Mailchimp Pricing 2026 With Cost, Fees and Plans by Contact Tier

How does Mailchimp pricing work?

Mailchimp prices on one number: how many contacts you store. Pick a plan, tell it roughly how big your list is, and the monthly price follows from that pair. Your send allowance is derived from the same number, at 10 times your contact limit on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. So a Standard plan sized for 5,000 contacts includes 60,000 emails a month.

That is the model in one sentence, and it is also where the surprises come from. Three rules turn a published price into a different invoice, and all three are documented by Mailchimp itself rather than inferred from complaints.

The first is peak billing. Mailchimp help documentation states that your monthly bill reflects the peak contact total during your billing period, and that even if your contact total decreases, the bill reflects the highest number of contacts stored in the account that month. Import a conference list on the 3rd, clean it out on the 10th, and you are billed as though you kept it.

The second is which contacts count. Subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your plan limit. Cleaned contacts (hard bounces) and pending contacts do not. Unsubscribing somebody does not stop you paying for them. Only archiving does, and archiving is a manual action nobody is prompted to take.

The third is duplicates. Mailchimp treats each audience as a separate entity, so the same email address sitting in two audiences is two billable contacts. Accounts that spun up a second audience for an event or a segment experiment are often paying twice for a large slice of the same people.

What Mailchimp costs at every contact tier

The table above lists the published monthly figures. In plain terms: Essentials opens at $13 a month and Standard at $20 a month, both sized for 500 contacts. At 5,000 contacts those become roughly $75 and $100. At 10,000 they are roughly $110 and $135, and Premium enters at $350 for the same 10,000 contacts.

One honesty note that most roundups skip. Below 10,000 contacts the published numbers are consistent across independent sources and match the vendor pricing page. Above 10,000 they stop agreeing: different guides quote Standard at 25,000 contacts anywhere from $270 to $310. If your list is that size, the contact slider inside your own Mailchimp account is the only number worth acting on, and any article that presents a single confident figure up there is guessing.

The charges that are not in the list price

Plan price is the floor. These are the line items that sit on top of it.

None of these are hidden in the sense of being concealed. They are documented. They are simply not in the number on the pricing page, which is why teams routinely budget the sticker and pay more.

Is Mailchimp still free?

Yes, but the free plan is much smaller than its reputation. It now caps at 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, with a 250 email daily limit, Mailchimp branding on every send, and support only for the first 30 days after signup. That is down from 2,000 contacts a few years ago. For a business with any real list, the free tier is now a trial rather than a plan, which is the honest reason so many searches for Mailchimp pricing start with somebody being pushed off it.

Why is Mailchimp so expensive?

Two things compound. The billing unit is contacts rather than activity, so cost tracks the size of your database and not how much marketing you actually do. A business sending one newsletter a month to 20,000 people pays far more than a business sending twelve campaigns a month to 2,000, even though the second one is doing six times the work.

The other is accumulation. Lists only grow, unsubscribes keep counting, duplicates stack across audiences, and nothing in the product nags you to clean up. The bill drifts upward without any decision being made, which is why the increase usually gets noticed at renewal rather than when it happens.

How to lower a Mailchimp bill without switching

If you are staying, three moves are worth an hour of somebody time and often drop a tier immediately.

Archive rather than unsubscribe. Filter for unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts, archive them in bulk, and they stop counting toward the plan limit while you keep their data. This alone is frequently the difference between two pricing tiers on an older account.

Consolidate audiences. If you run more than one audience, work out how much overlap there is. Merging into a single audience with tags gives you the same segmentation without paying for the same person twice.

Watch the peak, not the average. Because billing follows the highest count in the period, do big imports right after a billing date rather than right before, and clean lists before the cycle closes rather than after.

Mailchimp pricing for nonprofits

Verified nonprofits and charities can get 15 percent off. It applies to the base plan price, you have to request it through the Mailchimp contact form before you buy a plan, and US organizations add their EIN to the account with a 501(c)(3) determination letter available if asked. Mailchimp states plainly that it cannot apply the discount retroactively or refund past purchases, so requesting it after a year of paying full price does not recover anything. We wrote up what the discount is actually worth at each list size in Mailchimp for nonprofits.

When a flat plan costs less than a contact ladder

Here is the honest comparison, including where Mailchimp wins.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Mailchimp Standard is cheaper than $149 a month until roughly 10,000 contacts, and more expensive after that. But the comparison is not like for like at any list size, because the $149 Growth plan is email plus SEO, social and Google Ads, and a Mailchimp plan is email. If you have a large list and you only want to send to it, Mailchimp is the better buy and you should stay. If your list is modest but four channels are behind and nobody is writing anything, the contact ladder is charging you for the wrong thing entirely.

If you are weighing a move rather than a budget, our Mailchimp alternative comparison covers the switch itself, and email marketing software covers how the whole category prices. For the other big vendor cost question, see HubSpot pricing.