Mailchimp has a pricing option to fit every single one of your marketing needs. If you’re looking for an email marketing service provider, or considering switching to another one, it’s time to know about Mailchimp pricing plans.

How much does Mailchimp cost?

Below, we’ll go through every single plan and its features. After reading this post, you’ll get a clear picture of which pricing option is a good fit for your business.

Types of pricing plans

Mailchimp pricing plans are based on your audience size or number of contacts. Contacts are individuals that are subscribed to your marketing campaigns.

Those contacts that are subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed, all count towards your monthly plan limit. Archived, deleted or cleaned contacts, do not count. 

Mailchimp offers four pricing plans: Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium.

Free

The Mailchimp free plan is perfect for starting businesses who are growing an audience online, as it includes plenty of nice features at no cost.

It includes up to 500 contacts in your audience and a top of 1,000 sends monthly. (There is a daily limit of 500 sends). 

Every email sent to one individual contact equals one send. If for instance you send a campaign to a 500 contacts audience, that counts as 500 sends. Transactional and test emails also count to your monthly sending limit.

Free Plan features:

• 1 Audience.
• 1 account user and owner.
• Marketing CRM tools (Contact profiles, tags & segments).
• Signup forms.
• Websites and domains.
• Landing pages & Postcards.
• Basic email templates.
• 1-step automations (or Autoresponders).
• Creative assistant & Content Studio.
• Subject line helper.
• Facebook and Instagram ads.
• Surveys and polls.
• Email support for 30 days.

If the 500 contact limit or sending limit are surpassed, Mailchimp will hold any email campaigns or test emails until an upgrade takes place or you limit your contacts to 500.

In the meantime, until you get an upgrade, you can still edit your campaigns and get or add new subscribers.

The free plan displays a Mailchimp banner on every campaign you send. This banner is not displayed in any of the paid plans.

Essentials

This plan is a great option for small marketers and frequent campaign senders. 

The Essentials pricing plan starts at up to 500 contacts for $3.25 a month, and a maximum of 50,000 contacts. The monthly price will rise as your contact list keeps increasing as shown in the table below.

The monthly send limit accounts to 10 times the maximum contact number. It means that you’re allowed as much as 500,000 sends each month with the Essentials plan. 

Pro tip: If the contact limit is surpassed, running campaigns won’t be put on hold, but you will face additional charges. It’s advisable to upgrade to the next plan beforehand if you can anticipate growth in your audience.

The Essential Plan includes all the features of the Free plan, plus:

• 3 Audiences.
• 3 users, (Owner and Admin permissions).
• Email and chat support 24/7.
• Behavioral targeting. (Tools to refine your audience segments).
• Automated emails.
• Email scheduling.
• A/B testing. Metrics that allow you to pick what works best for your campaigns.
• More than 100 email templates.
• No Mailchimp publicity banner.

Standard

The Standard plan is one of the most recommended for businesses who want to make their audience grow exponentially. It focuses on the use of effective tools and features that will help you know your audience even further.

The Standard pricing plan begins with up to 500 contacts for $5.00 a month, with a limit of 100,000 contacts. The price will rise according to the growth of your audience, as shown in the table below:

The limit of monthly sends accounts to 12 times the maximum contact limit. Meaning that you get as much as 1.2 million sends per month if your audience reaches 100,000 subscribers.

The Standard Plan includes all the features of the Free and Essentials plans, plus:

• 5 Audiences.
• 5 users, with Owner, Admin, Author or Viewer permissions.
• Email and chat support 24/7.
• Customer Journey Automation. Automated routes and visual representation of all the paths and interactions your customers take, with settings that you can personalize according to your marketing goals.
• Retargeting ads.
• Custom email templates.
• Customer Lifetime Value information.
• Send time optimization feature. This tool helps you determine the best time to send emails and increase customer engagement.

Premium

The Premium pricing plan will let you unleash a powerhouse marketing tool. It’s mostly recommended for larger businesses with a numerous audience and advanced users.

Unlike the previous pricing plans, Premium starts with a base of 10,000 contacts for $87.50 a month. Take into consideration that the price will rise in line with your audience growth, as shown in the table below:

The Premium Plan includes all the features of the previous plans, plus:

• Unlimited audiences.
• Unlimited users, with Owner, Admin, Author or Viewer permissions.
• Phone support.
• Unlimited email and chat support 24/7.
• Advanced segmentation. This tool provides insightful information on how you can test your campaigns and filter your audience, with unlimited conditions and criteria.
• Multivariate testing. Another useful tool that will let you test several variables that can affect the result of your campaign. Unlike A/B testing, here you can compare more than just one variable and see how they respond with each other. 

Contact storage ascends to 200,000 and the limit of monthly sends accounts to 15 times your maximum contact limit, taking that number to a potential 3 million sends per month.

For audiences larger than 250,000 contacts, you can get a customized pricing plan.

Mailchimp pricing plans and features in short

Mailchimp Pay As You Go plan

Mailchimp offers a Pay as you Go plan, ideal if you’re only planning to send selected campaigns during the year but you want access to more advanced features.

It’s also a great option if you don’t want to be charged on a monthly basis.

This plan lets you buy credits. Each email you send to one individual costs one credit. So if you send an email to 500 contacts, it will cost you 500 credits. Credits expire after 12 months. 

To choose this plan, head over to your account settings, then click Billing and click Monthly plans or credits.

If you are currently on the Free Plan, take into account that when you purchase credits, you'll be automatically upgraded to a paid plan.

Let us do the hard work

If you’re not sure if any of the Mailchimp pricing plans is the right fit for your business, get in touch with us for a free consultation.

We’re Duckduckchimp, the Mailchimp Agency who will help you figure out the best suited direction for your marketing needs.

Illustration by: Taxi from Icons 8