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

> Mailchimp against Kit, formerly ConvertKit: the same promotional tactic with opposite disclosure, subscribers against contacts as the meter, a free tier forty times larger, and why send volume decides this more than price.

_Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/mailchimp-vs-convertkit — The Professional's Toolkit · updated 2026-10-08_

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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.



> 💡 **undefined:** Count your list twice, once as contacts including unsubscribes and once as active subscribers, then price each ladder against the right number.

## 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.



> 💡 **undefined:** Check your send ratio first. A list of a thousand mailed three times a week is twelve thousand sends, twice Mailchimp Standard's entry allowance.

## 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.



> 💡 **undefined:** If you want a genuine trial on a real list, Kit's free tier runs a business. Mailchimp's runs a test.

## 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.



> ⚠ **undefined:** Kit's headline figures are all quoted for one thousand subscribers. Larger lists require the selector.

## 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.



> ⚠ **undefined:** Both products discount the first year, so both have a month-thirteen conversation. Only Kit's is knowable in advance.

## 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.



> ⚠ **undefined:** We measured Kit's pricing page only, on 8 October 2026, and nothing else about the product.

## 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.



## FAQ

**Is Kit more expensive than Mailchimp?**

Yes, substantially. Kit's entry paid tier is thirty-three dollars a month for one thousand email subscribers against Mailchimp's thirteen and twenty at five hundred contacts. Kit's free tier, however, runs to ten thousand subscribers against Mailchimp's two hundred and fifty.

**Which is better for newsletters?**

Kit, on the published evidence. It advertises unlimited email broadcasts and prices on subscribers, while Mailchimp allowances sends as a multiple of the contact limit, which binds a frequent sender long before the contact count does.

**Does Kit show the price after its promotion?**

Yes. Its Pro card shows sixty-six dollars struck through beside the promotional fifty, the first-year total of five hundred and ninety-three, and the saving in dollars. Mailchimp's equivalent slot renders empty or as a bare zero for an American reader.

## 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.




## Sources

[1] Mailchimp vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/ (2026-10)
[2] Mailchimp vendor plan comparison table — https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/compare-plans/ (2026-10)
[3] Mailchimp vendor marketing-plans page — https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/ (2026-10)
[4] Mailchimp vendor documentation on plans — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans/ (2026-10)
[5] Mailchimp vendor documentation on additional charges — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-additional-charges/ (2026-10)
[6] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pricing tiers — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/mailchimp-pricing-tiers/ (2026-10)
[7] Mailchimp standard terms of use — https://mailchimp.com/en/legal/terms/ (2026-10)
[8] Mailchimp promotional offer terms — https://mailchimp.com/en/legal/promotional-offer-terms/ (2026-10)
[9] Mailchimp vendor pay-as-you-go page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/pay-as-you-go (2026-10)
[10] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pay-as-you-go — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-the-pay-as-you-go-plan/ (2026-10)
[11] Mailchimp vendor transactional email page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/transactional-email (2026-10)
[12] Mailchimp vendor SMS page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/sms-marketing (2026-10)
[13] Mailchimp vendor documentation on cleaned contacts — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-cleaned-contacts/ (2026-10)
[14] Mailchimp vendor documentation on archiving — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/archive-unarchive-contacts/ (2026-10)
[15] Mailchimp vendor documentation on closing an account — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/close-an-account/ (2026-10)
[16] Mailchimp vendor about page — https://mailchimp.com/en/about/ (2026-10)
[17] Trustpilot, displayed score and distribution — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailchimp.com (2026-10)
[18] Gartner Peer Insights, published histogram — https://www.gartner.com/reviews/product/ailchimp-594139131 (2026-10)
[19] TrustRadius, structured data — https://www.trustradius.com/products/mailchimp/reviews (2026-10)
[20] Apple App Store listing — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mailchimp-email-marketing/id366794783 (2026-10)
[21] Google Play listing — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mailchimp.mailchimp (2026-10)
[22] MailerLite vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing (2026-10)
[23] Kit vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://kit.com/pricing (2026-10)
[24] Brevo vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://www.brevo.com/pricing/ (2026-10)
[25] ActiveCampaign vendor pricing page — https://www.activecampaign.com/pricing (2026-10)