Mailchimp vs Kit (ConvertKit): Both Run a First-Year Discount, Only One Prints the Price That Follows

Kit, which most people still call ConvertKit, is the comparison that makes Mailchimp's pricing page look worst, and not because Kit is cheaper. It is dearer, by a lot. It simply prints the number Mailchimp leaves blank.

Both vendors run a first-year promotion. One shows you the price you will pay afterwards, struck through beside the price you pay now. The other shows you an empty space.

OUR TAKE: Kit costs two and a half times Mailchimp's entry price for the same thousand contacts, and it publishes a free tier that runs to ten thousand subscribers. If you are a creator selling to a list, the money is probably justified. If you are a small business sending campaigns, it probably is not. But on pricing transparency the comparison is not close. A note on what this comparison is. We have measured Mailchimp in full: its pricing pages read as served from the United States, its terms read end to end, its ratings counted with the shared-ownership platforms counted once, and one hundred reviews cross-tabulated by theme. For the other product we read its own pricing page, served the same day from the same American address, and nothing else. No feature testing, no support testing, no review analysis. When that product gets its own cluster this article will be rewritten rather than appended to.

Same tactic, opposite disclosure

Kit's Pro card shows sixty-six dollars struck through, fifty dollars as the price, five hundred and ninety-three billed for the first year, and "Save $355 first year" beside an extra twenty-five percent first-year offer^[24]. Its Creator card shows thirty-three dollars a month or three hundred and ninety billed yearly, with the seventeen percent annual saving computed on the page^[24].

Mailchimp's cards show thirteen, twenty and three hundred and fifty, each above the words "per month for 12 months", with the post-promotional slot rendering empty or as a bare zero in the markup served to an American reader^[2].

Both products discount the first year. Kit tells you the list price, the promotional price, the annual total and the saving in dollars. Mailchimp tells you the promotional price and that a different one exists^[8].

That is the whole comparison in one paragraph, and everything below is detail.

## The prices, side by side

Product	Entry paid tier	Basis	Annual option	List price shown
Mailchimp	$13 Essentials, $20 Standard	500 contacts, 12-month promotion	not published, sales-gated	no
Kit	$33 Creator, $50 Pro (from $66)	1,000 email subscribers	$390 and $593 first year	yes

Normalise for the list size and the gap narrows but does not close. Mailchimp's Standard at the band above five hundred is still well under Kit's Creator at a thousand subscribers.

Nine published figures on Kit's page against twelve on Mailchimp's, and Kit's nine include a list price, two annual totals and two stated savings. Mailchimp's twelve include four distinct prices and a support threshold.

Subscribers against contacts

Kit prices per email subscriber. Mailchimp prices per contact, and counts three statuses as billable: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed^[5].

For a list with years of churn those are materially different meters. A database of a thousand people with three hundred past unsubscribes is a thousand contacts on Mailchimp and, on a subscriber basis, seven hundred.

Mailchimp answers this with its exclusions, which Kit does not need because its basis already excludes them: archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count^[5], and archiving is a lever you operate while keeping the data and reports^[15].

So the honest comparison is not thirteen against thirty-three. It is your own list, counted twice, against both ladders.

## What Kit includes that Mailchimp meters

Kit's free tier runs to ten thousand subscribers, which is forty times Mailchimp's two hundred and fifty^[24]. It includes unlimited landing pages and forms, unlimited email broadcasts, audience tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products and subscriptions^[24].

Unlimited is the word that recurs on Kit's feature table: unlimited landing pages, unlimited opt-in forms, a newsletter feed and website, and unlimited traffic^[24]. Its Pro tier adds a referral system that it values at ninety-nine dollars a month on its own page, and quarterly performance audits with access to an in-house strategist^[24].

Mailchimp's free tier gives five hundred sends a month with a daily cap of two hundred and fifty, one audience, and fifteen capabilities marked "Not included"^[5][3].

If you want to evaluate a product properly before paying, Kit's free tier lets you run a real business on it. Mailchimp's does not.

What Mailchimp includes that Kit does not

The documentation, measured and not close. Mailchimp publishes the peak-total billing rule, the billable and non-billable contact statuses, the send multiple per tier, and the overage mechanism with its own send allowance attached^[6][5]. On our documentation axis it earns 3.8, the highest mark we have given.

The transactional product, with a complete six-step published ladder from eighty cents to forty cents per thousand emails and a dedicated IP at twenty-nine dollars ninety-five^[12]. If you need receipts as well as campaigns, that is one vendor instead of two.

And the usability evidence. 74,983 app store ratings at 4.9 and 4.7, with the interface the only review theme its users name more in praise than in complaint. We have no comparable figure for Kit because we have not measured it.

## The send allowance question

Mailchimp allowances sends as a multiple of the contact limit: ten, twelve or fifteen times by tier^[5]. At the entry band that is five or six thousand a month.

Kit advertises unlimited email broadcasts on its free tier and unlimited automations above it^[24], which is a different model entirely. A creator mailing a list of a thousand people three times a week sends twelve thousand a month, which is twice Mailchimp Standard's entry allowance and inside Kit's unlimited.

That is the single most likely reason a newsletter operation outgrows Mailchimp's cheap bands long before its contact count suggests it should, and it is the calculation almost nobody does first.

Divide your monthly sends by your list size. If the answer is above twelve, Mailchimp's multiple is your constraint regardless of price.

Who each product is built for

Kit's own language says creators, repeatedly: for creators just starting out, for growing creators, for scaling creators^[24]. The feature set matches, with digital products, subscriptions, a referral system and a newsletter website.

Mailchimp's language says small business, and its product lines back it up: five priced lines covering campaigns, credits, SMS, transactional email and a dedicated IP, plus a commerce integration list led by Shopify and WooCommerce.

Those are different businesses, not different price points. A creator selling courses to a newsletter and a shop sending promotions to customers want different things, and both vendors are being honest about which they are.

## Where both of them are the same

Both run a first-year discount, so both have a month-thirteen conversation waiting. Kit's is knowable in advance because the list price is printed. Mailchimp's is not.

Both price on list size, so both reward pruning and punish hoarding. Mailchimp documents two ways to prune without deleting; Kit's basis is narrower to begin with.

And neither publishes a complete ladder. Kit's figures are all quoted for a thousand subscribers, with the price at larger list sizes requiring the selector; Mailchimp publishes twenty bands and the price of two.

The demand behind this pairing

Mailchimp against Kit draws 520 searches a month across both directions, tied with Mailchimp against ActiveCampaign and behind only MailerLite at 1,180 among comparisons we can write.

That figure nearly went unmeasured, and the reason is worth a sentence because it is a lesson about our own tooling rather than about either product. Our catalogue records the vendor as "Kit (ConvertKit)", and the tool that ranks rivals by demand was reconstructing its search term from that catalogue name, which matched nothing. The rival with 520 searches was dropping out of the ranking entirely, not appearing small. We fixed the aggregation before writing this.

Under its old name the demand is stronger than under its new one, which is why this article carries both. Kit renamed itself; the search behaviour has not finished following.

## What each vendor is actually optimising for

Read the two pricing pages as documents rather than as price lists and they are aimed at different readers.

Kit's language is creator throughout: for creators just starting out, for growing creators, for scaling creators^[24]. The features follow: digital products and subscriptions, a newsletter feed and website, a referral system it values at ninety-nine dollars a month, quarterly performance audits with an in-house strategist^[24].

Mailchimp's is small business. Five priced lines covering campaigns, credits, SMS, transactional email and a dedicated IP, a commerce integration set led by Shopify and WooCommerce, and a plan comparison table of 225 cells aimed at someone choosing between tiers rather than growing an audience^[3].

Neither is pretending. A creator selling courses and a shop sending promotions want different things, and the price difference between them is partly a difference in what is being sold.

Where the published evidence runs out

Three honest limits on this comparison.

We measured Kit's pricing page on 8 October 2026 and nothing else: no feature testing, no support testing, no review corpus, no independent ratings. Kit has no score on our scale and we are not going to invent one from somebody else's review.

Kit's published figures are all quoted for one thousand email subscribers. What the ladder does above that requires the selector on its page, and we did not work through it.

And Mailchimp's own numbers carry their own gap: the price of eighteen of its twenty published bands is unavailable, so the ladder comparison between these two products is between one partial ladder and one unexplored one.

When Kit gets its own cluster this article will be rewritten rather than appended to. Until then, weight the parts of it that rest on two published pricing pages and discount the rest.

## What the review themes say about living with Mailchimp

A comparison built on pricing pages tells you what signing up costs. The reviews tell you what the year afterwards is like, and we read one hundred of them in full and sorted 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

Four of those rows are commercial and one is about access to your own account. The contact limit, which the whole of this comparison has been about, appears in three percent of unhappy reviews.

That is a useful corrective. The pricing structure is where the money is, but it is not where the anger is. The anger is in billing disputes, in support that does not answer, and in sixteen percent of low reviewers describing days spent trying to get back into an account they pay for. None of those appear in any feature table.

The row that runs backwards matters too. The interface is named more often in praise than in complaint, which is rare in this corpus, and it is supported by 74,983 app store ratings at 4.9 and 4.7. People like using this software.

So weigh the pricing analysis for the signing-up decision and the review analysis for the staying decision. They point in different directions and both are measured.

A worked example on send volume

The price comparison is decided by a ratio neither pricing page asks you for, so here it is with numbers.

A newsletter with one thousand subscribers mailing twice a week sends about eight thousand six hundred emails a month. On Mailchimp Standard at the thousand-contact band the allowance is twelve times the contact limit, so twelve thousand, and that fits^[5]. Move to three sends a week and it is nearly thirteen thousand, which does not.

The remedy on Mailchimp is to move up a contact band you do not need, because the send allowance is tied to the contact limit rather than sold separately. You buy contacts to get sends.

On Kit the broadcast allowance is advertised as unlimited, and the price is set by subscriber count alone^[24].

So for a frequent sender with a small list, Kit's thirty-three dollars can be cheaper in practice than Mailchimp's twenty, because the Mailchimp path to the same send volume runs through a higher band. For an infrequent sender with a large list the arithmetic reverses completely.

Divide your monthly sends by your subscriber count. Under ten, Mailchimp's model is cheaper at every comparable size. Over twelve, Kit's becomes competitive despite costing two and a half times as much at the headline.

Where Mailchimp's five lines matter

Kit sells one thing well. Mailchimp sells five, and two of them have no equivalent on Kit's page at all.

Transactional email is the clearest. Blocks of twenty-five thousand emails from twenty dollars down to ten, which is eighty cents per thousand down to forty, with a dedicated sending address at twenty-nine dollars ninety-five^[12]. If you send order confirmations and password resets as well as campaigns, that is one vendor and one invoice instead of two.

SMS is the second, with its own conditions: credits bought in blocks as an add-on to a paid plan, expiring monthly, requiring approval before purchase^[13].

Neither of those makes Mailchimp better for a creator. They make it a different kind of purchase: a platform with a billing surface you have to learn, against a focused product with a price you can read off the page.

Which of those you want is not a price question.

## What to ask before choosing

Ask Mailchimp for the list price for your band in writing. Ask Kit nothing, because it has already printed its list price, which is the point of this article.

Then count your list twice, once as contacts including unsubscribes and once as active subscribers, and price both ladders against the right number rather than the convenient one.

And check your send ratio before anything else. It rules out tiers faster than your list size does, and it is the one input neither pricing page asks you for.