Mailchimp Pricing Explained: Plans, Contact Limits, and Costs (2026)

What Mailchimp Costs, in Short

As of November 2026, Mailchimp sells four marketing plans: Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium. Free costs $0 but stops at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month (250 a day). The cheapest paid plan, Essentials, lists at $13 a month for 0 to 500 contacts, and Standard lists at $20 a month for the same tier. Premium starts at $350 a month. The price you pay depends mostly on how many contacts sit in your audience, and it climbs steeply as that number grows.

All figures in this guide come from Mailchimp’s pricing page and help center, checked on November 12, 2026, in US dollars. The page detects your location and may open in another currency (it opened in Canadian dollars for us), so switch the currency selector to USD before comparing. Mailchimp also shows a first-year promotional price on top of these list prices, covered below.

How Mailchimp Counts Contacts and Sends

Mailchimp bills on the number of contacts in your account, then caps your monthly sends as a multiple of that contact limit. Four rules decide the bill:

• Which contacts count. Per Mailchimp’s pricing plans help page: “Subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts are included in your contact count.” Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count toward the contact total or the price.
• Peak, not average. Mailchimp’s additional charges page says the bill reflects your “peak contact total during your billing period”. A list that spikes after an import and shrinks later still bills at the spike.
• Send limits scale with contacts. The same help page sets the monthly send limit at 10 times your contact limit on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. Free allows 500 sends a month with a daily cap of 250.
• Duplicates across audiences. Mailchimp’s published pages do not say how a person who appears in two audiences is counted. Treat it as Not published and test it with support before you split lists.

Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts still count toward your Mailchimp plan. Only archived, cleaned and deleted contacts drop out of the contact total and the price.

What Happens When You Go Over

Paid plans do not stop sending when you pass a limit. Mailchimp says “we won’t interrupt your service” and instead adds a charge to your monthly bill. Overages are billed in add-on contact blocks, and the block carries sends too: on Standard, “one block of 1,000 additional contacts includes 12,000 additional email sends.” Go over by more than one block and you are charged for several. Mailchimp publishes no dollar price for these blocks; they are visible inside a logged-in account.

Free behaves differently. When the Free plan’s 250-contact limit is exceeded, a hold is placed on sending live and test emails until you upgrade or reduce the contact total.

Monthly vs Annual Billing

The pricing page shows monthly prices. It states that annual plans exist for Standard and Premium at 10,000 or more contacts, but “contact sales to learn about pricing and eligibility”, so no annual price is published.

Plan Tiers and Limits

Plan	List price at 0 to 500 contacts	Monthly sends	Seats	Audiences	What the plan adds
Free	$0	500 a month, 250 a day	1	1	Core features; limit of 250 contacts
Essentials	$13 a month	10 times contacts	3	3	Scheduling and testing; automation flows capped at 4 steps; custom-coded templates can be created but not sent; no custom reports or dynamic content
Standard	$20 a month	12 times contacts (6,000 at 0 to 500)	5	5	Up to 200 automation flows; custom-coded templates can be sent; custom reports and dynamic content; 24/7 email and chat support
Premium	$350 a month	15 times contacts	Unlimited	Unlimited	Up to 200 flows, enterprise SSO, phone and priority support, dedicated onboarding specialist

Checked on November 12, 2026 on Mailchimp’s pricing page. Free-plan seats and audiences were read from the page’s plan card. Mailchimp does not publish a dedicated IP price for marketing plans, so that cell is Not published.

Two banners affect the price you see. Mailchimp advertises 15% off the first 12 months for larger lists (its banner says 5,000 or more contacts, its offer terms say a tier of 10,000 or more), and the discount carries over if you switch between Standard, Premium and Essentials. Standard and Essentials start with a 14-day free trial.

What the Price Looks Like as the List Grows

The pricing page’s contact selector gives a list price for each tier. These are the monthly list prices before the first-year discount:

Contacts (tier)	Essentials	Standard	Premium
500 (0 to 500)	$13	$20	$350
2,500 (1,501 to 2,500)	$49	$60	$350
10,000 (5,001 to 10,000)	$110	$135	$350
50,000 (40,001 to 50,000)	$385	$495	$815

Standard costs about 6.75 times more at 10,000 contacts than at 500, and about 25 times more at 50,000, while Premium stays flat at $350 until the list passes 10,000. The selector lists custom pricing for more than 250,000 contacts, and the Premium rows for the highest tiers show no price at all.

Pay-as-You-Go Credits

Mailchimp’s pricing page says that instead of a recurring charge you “can buy email credits as needed through our Pay As You Go plan. It’s best for infrequent senders.” Per the Pay As You Go help article:

• Each email to one contact costs one credit, including test emails, automations and sends that bounce.
• Credit blocks start at 5,000 credits, and credits expire after 12 months.
• The plan has the same features as Essentials, and the credits cannot be used with any other Mailchimp plan.
• Mailchimp publishes no per-credit price; the rates appear when you buy (“localized rates in the credit blocks”). The plan is also not offered in some currencies or regions.

It suits a team that sends a few announcements a year to a large list, since a subscription would bill for contacts every month. It does not suit lifecycle email, where sends are frequent and steady.

Mailchimp Transactional Pricing

Transactional email, the receipts and password resets your product sends through an API, is a separate product with its own bill. Mailchimp Transactional’s pricing page sells it in blocks, where “each block is a credit for 25,000 emails”:

Blocks per month	Price per block
1 to 20 (up to 500,000 emails)	$20
21 to 40	$18
41 to 80	$16
81 to 120	$14
121 to 160	$12
161 or more	$10

It is available as an add-on to Standard and Premium, or to the legacy Monthly plan. The page states Essentials “is not eligible”, so a team on Essentials who needs a transactional API has to move up a plan. A dedicated IP is an optional $29.95 a month. New users get up to 500 free sends to a verified domain, with restrictions. When blocks run out, sending stops unless you enable automatic block purchases or act on a low-balance alert, and unused emails do not carry over.

For a head-to-head on this layer, see SendGrid vs Mailchimp, and for the wider field, our guide to transactional email services.

Where Mailchimp Costs Escalate

• Contacts you no longer email. Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count, so a list that is never pruned grows the bill. Archiving them removes them from the count.
• Peak billing. One large import can set a higher peak for the whole billing period.
• Tier jumps. Standard goes from $135 at 10,000 contacts to $230 at 10,001, and from $230 to $315 between the 15,000 and 20,000 tiers. Moving up one contact can cost $95.
• Automation gating. Essentials limits flows to 4 steps. Multi-step lifecycle sequences push you to Standard.
• Transactional on top. Sending receipts through Mailchimp means Standard or higher plus block charges.
• Seats. Essentials includes 3 seats and Standard 5; unlimited seats need Premium.

Mailchimp’s own pages announce no dated price change that we could verify, so this guide reports current figures only. If cost pressure is the reason you are reading, Mailchimp alternatives covers what to switch to and how to migrate.

Worked Example: 3,000 Contacts Growing to 20,000 on Standard

A SaaS product starts the year with 3,000 contacts and ends it near 20,000. Using only the list prices above and assuming a steady climb:

Quarter	Contacts (approx.)	Standard tier	List price per month	Monthly sends allowed
Q1	3,000	2,501 to 5,000	$100	60,000
Q2	7,000	5,001 to 10,000	$135	120,000
Q3	12,000	10,001 to 15,000	$230	180,000
Q4	20,000	15,001 to 20,000	$315	240,000

At those quarterly price points the year costs $2,340 in list prices (three months at each tier). The list grew about 6.7 times, and the monthly bill grew 3.15 times.

On Standard, growing from 3,000 to 20,000 contacts moves the list price from $100 to $315 a month. The send allowance grows with it, so it only matters if you actually send that much.

The 15% first-year discount would apply to the larger tiers. If your list is mostly dormant, archiving inactive contacts before each quarter is the single biggest lever on this bill.

How Mailchimp Compares on Entry Price and Billing Unit

Mailchimp bills by contacts. The three platforms below use different units, which is why their entry prices are not interchangeable.

Platform	Billing unit	Entry paid price (USD, monthly billing)
Mailchimp Essentials	Contacts in the audience	$13 a month at 0 to 500 contacts
MailerLite	Active subscribers; unsubscribed and bounced do not count	Comfort starting at $12 a month
Brevo	Emails sent per month	Starter from $9 a month, from 5,000 emails
SendGrid Marketing Campaigns	Stored contacts and monthly email volume	Basic starting at $15 a month

Checked November 12, 2026 on each vendor’s pricing page (links in the sources below). Details are in our posts on MailerLite’s pricing, Brevo’s pricing and SendGrid’s pricing. The practical difference: MailerLite does not count unsubscribed contacts, while Mailchimp does, and Brevo prices its tiers by monthly email volume rather than contacts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

All checked on November 12, 2026:

• Mailchimp marketing pricing
• About Mailchimp pricing plans
• About additional charges
• About your contacts
• About the Pay As You Go plan
• Mailchimp Transactional pricing
• MailerLite pricing
• Brevo pricing
• SendGrid Marketing Campaigns pricing