Mailchimp Pricing & Plans 2024 – How To Avoid Extra Cost?

Mailchimp offers 4 pricing plans to choose from ranging from Free Plan to Premium which costs $299/month. The pricing is calculated based on audience size. Each plan has a limit on contacts and emails sent, these limits are reset on every billing cycle.

Alternatively, if you feel that your marketing campaigns won’t utilise complete allowance of the subscriptions plans then Mailchimp also offers to Pay as You Go

Pay As You Go

Mailchimp’s Pay As You Go Plan caters to seasonal senders which allow users to send emails whenever they need to without a monthly subscription.

Pay As You Go offers credit packages. Each email costs one credit, so an email sent to 50 contacts will cost 50 credits. One has to be careful though, these credits are not valid for a lifetime, they expire after 12 months, so be sure to utilise your pending credits before they expire.

In case you run out of credits, you can always buy more credits through your Billing settings section. If you want to stop your campaigns then you can do so any time, however, the credits are non-refundable so you will not get a refund for pending credits. If you plan to upgrade to a monthly plan then your remaining credits will be converted to Rewards which will be applied towards your next bill.

Free Plan

Free includes allow you to save up to 2,000 contacts, with 10,000 email sends per month and a daily email sending limit of 2,000. However free plans lacks a lot of features.

Features included in the Free Plan:

1. Marketing Calendar – It gives you the ability to view the whole marketing plan in one view
2. CRM – Manage your customers and keep information safe in their customer relationship management system
3. Website Builder – Design your website using the drag and drop visual website builder
4. Mailchimp Domain
5. 250+ App Integrations
6. Surveys, Forms & Landing Pages – Create forms and landing pages and include links in the emails
7. Mobile App
8. Creative Assistant
9. 30 Day Email Support

Pros:

1. Send up to 20,000 emails per month and store up to 2000 contacts
2. Great way to start your marketing campaign with no upfront cost
3. The high-reliability rate in delivering your promotional and transactional emails
4. Multi-channel tools to promote your business through landing pages, social postings, Facebook ads, Instagram ads and postcards.
5. Choose from basic ready-made templates and skip the hard work of creating one.
6. Set triggers and actions to automate 1step processes

Cons:

1. The email sending limit can be easily exhausted if the number of contacts grows large. Also, because of a recent update to Mailchimp’s TOS, they consider an email sent even if the user in the list has unsubscribed or non-subscribed.
2. Mailchimp logo (branding) is present in the emails
3. If you exhaust your plan limits and go over, Mailchimp will charge you for your overages.

Essentials Plan

Pricing for the essentials plan starts at $9.99/month

Essentials plan allows you to save up to 50,000 contacts and ability to create and manage 3 audiences.

Features included in the Standard Plan:

1. All Email Templates – Get access to all ready-made email templates and choose from the list to match your requirements.
2. Multi-Step Journeys – Multi-step forms are available to make your data collection process more interactive.
3. Custom Branding – The essential plan includes custom branding, so your customers won’t see Mailchimp’s logo in the emails.
4. A/B Testing – A/B testing is available to send different emails to a separate set of audience and test the impact of emails on each audience group.
5. Marketing Calendar
6. CRM
7. Website Builder
8. Mailchimp Domain
9. 250+ App Integrations
10. Surveys, Forms & Landing Pages
11. Mobile App
12. Creative Assistant
13. 24/7 Email & Chat Support

Pros:

1. Essential plans allow you to send up to 100,000 emails per month. Also, you can store up to 50,000 contacts with their $270/month tier.
2. Ability to create 3 audience types
3. Email automation is available to schedule emails
4. A/B testing can help in making business intelligence decisions by targeting different audience sets and associating different email campaigns. This also helps in deciding which campaign proves to be more effective for the audience.
5. Choose from 100+ ready-made templates
6. Customized branding and 24/7 support

Cons:

1. Limit of 50,000 contacts might come in your way
2. The plan is expensive considering only 50,000 contacts are allowed to be saved
3. Mailchimp will charge you for unsubscribed and non-subscribed users too, so it is a good practice to separate these contacts by creating a new segment. Refer to the tips written at the end of the article to learn how to save money in Mailchimp and make the most of it.
4. Behavioural targeting and dynamic content features are not offered in this plan

Standard Plan

Pricing for the standard plan starts at $14.99/month

The standard plan allows you to save up to 100,000 contacts and the ability to create and manage 5 audiences.

Features included in the Standard Plan:

1. Behavioural Targeting – Target customers based on their behaviour on the website
2. Dynamic Content – Dynamically update content in the email to give a more personalized feel to it.
3. Send Time Optimization
4. All Email Templates & Custom Templates
5. Customer Journey Builder + Branching Points
6. Custom Branding
7. A/B Testing
8. Marketing Calendar
9. CRM
10. Website Builder
11. Mailchimp Domain
12. 250+ App Integrations
13. Surveys, Forms & Landing Pages
14. Mobile App
15. Creative Assistant
16. 24/7 Email & Chat Support

Pros:

1. Standard plans allow you to send up to 120,000 emails per month. Also, you can store up to 100,000 contacts with their $540/month tier.
2. Ability to create 5 audience types
3. Customer journey builder helps you to create custom experiences for your customers
4. Create automated emails, apply triggers and actions to emails to give your customers a unique personalized experience.
5. Choose from the available 100+ pre-built templates which include content and blocks and send high converting emails to your contacts.

Cons:

1. The standard plan limits you to send 120,000 emails per month and 100,000 contacts. 100,000 contacts are included in their $540/month tier.
2. The plan has a limit of 5 audiences and you can create 5 user accounts who can share the same plan.

Premium Plan

Pricing for the premium plan starts at $299/month

The standard plan allows you to save up to 200,000+ contacts and the ability to create and manage unlimited audiences.

Features included in the Standard Plan:

1. Advanced Segmentation – This allows separating audiences based on advanced filters
2. Multivariate Testing – This is similar to A/B testing but considers a higher number of variables, hence this feature is much more advanced than conventional A/B testing.
3. Comparative Reporting – Comparative reporting allows you to visualize your statistics of active campaigns
4. Unlimited Seats & Role-Based Access
5. Behavioural Targeting
6. Dynamic Content
7. Send Time Optimization
8. All Email Templates & Custom Templates
9. Customer Journey Builder + Branching Points
10. Custom Branding
11. A/B Testing
12. Marketing Calendar
13. CRM
14. Website Builder
15. Mailchimp Domain
16. 250+ App Integrations
17. Surveys, Forms & Landing Pages
18. Mobile App
19. Creative Assistant
20. 24/7 Email, Chat & Phone Support

Pros:

1. Premium plans allow you to send up to 150,000 emails per month. Also, you can store more than 200,000 contacts with their $1,190/month tier.
2. Ability to create unlimited audience types
3. Advanced segmentation and multivariate testing are great features available in this plan. These features allow you to segregate users using premium filters and test your email campaigns using a higher number of variables than A/B testing.
4. Comparative reporting is another great feature to visualize the statistics and efficiently analyse the outcome of campaigns.
5. Ability to create unlimited users to share the plan. You can also assign roles to users to restrict access to certain components.
6. The plan also boasts 24/7 support via live chat, email and phone.

Cons:

1. The plan is super expensive taking into consideration the email sending limit.
2. In case the user wants more quota, they have to contact the customer support directly after which the support will come up with a dedicated plan for the user.
3. The only major difference between the premium plan and standard plan is advanced segmentation and comparative reporting apart from the sending limit.

Pricing Plan Comparison with No. of Email Add-on

Tip to Save Money on Mailchimp Monthly Subscription:

1. Check email addresses that are invalid/unsubscribed
2. Create a new segment and set the “Email Marketing Status” to “Unsubscribed & Non-Subscribed”
3. Check all visible contacts in the segment >> Click Actions & Select Archive
4. The emails are sent to the archive so they are saved but won’t be included in the marketing emails which will save you money as Mailchimp considers every email sent (whether delivered or not) while computing your charges for the billing cycle.

Conclusion:

1. Mailchimp’s Free plan is one of the best available free plans out there. It is very competitive and provides most of the features required to run a successful email marketing campaign.
2. The essentials plan is moderate and suitable for small enterprises, the included email limit is low however, it can be increased by using add-ons with the plan.
3. The standard plan is most suitable for SME’s (Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises). Custom branding, dynamic content, behavioural targeting and the ability to use pre-built email templates are very useful features in the plan.
4. The Premium plan is suitable for big enterprises, however, the pricing is expensive. The only major difference between premium plan and standard plan apart from sending limit is advanced segmentation, multivariate testing and comparative reporting. While these features might be beneficial for some companies, there might be no need for them in others.

Jack Cox

Jack is the Co-founder of WebsitebuilderLy, a Software Engineer from Standford University, An entrepreneur with 12 years of Website Creation, Management, Marketing Automation & App Development Experience. Worked for the world’s leading companies such as Roblox, HTC, etc.