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At first glance, the Atlanta-based company is pretty generous, offering free newsletters. However, make sure you read until the end as there are a few snags in their pricing model.
MailChimp offers the Forever Free plan for up to 2,000 contacts and 12,000 emails per month (with ads). The Growing Business plan starts at $10 per month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails. The Pro Marketer plan adds MailChimp’s advanced email marketing features to your current plan for an extra $199 per month.
MailChimp also features a pay as you go pricing system where you’ll just pay for the amount of emails that you send. This plan comes with the same features as the monthly MailChimp plans. But if you need to add the advanced MailChimp Pro features, this will cost you an additional $199 a month. Let’s have a look at some of their prices:
Similarly to a cell phone setup you prepay your email quota. These credits never expire.
| Emails | Price per email | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $0.03 | $30 |
| 5,000 | $0.02 | $100 |
| 10,000 | $0.02 | $200 |
| 50,000 | $0.01 | $500 |
| 75,000 | $0.01 | $750 |
The advantage of a subscription is that you never run out of credits thus your automations won’t stop on Black Friday because you forgot to refill.
| Mailchimp Plans | Forever Free | Growing Business | Pro Marketer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Features | |||
| Marketing Automation
(Autoresponders) |
Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Abandoned Cart | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A/B Testing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Inbox Preview | No | 25 free | 1,000 free |
| Segmentation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Chat and Email Support | No (Knowledge base only) | Yes | Yes |
| Mailchimp advertisement | Yes (a small banner in the newsletter’s footer) | No | No |
| Advanced features | |||
| Time Zone delivery | No | Yes | Yes |
| Predicted Demographics | No | Yes | Yes |
| Geo-segmentation | No | Yes | Yes |
| Transactional Emails | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced segmentation | No | No | Yes |
| Comparative Reports | No | No | Yes |
| Multivariate Testing | No | No | Yes |
| Mailchimp cost | |||
| 500 users | Free* | $10 | $10 + $199 |
| 1,000 users | Free* | $20 | $20 + $199 |
| 2,000 users | Free* | $25 | $25 + $199 |
| 5,000 users | X | $50 | $50 + $199 |
| 10,000 users | X | $75 | $75 + $199 |
| 25,000 users | X | $150 | $150 + $199 |
| 50,000 users | X | $240 | $240 + $199 |
* You can only send 12,000 emails per month.
Firstly you need to decide if you need a pay as you go account where you purchase email credits and send campaigns out or if it makes more sense to have a monthly account with a subscriber limitation. Generally speaking, if you send email campaigns regularly, getting a monthly account is more sensible. However, if you just want to send the odd campaign every now and then (or are generally scared of commitment), buying email credits is your best option.
New Business – Forever Free Plan: MailChimp lets you start your email marketing program for free. Actually this complementary plan is very generous and includes plenty of features. For example, you have access to all the templates and design options. Unlike other providers, the email automations and (some) other advanced features (e.g. A/B test, reporting or the ecommerce abandoned cart feature) are included in this tier too. However, you won’t be able benefit from any personal support.
You have to be aware that this plan is limited to 2,000 subscribers (contacts) and 12,000 emails (a month). If you exceed these, you’ll have to purchase a monthly plan or email credits (pay as you go). Take into account that when sending campaigns, a MailChimp self-promoting badge will show in your communications.
We’re big fans of MailChimp’s free plan, but, honestly speaking we like MailerLite’s free plan even more. Theirs is completely ad-free, allows up to 1,000 subscribers with no cap on the amount of emails you can send.
Growing Business Plan: Chances are that the MailChimp Free plan isn’t for you, for example, if you need to send more than 12,000 emails per month or you have more than 2,000 contacts. The monthly paid plans come with other advantages, the most relevant are:
Pro Marketer Plan: This isn’t cheap at all as you’ll need to pay an extra $199 a month to get MailChimp’s cutting edge features. But let’s see what these Pro features can do for you and your organization:
The free plan is actually quite generous and will be enough for most small businesses and organizations. If you don’t mind not having dedicated support and the advertisement at the footer of your email, of course.
The monthly MailChimp paid plan is a decent enough solution for those marketers looking for a solid tool with professional looking newsletters. But be aware that other newsletter services are more powerful and also offer much cheaper paid plans.
MailChimp’s Pro plan is really expensive (an extra $199 a month) and unless you are looking to create complex segmentations, need an advanced reporting system or you want to do multivariate testing it’s not worth it.
MailChimp is one of the most expensive newsletters tools out there. If you are looking for a budget-friendly solution we’d encourage you to try our Newsletter Pricing Comparison Tool and find one that suits you.
These features can do really advanced tasks, however they are quite expensive as they’ll cost you $199 extra a month. Unless you need to perform complex A/B tests, require (really) advanced segmentation or would like to get comparative reports, you don’t need the Pro features.
