Mailchimp Pricing 2026: How Much Mailchimp Costs

The short answer: at 500 contacts, Mailchimp costs $13 a month on Essentials, $20 on Standard and $350 on Premium, with a free plan at $0 for up to 250 contacts. Those are floors, not forecasts. Mailchimp bills on how many contacts you store, stepping up through roughly 20 tiers, and it counts people who have unsubscribed. The lever nobody tells you about is archiving: archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count toward your bill at all.

Every number below was read from Mailchimp's own US pricing page and its billing documentation in August 2026. Where Mailchimp does not publish a figure, this article says so instead of guessing. Prices change, so check before you buy.

Mailchimp pricing in 2026

One detail in that table is worth a second look, because it changes how Premium reads. Premium's base price includes 10,000 contacts, not 500. So $350 a month is not "Standard plus extras at the same list size", it is a plan that already carries a twenty times larger allowance. If you are running a list of a few hundred people, Premium is not the tier you are choosing between. If you are at 10,000 contacts, comparing Standard at that tier against Premium's flat $350 is a real calculation worth doing.

The free plan is smaller than most guides claim

Mailchimp's Free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with a daily send limit of 250. You get one audience and one seat. A large number of articles still describe the free tier as 500 contacts and 1,000 sends, which was true of an older version of the plan and is not what Mailchimp's own documentation says today.

The behavior at the limit is worth knowing too. Go past 250 contacts on the Free plan and Mailchimp places a hold on sending live emails or test emails until you upgrade or reduce your contact total. You can carry on building emails and templates and importing contacts, but nothing goes out. That is a hard stop rather than an overage charge, which is a reasonable design and a genuinely bad surprise mid-launch.

How Mailchimp billing actually works

Two meters run at once, and most budgeting mistakes come from watching only the first.

Meter one: your contact limit

Your contact limit is the maximum number of contacts you can store at any point in your billing cycle, and you set it when you choose your plan. The price steps up through a ladder of about 20 tiers on the pricing page selector. These are the bands Mailchimp lists:

Read that ladder as a set of cliff edges rather than a smooth slope. Crossing from 1,500 to 1,501 contacts moves you a whole band. If you are sitting at 1,480 contacts and about to import a list of 200, that import has a price attached, and it is worth knowing the number before you click. The bands above each plan's ceiling only apply to plans that reach them, since Essentials stops at 50,000 contacts and Standard at 100,000. Past 200,000 contacts Mailchimp moves you to a custom plan.

Meter two: your send limit

Your monthly send allowance is calculated from your contact limit, not sold separately: 10 times your contact limit on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. A send is counted per recipient, so one email to 500 contacts is 500 sends, not one.

Work that through. On Standard at a 2,500 contact limit you get 30,000 sends a month. If you mail your whole list weekly that is 10,000 sends, comfortably inside the allowance. Add a three-email welcome sequence, a monthly newsletter and an abandoned cart flow and you are still fine. But a business that mails daily, or runs several long automated sequences at once, can hit the ceiling on a list that looks small. Exceed either meter and overage charges apply.

Which contacts you actually pay for

This is the most useful paragraph in the article, so here it is plainly. Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts in your contact total. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count toward your contact total or the price of your marketing plan.

In other words, everyone who ever gave you an address and then opted out is still on your invoice until you do something about it. For a business that ran a giveaway two years ago, that can be thousands of contacts sitting one or two bands higher on the ladder for no return whatsoever.

The fix is a re-engagement sequence followed by archiving. Mail the people who have not opened anything in six or twelve months, give them a clear reason to stay, then archive the ones who do not respond. You drop a pricing band, and your open rates and deliverability improve at the same time, because you stop sending to addresses that never engage. It is the rare cost saving that also makes the marketing work better.

Why is Mailchimp so expensive?

Because the meter is list size rather than results, and list size only goes one way unless you actively prune it. A campaign that added 5,000 contacts is a cost increase from the month it lands, whether or not any of those people buy. Per-send pricing, which is what Brevo and some others use, has the opposite failure mode: it is cheap for a big dormant list and expensive in a heavy campaign month.

The second reason is that Mailchimp is priced as a suite while many people use it as a newsletter tool. If your use is one campaign a month to 3,000 people, you are paying for automation depth, multivariate testing and segmentation you never open. That is a fair reason to look at Mailchimp alternatives, and an equally fair reason to stay if the thing you value is that it just works and support answers.

The costs that are not the plan price

• SMS marketing is an add-on rather than part of the plan, available on Essentials and above, and it is billed separately through credits. Mailchimp does not publish a flat per-message rate on the pricing page, so price it inside the app for your own volume before you build SMS into a campaign plan.
• Transactional email, the receipts and password resets sent from your application, is a separate product with its own billing rather than part of your marketing send allowance.
• Pay As You Go is an alternative to a monthly plan where you buy email credits as you need them. It suits businesses that send a few times a year and would otherwise pay twelve monthly bills for two campaigns.
• Overages apply if you exceed either your contact limit or your send limit, which is why the two meters above are worth tracking together rather than separately.
• Whoever writes the emails. This is the largest line item in almost every account and it appears on no pricing page. A $20 plan that sends nothing costs $240 a year for silence.

What a year actually costs

Mailchimp bills monthly and does not offer a standard annual prepay discount, so the yearly figure is simply twelve times your tier. A business steady at 500 contacts on Standard pays about $240 a year. The same business after a good year at 5,000 contacts is several bands up the ladder, and that increase arrives quietly, one band at a time, without anyone approving it.

There is one published discount worth knowing: accounts with more than 10,000 contacts can take 15 percent off for the first 12 months, and Mailchimp states the discount is kept if you switch between Premium, Standard or Essentials. It applies to the first year only, so treat it as a first-year number rather than your run rate.

If you want the wider picture across the whole stack rather than one vendor, our guide to AI marketing platform pricing compares the seven different ways these vendors bill, and how much AI marketing costs covers agencies and people as well as software.

Is Mailchimp the right buy?

It is a genuinely good product for a specific shape of business: a modest list, regular campaigns, a few automations, and a preference for something that works without configuration. Deliverability is solid, support is real on paid plans, and almost every other tool integrates with it.

It is the wrong buy in two cases. If you are an ecommerce store whose automation depends on catalog and order data, the ecommerce-native platforms are built for that and it shows. And if your list is large but dormant, you are paying storage rent on people who will never open anything, which is a pricing model working exactly as intended and against you.

The bigger question sits underneath all of it. A sending platform executes sequences you have written. It does not decide the offer, write the campaign or notice when a flow stopped converting. Teams that keep this cost sensible usually get more out of the writing they already have, turning one solid piece into the newsletter, the blog post and the social version rather than starting from a blank page every month. If the real gap is that nobody has time to run any of it, that is the gap our marketing automation software guide is written around, and the one AiMarketer is built to fill.

Questions people ask about Mailchimp pricing

How much does Mailchimp cost per month?

At 500 contacts, Mailchimp Essentials is $13 a month, Standard is $20 a month and Premium is $350 a month, read from Mailchimp's own US pricing page in August 2026. The Free plan is $0 and covers 250 contacts. Every paid price rises as your contact total climbs through a ladder of about 20 tiers, so the entry price is a floor rather than a forecast.

How does Mailchimp billing work?

Mailchimp bills on your contact limit, which is the maximum number of contacts you can store during a billing cycle. Your monthly send allowance is a multiple of that limit: 10 times on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. Exceed either the contact limit or the send limit and overage charges apply, so both meters matter.

Does Mailchimp charge for unsubscribed contacts?

Yes. Mailchimp states that subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts are all included in your contact count, which means people who opted out still push you up the pricing ladder. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count toward your contact total or your plan price, so archiving inactive contacts is the direct way to lower the bill.

Is Mailchimp free?

There is a real free plan, not a trial, but it is small. It covers up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month with a daily cap of 250 sends, one audience and one seat. Go past 250 contacts and Mailchimp places a hold on sending live or test emails until you upgrade or reduce your contact total, though you can keep building emails and collecting contacts.

How much does Mailchimp cost per year?

Multiply the monthly rate for your contact tier by twelve, since Mailchimp bills monthly rather than offering a standard annual discount. A small business steady at 500 contacts on Standard pays about $240 a year. Accounts with more than 10,000 contacts can take a promotional 15 percent off for the first 12 months, which applies to the first year only.

Last updated August 2026. Prices and plan limits were read from Mailchimp's US pricing page and billing documentation on 9 August 2026 and are not estimates. Check the current numbers on Mailchimp's own site before you buy.