Mailchimp Pricing: Plan Breakdowns & Cost-Value Analysis (2025)

You are looking for the perfect email service provider for your business - you definitely saw Mailchimp top your results. You most probably already checked their pricing… and you have questions. We have answers.

For quite a while now, Mailchimp has been a prime choice for businesses aiming to nail their email marketing strategy. With a wide range of features, they cater to organizations of all sizes, helping them connect with their audience across the globe.

Whether you are a small business looking for a quick fix, or a large organization in need of advanced features, we hope that this guide can help you understand the different plans offered by Mailchimp, and the value that they can provide you.

Here’s this blog’s breakdown:

• What Mailchimp brings to the table
• Features that Matter in Email Marketing
• Breaking down Mailchimp’s Pricing Strategy
• Mailchimp’s Free Tier
• Essentials Plan
• Standard Plan
• Premium Plan
• Which Mailchimp Plan is the best for you?
• Comparing Mailchimp with other e-mail service providers
• Final verdict - Is Mailchimp overpriced?

Let us dive right in!

What Mailchimp brings to the table

Mailchimp is more than just an email service provider; it has evolved into a complete marketing platform.

At its core, Mailchimp makes it incredibly easy to create and manage your email campaigns from the ground up. You can set up automated email sequences using a drag & drop visual builder, letting you visualize your email sequences as you are building them. Audience segmentation, engagement analytics, and the AI assistants are just the icing on top.

But that is not everything that Mailchimp has to offer. You also get a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and a wide range of e-commerce tools which integrate directly with most e-commerce platforms.

For businesses and entrepreneurs who are just starting out, Mailchimp also features a user-friendly landing page builder and a scheduling app to help keep track of all your incoming leads and meetings.

Features that Matter in Email Marketing

While many email marketing tools boast a wide range of features with endless tables displaying the variance between each pricing tier, not all features are created equal; especially when it comes to driving engagement and delivering results.

Better audience segmentation, high deliverability, A/B testing, personalization, analytics, and finally, automation; all are features that lay the foundation of any email marketing tool that claims to provide you value. It is then your team’s job to make the most out of these features.

Let us break down why each of these features are absolute must-haves.

Audience Segmentation

Relevant for every industry, but most impactful in the world of e-commerce. Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your recipient list into distinct groups based on various criteria, such as demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels.

This feature lets you send targeted messages that will resonate with specific segments of your audience. Offering discounts on bedsheets for people who recently bought pillowcases, sharing new t-shirt designs with people who bought from the same collection last season, etc.

By delivering relevant content to the right people, you improve your engagement rates, reduce unsubscribe rates, and ultimately drive more conversions.

A/B Testing

Split testing, more commonly known as A/B testing, allows your marketing team to compare two or more versions of an email to determine which performs better.

This feature is important for optimizing your email’s content, subject lines, layouts, and calls-to-action based on real performance data. It is impossible to test these things out in any reasonable manner without official A/B testing support from your platform of choice.

The top-tier email marketers do not come up with the perfect subject line overnight, they run A/B tests and iteratively improve their templates, using raw data, down to the perfect emoji they should use.

Personalization

Proper personalization goes beyond just inserting the recipient’s name in the subject line; it revolves around delivering tailored content based on their behaviour, preferences, and past interactions with you, or your business.

An email that feels personal can foster a stronger connection with the recipient and lead to higher engagement. Dynamic content and personalized recommendations will significantly increase conversion rates and customer loyalty.

But all of this is only possible if your email marketing tool actually support this!

High Deliverability

What even is the point of sending emails if they do not end up in the recipient’s inbox and the spam filter ends up catching it? High deliverability is important because even the most well-crafted email will not yield any results if it skips the inbox entirely.

Analytics

Tracking metrics such as open, click-through, and conversions rates is critical for evaluating the success of your email marketing efforts. You measure something, then you improve it in hopes for a better result next time, this is data-driven decision-making in a single sentence.

Automation

Last, but not the least, email marketing automation, something that makes modern email marketing possible in the first place.

Whether you wish to schedule relevant messages to be sent on the right time or automatically guide a customer through a series of emails based on their actions, email marketing automation is the lifesaver your marketing team has been looking for.

Did someone add stuff to their cart and abandon ship? This should trigger an email sequence that first reminds the user after a few hours, then waits a day or two before offering a coupon code for some extra encouragement.

Breaking down Mailchimp’s Pricing Strategy

Now that you know the features you should keep an eye out for, let us take a deep dive into Mailchimp’s pricing strategy and the different plans they have to offer.

Mailchimp prices their service based on a single factor; the number of contacts that you have in an audience. For users with a paid account who can have more than a single audience, it is important to note that two audiences are unique and independent of each other, having a single contact in two audiences will cause them to be counted twice towards your limit.

How many emails you can send per month is simply a multiplier to the number of contacts that you have; does this all seem complicated? Yes, that’s a big complain new users have about email marketing platforms.

Let us begin with the free tier.

Mailchimp’s Free Tier

Mailchimp’s free tier has little to offer, the functionality is fairly limited, and it is designed for users just getting started with email marketing. With the free tier, you are only allowed to have a maximum of 500 contacts and can send up to 1,000 emails per month. While this may be sufficient for very small campaigns, the limitations do not end here.

• Limited Segmentation – The free tier only includes basic audience segmentation features, pretty restrictive for users looking to engage in more targeted marketing efforts.
• Lack of Audience Insights – Missing audience insights make it harder to analyze and understand customer behavior. The unsavory icing on top is the fact that Mailchimp’s free tier only provides you with the bare minimum analytics,
• No Automation Features – Free users do not gain access to automation features, with only a preview available. Features like A/B testing and dynamic content are also missing, limiting optimization and email personalization options.
• No Email Scheduling – Not only does the Mailchimp free tier lack automation features, but it also lacks the ability to schedule your emails, necessitating manual sending.
• Mailchimp Branding – The free Mailchimp tier comes with their own branding, that you cannot remove. This looks incredibly unprofessional and is the biggest drawback of using a free tier for your email marketing purposes.

Essentials Plan

With 2,500 Contacts, the Essentials Plan will cost you $45 per month (after your initial promo price expires of course). It brings with itself a slightly expanded feature set compared to the Free Tier, and lets you send way more emails instead of just a thousand every month.

This plan is for businesses who are just starting out, have marketing needs, and need some basic email automation tools so that email marketing becomes less tedious. You also get more than a single user seat to manage your email marketing efforts.

The Essentials Plan is very similar to the free tier in functionality, let us break down the features you will be getting on top:

• Scalability & Sending Limits – This is a scalable plan, with an upper limit of 50,000 contacts. Your monthly email limits also scale up along with your contact list, letting you send 10X the emails for every contact in your list.
• Remove Mailchimp Branding – With a paid tier, users can remove the Mailchimp branding from their emails, giving your communications a more personalized and professional look.
• Basic Automation Features – Users can set up basic email sequences letting you automate repetitive tasks; however, the customer journeys can only have singular starting-points, no branches, and only 4 journey points! Making this a very simple, and linear pipeline builder.
• A/B Testing, finally – Perhaps the most important part of any email marketing campaign, you can set up A/B tests to experiment with different variations and decide on one that works.
• Customer Support – The free tiers have minimal access to customer support, so if you often need assistance with something, the essentials plan is the bare minimum that you need.

Standard Plan

For businesses that are ready to take their email marketing seriously, Mailchimp’s Standard Plan is a complete solution with an equally premium price. At $60 per month for 2,500 Contacts, with the capacity to scale up to 100,000 Contacts.

This tier is for businesses seeking a more complete toolset to engage and build their audience. You will be able to optimize campaigns, run elaborate experiments, and drive results with confidence.

Here is a closer look at what the Standard Plan offers beyond the Essentials Plan:

• Even More Scalability: As your business grows, so does your contact list. The Standard Plan supports growth with a maximum limit of 100,000 contacts. Letting you match your growing audience with the ability to send even more emails, this time with a higher multiplier of 12 emails per contact.
• Advanced Segmentation: The Standard Plan includes advanced segmentation capabilities, letting you set up additional conditions and checks to evaluate who should be included in your final recipients list.
• In-depth Insights: Mailchimp lets you gain a deeper understanding of your customers with detailed insights such as demographic predictions, customer lifetime value assessments, and purchase likelihood analytics. Data that is invaluable for refining your marketing strategies.
• Custom Templates: For those who want full control over their email design, the Standard Plan provides the ability to custom code your email templates. More creative freedom and the power to align your emails with your brand’s unique identity.
• Complex Journeys: Unlike the linear automation pipeline of the Essentials Plan, the Standard Plan supports multiple starting points and branches in customer journeys (email sequences). Something that really should be available to everyone, in our opinion. You can also have 200 journey points instead of being limited to just 4.

The Standard Plan is a proper email marketing solution, and everything prior was just a demo, giving you reasons to switch to the Standard plan. Features such as dynamic content and the ability to create functional customer journeys are essential to email marketing and should be part of the previous tier instead.

Premium Plan

Mailchimp’s top tier, the Premium Plan is for large enterprises and businesses who need a more hands-on experience, proper onboarding, and more tech support. Starting at $350 per month for a minimum of 10,000 Contacts, this plan is pretty much the same as the Standard one, with some additional bells & whistles attached.

Here is what you will be getting:

• Everything in Standard – The Premium Plan does not offer additional features over the Standard plan. Apart from scalability and better tech support, you also get an unlimited number of seats, so businesses with large marketing teams will benefit the most from this.
• Unlimited Scalability – Unlike the other tiers, the Premium Plan has no upper limit on contact count. As your business grows, your contact list can expand without any constraints.
• Priority Support – Mailchimp offers priority customer support for Premium Plan users. This ensures your team has access to quick solutions and expert advice whenever needed. Large teams tend to run into more issues than smaller ones, so the priority support can be a lifesaver.

Which Mailchimp Plan is the best for you?

Let us break down the different Mailchimp plans to help you determine which one best suits your business. Hint, both the free and essential plans are subpar compared to other alternatives on the market.

• Free Tier: Practically useless for professional usage, beginners or those testing the waters of email marketing would find it alright due to their very limited needs.
• Essentials Plan: Ideal for small businesses needing basic automation while starting to scale, however there are other email marketing platforms with much better offerings in this price range.
• Standard Plan: For growing businesses who want more segmentation, insights, and automation to help their marketing teams out.
• Premium Plan: Best for large enterprises who need unlimited scalability, extensive support, and have large marketing teams.

Our recommendation would be to only look at the Standard plan as something that delivers value, while treating the Free and Essential plans as introductory in nature.

This is because modern email marketing is impossible to conduct without proper automation. Having multiple branches and starting points for your customer journey are probably the most important tools in any email marketer’s arsenal; you cannot treat everyone the same.

But even if the Essential plan had these features, the fact that it is limited to only “4” journey points, makes it essentially useless.

Comparing Mailchimp with other e-mail service providers

Depending on your marketing goals, audience size, and the type of business you are conducting, you may find some email marketing platforms to be more suitable than others.

It is important to be aware of your requirements, do you actually need automation? How tech savvy is your team? Will you be integrating it with third party platforms or using it as a standalone thing on its own? We’ve previously covered Mailchimp alternatives with more comparisons.

For E-Commerce Emails – Try Omnisend

From promotional email blasts for seasonal sales to personalized cart abandonment reminders, these emails have become an integral part of running a functional online store.

There is fierce competition against Mailchimp in this sector, names like Klaviyo and Omnisend are often the top contenders, we will just be looking at Omnisend in this section since you have probably heard about the former quite a lot.

At $45 per month for 2500 contacts, with support for web push notifications as well as the ability to collect reviews for your Shopify store, Omnisend offers you all the features that your e-commerce business could ever need, at a cost that’s 25% cheaper than Mailchimp.

With its powerful automation capabilities, even better analytics, and integrations with leading e-commerce platforms, Omnisend will empower your businesses to create tailored campaigns that resonate with your audience and drive conversions, all while providing extensive insights in the process.

For Cold Emails – Try Mailmeteor

Cold emailing is one of the most powerful lead generation methods available to you, but it requires a delicate balance of crafting personalized messages that resonate while navigating the challenges of deliverability, compliance, and engagement rates.

Unlike traditional email marketing, where the recipient is already expecting you to send them promotional material, cold emailing is all about promoting yourself to strangers who have never heard of you.

The constant pursuit of writing the perfect copy, rigorous A/B testing, and tracking the recipient’s engagement rates, make cold emailing both an art and a science. However, Mailchimp does not support cold emailing at all.

We recommend picking up Mailmeteor instead, with its intuitive interface that fits seamlessly within your Gmail mailbox, and features tailored for personalized outreach. Mailmeteor allows users to streamline their cold emailing campaigns without the cost burden commonly associated with many email service providers, all at the low cost of $5 per month for the starter tier. You can read more on why it’s the best alternative to Mailchimp.

For Transactional Emails – Try Mailgun

Any online service or app is incomplete without a properly integrated transactional email service provider.

From a simple email address confirmation link, to order confirmation and password recovery emails, every single email that exists because of the user taking an action, is called a transactional email.

While Mailchimp does support transactional email (starting at $20 per month for 25k emails), it does not have a free tier for such email. Tools like Mailgun on the other hand excel at providing a cheap ($15 per month for 10k emails) and trustworthy transactional email service to businesses large and small, with a free tier as well!

Final verdict - Is Mailchimp overpriced?

Mailchimp is a formidable player in the email marketing world, but as features and pricing structures evolve, you may question whether it remains the best value for businesses.

Overall, Mailchimp offers a well-rounded feature set that covers every single need that you could have. But will you need every single feature? Some tools like Mailmeteor could take you much further with a lower budget or enterprise level requirements.

The pricing on Mailchimp’s premium tier is steep compared to alternatives like Omnisend and Mailgun, but keep in mind that Premium does not offer much on top of Standard for most people.

Both Omnisend and Mailgun provide more tailored features for specific needs at lower costs, like e-commerce or transactional emails, respectively. As such, businesses with clear marketing goals may find that Mailchimp has a lot of features that they simply do not fully utilize.

At the same time, smaller organizations or those just starting out their adventure into the world of email marketing will find that Mailchimp’s Free and Essentials Plan have significant limitations that will hinder growth and engagement. This is the actual problem we were hoping to tackle with this breakdown.

The lack of automation and meaningful segmentation capabilities defeat the entire purpose of using an email marketing platform in the first place. Mailchimp is undoubtedly a powerful tool with a user-friendly interface, has all the features that you could ever ask for, but it forces you to upgrade to a higher tier as soon as you need an additional feature.

This is not industry standard, Klaviyo has a single tier, Omnisend has virtually no feature disparity, Mailgun only cares about how many emails you send.

Our advice? You need to figure out what matters for your business and pick a tool accordingly. You can check out our more detailed article on Mailchimp alternatives for help in narrowing down your pick.

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