Email Marketing for Nonprofits: Mailchimp for Nonprofits, the Nonprofit Discount, and What You Pay

Short answer: Mailchimp gives verified nonprofits and charities 15 percent off the base price of a marketing plan. You have to request it through Mailchimp's contact form before you purchase a plan, US organizations add their EIN to the account and may be asked for a 501(c)(3) determination letter, and Mailchimp states plainly that it cannot apply the discount retroactively or refund past purchases. On a typical 5,000 contact list on Standard, the discount is worth about $15 a month. The billing rules underneath it usually cost a nonprofit more than that.

That last point is the one nobody leads with, so let's do the arithmetic properly.

How much is Mailchimp for nonprofits?

The nonprofit rate is just the standard price with 15 percent taken off the base plan. It is not a separate plan, a separate tier, or a bigger free allowance. So the starting point is the ordinary contact ladder.

Figures checked against Mailchimp in August 2026. Above 10,000 contacts independent sources stop agreeing on the ladder, so treat the last row as indicative and read the contact slider inside your own account.

For a small community organization with a 1,200 person list, the discount is worth roughly $50 a year. That is real money for a nonprofit, and it is also less than most people expect when they hear "nonprofit pricing." It is a modest courtesy discount, not a program like the ones Google and Microsoft run.

Is Mailchimp free for nonprofits?

No. There is no free nonprofit plan. Nonprofits use the same free tier everyone else does, and in 2026 that tier was cut hard: 250 contacts, 500 emails a month, a 250 email daily cap, Mailchimp branding on every send, and support only for the first 30 days after signup.

For context, that free plan held 2,000 contacts a few years ago. A church with a 400 person congregation, a school PTA, or a food bank with a modest donor file is now over the cap on day one. This is the single biggest change affecting nonprofit users of Mailchimp, and it is why so many organizations went looking for pricing information this year.

How to get the Mailchimp nonprofit discount

The sequence matters more than the paperwork, because getting it out of order costs you the whole first year.

1. Create the account, but do not buy a plan yet. This is the step that trips people up. Mailchimp asks you to request the discount before you purchase a marketing plan.
2. Add your EIN to the account. For US organizations this is the primary verification.
3. Submit the request through Mailchimp's contact form, choosing the nonprofit discount option for US organizations. Have a digital copy of your 501(c)(3) determination letter ready in case they ask for it.
4. Wait for approval before upgrading. Mailchimp cannot provide retroactive discounts or refunds on past purchases, so a year of paying full price is not recoverable once you notice.

If you are already a paying customer, still request it. You will not get the past year back, but you will get every month afterward.

What the discount does not cover

The 15 percent applies to the base plan price. It does not apply to the charges that most often inflate a nonprofit's invoice, and there are more of those than the pricing page suggests.

The billing rules that cost more than the discount saves

This is the part worth an hour of somebody's time, because for most nonprofits it is worth several times the 15 percent.

You are billed on your peak contact count. Mailchimp's own help documentation says the monthly bill reflects the highest contact total stored in the account during the billing period, and that the bill does not follow the count back down within that period. Nonprofits do this to themselves constantly: import the gala guest list on the 2nd, clean it out on the 20th, and pay the higher tier for the whole month. If you must do a big import, do it just after your billing date, not just before it.

Unsubscribed contacts keep costing money. Subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your plan limit. Unsubscribing somebody does not remove them from your bill. Only archiving does, and nothing in the product prompts you to do it. A ten year old donor file can easily be carrying thousands of archived-worthy records that are still being counted.

Duplicates across audiences are billed twice. Mailchimp treats each audience as a separate entity. If you built one audience for donors, another for volunteers and a third for the newsletter, every person who appears in two of them is two billable contacts. This is extremely common in nonprofits, because the audiences usually map to programs rather than to people.

So before you chase a $15 a month discount, filter for unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts and archive them, then work out how much your audiences overlap and merge them into one audience with tags. Organizations routinely drop a full pricing tier doing this, which is worth considerably more than 15 percent.

While you are cleaning up data, the same problem usually exists on the income side. Small nonprofits often receive donation notifications by email from a payment processor or giving platform and re-key them into a spreadsheet by hand, when you can pull the details out of those notification emails into a spreadsheet automatically and reconcile against the donor record instead.

Mailchimp vs Constant Contact for nonprofits

This comparison comes up constantly, and there is one structural fact behind it.

Mailchimp's nonprofit discount is offered directly by Mailchimp, and Mailchimp is not currently listed in the TechSoup catalog. Constant Contact is available through TechSoup, at a discount reported to be considerably deeper than 15 percent, and its nonprofit and standard pricing also gives 30 percent off for a 12 month prepay. If your organization is already TechSoup verified, that is a legitimate reason to price Constant Contact seriously rather than defaulting to Mailchimp because it is the name everyone knows. Check the current TechSoup listing rather than trusting any article's number, including this one, because these programs change.

On capability the two are closer than their marketing suggests. Constant Contact has traditionally been stronger on events and simple list management, which suits a lot of nonprofit work. Mailchimp has deeper automation, templates and integrations. Neither writes your appeal for you.

What is the best email marketing platform for nonprofits?

It depends which constraint is actually binding, and for nonprofits it is usually not the one they start shopping for.

If the constraint is cost on a large, quiet list, look at platforms that bill on sends rather than stored contacts. A nonprofit with 30,000 lapsed donors it emails four times a year is paying Mailchimp to warehouse a database, not to send email. Brevo prices on email volume rather than contact count, which inverts that math.

If the constraint is deliverability to an old file, the fix is list hygiene before it is a platform change. Moving a decayed list to a new tool moves the problem with it.

If the constraint is that nobody has time to write the emails, and for small nonprofits this is nearly always the real answer, a cheaper sending platform changes nothing. The newsletter that did not go out in March would not have gone out on a different tool either. One development director covering communications, events and grants does not have a software problem.

That last case is what AutoMarketer is built for. It reads your website, learns what your organization does and who supports it, then drafts the campaigns, the social posts and the blog content, and you approve them before you send anything yourself. Email sits on the Growth plan at a flat $149 a month alongside SEO, social and Google Ads, with no contact ladder, so a 40,000 person donor file costs the same as a 400 person one. That is more than a small nonprofit would pay Mailchimp for email alone, and less than most pay for email plus a contractor to write it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Mailchimp have a nonprofit discount? Yes. Verified nonprofits and charities get 15 percent off the base price of a marketing plan. It must be requested through Mailchimp's contact form before you buy a plan, and it is not applied retroactively to purchases you have already made.

How much is Mailchimp for nonprofits? The standard contact-tier price minus 15 percent. A 1,000 contact list on Standard is roughly $23 a month instead of $27, and a 5,000 contact list is about $85 instead of $100. There is no separate nonprofit plan or larger free allowance.

Is Mailchimp free for nonprofits? No. Nonprofits use the same free plan as everyone else, which since 2026 caps at 250 contacts and 500 emails a month with a 250 daily send limit. Most organizations with a real donor or member file exceed that immediately.

What documentation do US nonprofits need? Add your EIN to the Mailchimp account. Mailchimp may also ask for a digital copy of your 501(c)(3) determination letter to validate eligibility.

Can I get the discount applied to what I already paid? No. Mailchimp states it cannot provide retroactive discounts or refunds on past purchases. Request it as soon as you realize, and it applies going forward.

For the full cost picture across every tier, see our breakdown of Mailchimp pricing. If you are weighing a move rather than a discount, the Mailchimp alternative comparison covers the switch, and email marketing software explains how the whole category prices itself.