. The software is not the problem. Year two is.
What Mailchimp is, and the five things it sells
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform: a contact database, a campaign builder, automation flows, landing pages and reporting, sold in four tiers and priced on how many people are in the database[5]. It has been part of Intuit since 2021, which the vendor states plainly on its own about page[17]. Search behaviour has not followed the ownership. The brand name and its tails draw 464,410 searches a month; the parent's name attached to the product draws 1,480.
What matters more for a buyer is that the marketing plans are only one of five priced lines. The others are pay-as-you-go email credits, SMS credits, transactional email, and a dedicated sending IP address. They are priced on different pages, in different units, with different degrees of clarity. Two of them are not priced at all.
Count your unsubscribed contacts before you pick a band. They are billable, and archived and cleaned ones are not, so the number that matters is not the number in your head.
The pricing page shows thirteen dollars for Essentials, twenty for Standard and three hundred and fifty for Premium[2]. Each sits above the words "per month for 12 months". Each has, beneath it, a line reading "Then, starts at". That line is where the post-promotional rate belongs.
In the markup served to an American reader, one of those slots carries the same figure as the promotional price above it, and another carries the character zero with no currency symbol at all[2]. The vendor's own legal terms describe the mechanism in a complete sentence: an introductory 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].
So the rule is published. The number is not. This is a meaningful distinction, and it is not the same as a vendor who explains nothing.
We can derive the figure from the vendor's own percentage, and we mark it as derived every time 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 is checkable, because the same page served to a European reader publishes both figures for every tier. There the promotional and list prices are nine euros ninety-five against eleven seventy-one, fifteen thirty-one against eighteen one, and two hundred sixty-seven ninety-two against three hundred fifteen twenty. Those pairs imply discounts of 15.03%, 14.99% and 15.00%. The arithmetic holds. The number exists. The page knows how to render it.
Where the two ends of the ladder are published
Price here is a function of the contact band, not a flat plan fee. The page publishes twenty bands,
from nought to five hundred at the bottom to over a million at the top[2]. The selector that
would let you see what each band costs is served to an American reader carrying the HTML disabled
attribute, and to a European reader without it.
The ceiling is published, though not where you would look for it. The comparison table's Maximum Contact Count row reads "Up to 100,000 contacts with our $800/mo tier" for Standard and "Up to 50,000 contacts with our $385/mo tier" for Essentials[3]. Neither figure appears on the pricing page. Neither page references the other.
| 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 | — |
One caution about reading that table down the column. The thirteen and the twenty are both at five hundred contacts. The three hundred and fifty is not: Premium starts at ten thousand contacts, which the page's own data payload records and the help centre states in words[5]. Comparing the three as rungs of one ladder would be wrong.
Import your list once and early. The bill is computed on the peak contact total of the billing period, so a list you grow and prune in one cycle is charged at its largest.
Both things are true at once, and which one you notice depends on where you stand.
| 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% |
Per thousand contacts, Standard gets eighty percent cheaper as you grow. The bill, over the same distance, goes up forty times. Growth is rewarded on the unit and punished on the total, and the page shows you only the first five hundred contacts of that journey.
What counts as a contact, and what does not
This is where Mailchimp is better than its competitors, and it deserves saying plainly.
Three statuses are billable and three are not, and the vendor publishes both lists on the same page. Billable: "Subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts are included in your contact count."[5] Not billable: "Archived, cleaned, and deleted contacts don't count toward your contact total or the price of your marketing plan."[5]
A cleaned contact is one whose address has failed: "Cleaned contacts have email addresses that have hard bounced or repeatedly soft bounced, and are considered invalid."[14] An archived contact is one you have set aside deliberately, and the vendor spells out the trade: "You won't be able to edit an archived contact's profile or send them marketing emails or texts. Their data is preserved, including identifiable information in email or SMS reports. Archived contacts don't count toward your billing tier."[15]
Compare ActiveCampaign, whose help centre states the opposite rule, that every contact counts regardless of list status. Archiving is a documented lever on your own bill. Most vendors in this category do not offer one.
Ask for the list price of your band in writing before the twelve promotional months start. The vendor has the figure; the page does not show it.
Two mechanisms, and they depend on whether you are paying.
On a paid plan, nothing stops. "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 charge comes as what the vendor calls an add-on contact block, and the send allowance travels with it: "one block of 1,000 additional contacts includes 12,000 additional email sends" on Standard[6]. The price of a block is not published.
Crossing a band does not move you up a tier. You chose the band, and you have to change it: "Your maximum contact count determines your pricing tier."[7] The vendor then tells you what to do about the surcharge: "If the increase is permanent, update your pricing tier to increase your contact limit, and we'll remove the additional charges."[5] No automatic upgrade means no surprise tier. It also means the surcharge does not end by itself.
And one rule that will cost you money if you do not know it: "We calculate your monthly bill based on your feature plan and pricing tier, as well as the peak contact total during your billing period. This means that even if your contact total decreases, your bill will reflect the highest number of contacts stored in your account that month."[6] An import you reverse the same week is billed for the whole month.
The free tier is the only bill that cannot move
Two hundred and fifty contacts, five hundred sends a month, two hundred and fifty a day[5]. There is no band above it, which makes this the one place in the product where the invoice is fixed. The consequence of reaching the limit is a hold rather than a charge: sending stops until you upgrade or reduce the list[5].
What you give up is longer than what you get. The comparison table marks fifteen capabilities "Not included" in the Free column, among them email scheduling, A/B testing, dynamic content, custom reports and the generative features[3]. Support is email only, and only for thirty days. A tier that cannot schedule an email is a tier for sending now, not for planning.
The annual term and the published discount are mutually exclusive, and the annual price is available only above ten thousand contacts and only through sales.
It is a multiple of the contact limit, and the multiple rises with the tier. Ten times on Essentials, twelve on Standard, fifteen on Premium, each stated in its own sentence[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 |
A daily send limit is published for the free tier and for no other tier, on any page.
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Value for money</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.4<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Capability & depth</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.8<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Ease of use</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.8<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Integrations</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.6<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">User sentiment</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.0<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Docs & learning resources</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.8<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Support & reliability</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">2.4<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<p class="mt-3 text-xs text-ink-300">Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). <a href="/how-we-test" style="color:var(--color-accent)">How we score →</a></p>
Transactional email is sold in blocks of twenty-five thousand emails, on a complete six-step ladder[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 |
A dedicated sending address is twenty-nine dollars ninety-five a month, stated plainly. New users get up to five hundred free sends to a verified domain.
That is a full price list with its unit named, on a page aimed at developers. Hold it beside the marketing plans, which are what the brand is known for, and the pattern is hard to miss. The more technical the reader, the more completely this vendor publishes its prices.
The clearest case of the reverse is the pay-as-you-go page. It runs to 329,312 characters of markup, yields 7,117 characters of visible text, contains no amount of money whatsoever, and asks the reader to select the plan and choose a credit package[10]. No package is listed. The help centre names nine credit quantities and then explains the gap rather than closing it: "You'll see the localized rates in the credit blocks."[11] The unit is clear enough. "Each email you send costs one credit, so an email sent to 100 contacts costs 100 credits."[10]
Crossing a contact band does not raise your tier. It starts a surcharge that continues until somebody changes the tier by hand.
Seven places, and two of them matter.
The ceiling of the Premium tier has five published answers. The help centre says two hundred thousand contacts[5]. The pricing page's own data payload carries one million five hundred thousand. The band selector offers over one million. The comparison table's Premium column says to contact sales[3]. And the note beneath the cards adds a fifth, moving everything above two hundred and fifty thousand contacts to the sales team[4].
The second is simpler and odder. The SMS page labels the same twelve-month promotion as eleven months, twenty-four times, while also saying twelve months five times in the same document[13]. The legal terms say twelve and never mention eleven[8].
We do not resolve either of these. Both go in the record as the vendor published them.
What the reviews actually say
Five independent owners, and they do not agree, which is itself the finding.
| Platform | Score | Scale | Reviews | Mean of its own published histogram | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trustpilot | 2.5 | 5 | 1,538 | 2.08 | +0.42 |
| Gartner Peer Insights | 4.3 | 5 | 1,268 | 4.40 | -0.10 |
| TrustRadius | 8.4 | 10 | 2,885 | not published | — |
| App Store | 4.9 | 5 | 51,654 | not published | — |
| Google Play | 4.7 | 5 | 23,329 | 4.67 from its own bars | -0.03 |
The two app stores carry 74,983 ratings between them, roughly forty-nine times the Trustpilot count, at nearly double the score. That is not noise. The stores rate the application; the review platforms rate the commercial relationship.
Which complaints actually distinguish this product? We read one hundred Trustpilot reviews in full and cross-tabulated them by star rating.
| Theme | Share of 1-2 star reviews | Share of 4-5 star reviews | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing and charges | 33% | 3% | +30 |
| Support | 52% | 26% | +27 |
| Cancellation | 17% | 0% | +17 |
| Locked out of the account | 16% | 0% | +16 |
| Price and increases | 11% | 0% | +11 |
| Contact limit | 3% | 0% | +3 |
| Interface | 3% | 13% | -10 |
Read the last row again. The interface is the only theme that runs the other way: named more often in praise than in complaint. And the contact limit, which we expected to dominate, barely appears. The things that differentiate this product in its users' own words are billing, support, cancellation and being locked out of your own account.
Monthly plans carry no refund as a matter of right. The sixty-day guarantee applies to the annual term, whose price is not published.
We measured the demand for this product before deciding what to write, across 165 explicitly requested terms. The shape of it says something about the product itself.
| Phrasing | Monthly searches | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| mailchimp (bare name) | 368,000 | the brand carries the category |
| mailchimp login | 60,500 | navigational, not a buying question |
| mailchimp pricing / cost / price | 6,600 each | the pricing question, three ways |
| what is mailchimp | 3,600 | this article, at 11x "mailchimp review" |
| mailchimp vs constant contact | 1,600 | the largest comparison anyone asks for |
| mailchimp alternatives | 1,300 | people looking to leave |
| is mailchimp free | 1,000 | the free-tier question |
| what does cleaned mean in mailchimp | 720 | a billing question in disguise |
| mail chimp (two words, all tails) | 0 | a spelling that carries nothing |
Two of those rows are worth pausing on. The bare brand name draws 368,000 searches a month, the largest we have measured against any product in any category, and the parent company's name attached to it draws 1,480. Whatever Intuit owns, the market still asks for Mailchimp.
And the fourth row from the bottom is the tell. Seven hundred and twenty people a month ask what "cleaned" means, across five different phrasings of the same question. Cleaned is a billing concept: an address that has failed, which the vendor removes and stops charging you for. More people search for that than for how to use the product.
How it compares, on what we measured
We read the pricing page of every rival in this category on the same day, from the same American address, and counted the same thing on each: dollar amounts in the visible text.
| Product | Dollar amounts in visible text | Published entry | Annual rate published |
|---|---|---|---|
| GetResponse | 14 | $19, or $15.58 annual | yes |
| Mailchimp | 12 | $13 / $20 promotional | no, sales-gated |
| Kit (ConvertKit) | 9 | $33, or $390 a year | yes |
| Beehiiv | 6 | $49 | partially |
| MailerLite | 3 | $12 | not in visible text |
| Brevo | 0 | none in visible text | no |
Mailchimp sits in the middle, which is itself a finding: the vendor with the largest brand in the category is neither the clearest nor the most opaque. Two of its five rivals publish an annual rate with the saving computed on the page, which Mailchimp does not; one publishes nothing at all in visible text.
To be plain about the limits of that table: we measured those five vendors' pricing pages and nothing else about their products. No feature comparison, no support testing, no review analysis. Each of them will get the same full treatment this product has had, and these comparisons will be rewritten when it does.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Mailchimp actually cost?+
At five hundred contacts, thirteen dollars for Essentials and twenty for Standard, both discounted fifteen percent for the first twelve months. Premium starts at three hundred and fifty at ten thousand contacts. The published ceilings are three hundred and eighty-five dollars at fifty thousand contacts on Essentials and eight hundred at one hundred thousand on Standard. The price of the eighteen bands in between is not published.
What happens after the twelve promotional months?+
The vendor applies the then-current monthly list price for your contacts and sends, which it states in its terms and does not publish as a figure for a United States reader. Derived from its own fifteen percent, the three card prices become about fifteen twenty-nine, twenty-three fifty-three and four hundred and eleven seventy-six.
Do unsubscribed contacts count toward the limit?+
Yes. Subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not, and archiving is a documented way to take a contact off the invoice while keeping its data and reports.
What happens if I go over my contact limit?+
On a paid plan the service continues and an add-on contact block is charged, whose price is not published. On the free plan a hold is placed on sending until you upgrade or reduce the list. The tier never changes by itself.
Is Mailchimp free?+
There is a real free tier, not just a trial: two hundred and fifty contacts, five hundred sends a month and two hundred and fifty a day. It is the only tier in the product whose bill cannot move, and the comparison table marks fifteen capabilities as not included in it, among them email scheduling and A/B testing.
If your list is small and your needs are ordinary, the free tier is genuinely free and the ladder starts low. If you are a developer sending transactional mail, the price list is complete and the unit is clear. If your interface matters more than your invoice, the evidence is on Mailchimp's side, and seventy-five thousand app store ratings are hard to argue with.
If you are planning a budget past month twelve, you have a problem the page will not solve. The list price is not published in the United States, the price of eighteen of twenty bands is not published anywhere, the annual rate exists only above ten thousand contacts and only through sales, and the two cannot be combined: "Annual Paid Marketing Plans are not eligible for introductory promotional discounts"[8]. You will be choosing between a published discount and an unpublished rate.
And if support is the thing that would break your year, read that cross-tabulation once more before you commit.
- [1] Mailchimp vendor pricing page, read from the United States (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/pricing/
- [2] Mailchimp vendor plan comparison table (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/compare-plans/
- [3] Mailchimp vendor marketing-plans page (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/
- [4] Mailchimp vendor documentation on plans (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans/
- [5] Mailchimp vendor documentation on additional charges (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-additional-charges/
- [6] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pricing tiers (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/mailchimp-pricing-tiers/
- [7] Mailchimp standard terms of use (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/legal/terms/
- [8] Mailchimp promotional offer terms (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/legal/promotional-offer-terms/
- [9] Mailchimp vendor pay-as-you-go page (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/pricing/pay-as-you-go
- [10] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pay-as-you-go (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-the-pay-as-you-go-plan/
- [11] Mailchimp vendor transactional email page (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/pricing/transactional-email
- [12] Mailchimp vendor SMS page (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/pricing/sms-marketing
- [13] Mailchimp vendor documentation on cleaned contacts (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-cleaned-contacts/
- [14] Mailchimp vendor documentation on archiving (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/archive-unarchive-contacts/
- [15] Mailchimp vendor documentation on closing an account (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/close-an-account/
- [16] Mailchimp vendor about page (2026-10) https://mailchimp.com/en/about/
- [17] Trustpilot, displayed score and distribution (2026-10) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailchimp.com
- [18] Gartner Peer Insights, published histogram (2026-10) https://www.gartner.com/reviews/product/ailchimp-594139131
- [19] TrustRadius, structured data (2026-10) https://www.trustradius.com/products/mailchimp/reviews
- [20] Apple App Store listing (2026-10) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mailchimp-email-marketing/id366794783
- [21] Google Play listing (2026-10) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mailchimp.mailchimp
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