The important difference is not features, it is the meter. Mailchimp charges by how many contacts you store. We charge by how much mail you actually send. Which is cheaper depends entirely on the shape of your list and your sending.
Sources and dating. Mailchimp plan details below were read from their own pricing page on 19 August 2026. Pricing changes, so treat every figure here as accurate as of that date and check their current pricing page before making a decision. If you find something out of date here, tell us and we will correct it.
| All In One Email | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | By volume sent, with published tiers: $0.80 CPM up to 100,000 emails/month, $0.70 up to 1 million, $0.60 up to 2.5 million. A dormant contact costs you nothing. | By contact count, with send limits set as a multiple of contacts. You pay for contacts whether or not you mail them. |
| Published plans | Three: Platform Only, Platform Plus Sending, Fully Managed. | Free at $0 for 250 contacts and 500 sends/mo; Essentials from $13/mo; Standard from $20/mo; Premium from $350/mo, which includes 10,000 contacts and 150,000 sends/mo. |
| Send allowance | Whatever you pay for. No contact ceiling. | A multiple of your contact count: 10x on Essentials, 12x on Standard, 15x on Premium. Overages are billed automatically. |
| Example: 150,000 sends/month | $105 at the $0.70 tier, for sending alone. | Premium at $350/mo includes 10,000 contacts and 150,000 sends, and bundles landing pages, forms and ecommerce integrations that we do not offer. Not a like-for-like comparison. |
| Large list, low frequency | Costs little, because you are billed for sends. | Costs a lot, because you are billed for stored contacts regardless of sending. |
| Deliverability work | Included in Platform Plus Sending and Fully Managed, done by our staff. | Self-service. Support tiers vary by plan, but running your own deliverability is expected. |
| Best fit | High-volume senders, and organizations that want the program operated for them. Strong in political, nonprofit and advocacy. | Small to mid-sized lists, self-service marketers, and teams that want landing pages, social posting and ecommerce integrations in the same tool. |
We would rather you pick the right tool than pick us. These are the cases where we would genuinely point you elsewhere.
At a few hundred or a few thousand contacts, Mailchimp is inexpensive and immediately usable. Our pricing is not built for that, and we would be a poor value.
Mailchimp bundles landing pages, forms, social posting and ecommerce integrations. We do email. If you want one tool for all of it, that is a real advantage and we do not match it.
You can sign up for Mailchimp and send this afternoon with no conversation. Working with us starts with a scoping call, which is slower by design.
Familiarity is a genuine cost saving. If it works and your deliverability is healthy, switching for its own sake is not worth it.
It depends on the shape of your list. Because Mailchimp bills by stored contacts and we bill by messages sent, we tend to be cheaper for large lists and high volume, and more expensive for small lists. The crossover is worth calculating against your real numbers rather than guessing.
They come with you. Because we do not bill per stored contact, list size stops being a cost driver, which usually changes how aggressively you need to prune.
Not as a managed service. Support levels differ by plan, but running authentication, reputation and list hygiene is expected to be your job. That is the main structural difference between their model and our Platform Plus Sending and Fully Managed tiers.
That pattern is the clearest case for volume pricing. Under contact-based pricing you pay every month for a list you mail occasionally. Under ours you pay for the sends when they happen.
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Mailchimp and its logo are trademarks of their respective owner. This page is an independent comparison and is not endorsed by or affiliated with them. Figures were taken from their published pricing on 19 August 2026.