Mailchimp pricing: every plan and what it costs

Use this Mailchimp pricing page to understand cost structure, usage limits, and where pricing conversations need more detail.

Mailchimp sells four tiers and prices three of them against a contact count. That is why a quoted figure without its tier is close to meaningless: Essentials at $13/mo and Standard at $20/mo are both 500-contact rates, and Premium's $350/mo is the 10,000-contact rate.

Read any Mailchimp price as a price at a list size.

We do not publish prices at contact counts we have not verified.

A rate at 500 contacts and a rate at 10,000 contacts tell you nothing reliable about the rate at 2,500, because the steps between tiers are set by Mailchimp rather than by a formula.

Mailchimp publishes a calculator on its own pricing page, and that is the figure to model against.

Annual billing is the one discount with a published number on it. Essentials falls from $13/mo to $9.75/mo and Standard from $20/mo to $15/mo at 500 contacts, which totals $117 and $180 across a year against $156 and $240 paid month to month.

Premium falls from $350/mo to $262.50/mo at 10,000 contacts.

The $7/mo step from Essentials to Standard is the most consequential decision on the card, and it is not about capacity. Both sit at 500 contacts in our check.

Standard is where behavioural automation, send-time optimisation and testing live, so a welcome sequence or an action-triggered email puts you on Standard regardless of list size.

The cost driver people miss is which contacts count. Mailchimp bills on the audience, and an audience holds more than the people currently receiving your email.

Before a renewal, export the audience, group it by status, and check Mailchimp's own billing documentation for whether unsubscribed and cleaned records sit inside the billable total. Archiving the ones that do can move you down a tier without changing anything you send.

Premium at $350/mo deserves a different question from the other three tiers. At that monthly figure the alternative is rarely Standard: it is another platform, or Standard plus a separate CRM.

The tier makes sense for teams running multiple audiences and testing programmes and wanting Mailchimp's higher support commitment, and it is poor value for a single list being emailed twice a month.

On entry price, Mailchimp is competitive and on growth it often is not. MailerLite Comfort is $12/mo and Power $25/mo, and Kit's Creator plan is $33/mo with Pro at $66/mo, all checked 1 October 2026.

Mailchimp Essentials at $13/mo undercuts Kit at the bottom of the range, but each vendor defines a billable contact differently, so the ordering can invert as the list grows.

Two head-to-heads cover the switching question in detail: Mailchimp against MailerLite for the cheaper like-for-like option, and Kit against Mailchimp for creator-focused list management. Full rate cards sit on the MailerLite profile and the Kit profile.

What Mailchimp buys at any tier is reach into other systems. It carries one of the deeper integration libraries in email marketing, which is the reason teams running on commerce and CRM platforms stay on it through a price increase.

If purchase-triggered email is part of the plan, check the native integration before you shop the price.

If you are weighing a move, our guide to newsletter platforms for creators sets out the field, the newsletter platforms category lists every option we track, and the pricing calculators will take your projected contact count rather than today's.

Stay on Free if your list is under 500 contacts and you send fewer than 1,000 emails a month. That is a real constraint rather than a soft one, and it fits a small business sending a monthly update.

It does not fit anything with a signup form attached to steady traffic.

Choose Standard at $20/mo rather than Essentials at $13/mo if any part of your plan involves automation.

The $7/mo difference at 500 contacts buys the behavioural triggers that separate email marketing from email sending, and discovering the gap after you have built a list is more expensive than paying it from the start.

Choose Essentials at $13/mo only when the job is broadcast: a scheduled newsletter, templates, no triggered sequences. It is a genuine saving for that pattern and a false economy for anything else.

Treat Premium at $350/mo as a procurement decision, not an upgrade. Model it against the cost of Standard plus a dedicated CRM, and against a platform priced for larger lists, before signing.

The same applies at any tier once your list has grown several steps past the rate you first signed up on: run the comparison annually rather than at renewal.