Brevo vs Mailchimp Pricing: What Each Plan Really Costs

Brevo is cheaper than Mailchimp for almost every sender, because the two products meter completely different things: Brevo charges for emails sent and Mailchimp charges for contacts stored. Store 50,000 contacts and mail them twice a year and Mailchimp costs about $4,620 while Brevo costs about $216. Mail that same list three times a month and the gap closes to $499 against $815. The meter, not the plan name, decides your bill.

Both sets of figures below were read from brevo.com/pricing and mailchimp.com/pricing on 3 September 2026. Every derived number in this article is arithmetic you can check against those two tables.

The two meters

This is the whole article in one table, and it is the thing most comparisons skip straight past on their way to listing features.

A send meter rewards you for holding a big list and mailing it rarely. A contact meter rewards you for holding a small list and mailing it constantly. Almost nobody works out which describes their own programme before signing up, which is why so many people feel ambushed by an email bill.

What Brevo charges

Brevo publishes four US prices, and the monthly figures are starting prices attached to a volume slider rather than fixed plan costs. Every slider step and add-on is listed on our Brevo pricing page.

Starter begins at 5,000 emails a month. Professional begins at 150,000. Between $18 and $499 there is nothing, which is a 27.7x price jump carrying roughly a 30x volume jump. We took that cliff apart in detail on our Brevo alternatives page, along with the reason Professional actually costs more per thousand emails at its own floor than Starter does at its.

What Mailchimp charges

Mailchimp's price moves with your contact count, so a plan name on its own tells you nothing. Here are the published US figures at three contact tiers.

Premium starts at $350 a month and runs to $1,600 at 200,000 contacts. Essentials stops climbing at $385, which is its ceiling, so above 50,000 contacts you are pushed onto Standard or Premium whether you want their features or not. Our Mailchimp pricing breakdown walks every tier.

Three details on that table cost people real money. Mailchimp bills on your peak contact count for the period, not your count today. Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts are still billable. And a contact who sits in three audiences is billed three times. None of those are hidden, and all three are routinely left out of comparisons.

The 50,000 contact test, run both ways

Take one list of 50,000 people and change only how often you mail it. This is where the meters diverge violently.

At two sends a year, 100,000 emails total, Brevo's Standard plan at $18 a month covers you comfortably and costs $216 for the year. Mailchimp charges $385 every month for holding those 50,000 records whether you mail them or not, which is $4,620. That is a 21x difference for identical work.

Now push the frequency up. Three sends a month to 50,000 people is 150,000 emails, which is exactly where Brevo's Professional plan starts, at $499 a month or $5,988 a year. Mailchimp is still $4,620, because nothing about your contact count changed. Somewhere between one and three monthly sends to a 50,000 name list, Mailchimp stops being the expensive option and becomes the cheap one. That crossover is the single most useful number in this comparison and neither vendor will ever calculate it for you.

Brevo's month is 30 days, not a calendar month

Buried in Brevo's payment FAQ is a sentence worth reading twice: if you subscribe to a monthly plan, the subscription period is 30 days and charges are processed at the beginning of each period. A 30 day cycle is not a month. Over a 365 day year it produces about 12.2 billing periods rather than 12, so monthly billing costs slightly more across a year than twelve times the sticker price, and your charge date walks steadily backwards through the calendar.

The amounts are small, roughly $1.50 extra a year on Starter and $3 on Standard, but the drifting date is the part that causes trouble. A subscription that lands on the 3rd, then the 2nd, then the 1st, then twice in one calendar month is exactly the sort of charge that gets miscategorized or double counted when you reconcile software spend at the end of a quarter. Brevo also takes payment only by card through Adyen or by PayPal, so there is no invoicing route on the published plans.

Mailchimp's discount structure has its own quirk: the current offer is 15% off on 10,000 or more contacts, so the saving is conditional on being large, not on committing for a year.

What the plan names hide

Two gates matter more than any price on this page.

Brevo brands your email until you reach $18. No Brevo logo is a Standard plan feature, and Brevo's own tooltip describes it as removing the Sent by Brevo sticker from the bottom of your emails. The free and $9 plans both send with that footer attached.

Brevo also has to approve your account before you can send anything. Its FAQ states that a new account gets a free plan to upload contacts, and that once Brevo approves the account for sending you can start sending up to 300 emails a day. No turnaround is published. If you have a launch date, treat that review as a scheduling risk.

On the Mailchimp side, the equivalent surprise is the peak billing rule above, plus the fact that its Best Value badge is justified in a footnote by a feature comparison dated 9/25/2023. It is a three year old claim sitting on a live pricing page.

Can you use either one for cold email?

No, and this is not a close call. Brevo's acceptable use rules prohibit purchased and rented lists, and unusually that prohibition extends to transactional messages as well as marketing campaigns. Mailchimp's rules are equally clear about lists the recipient did not join. Neither vendor is being unreasonable; both send from shared infrastructure, so one customer's bought list damages every other customer's delivery.

If your recipients did not opt in, the cheaper plan is not the question. Cold outreach belongs on mailboxes you own and warm yourself, which is why our guide to choosing SMTP for cold email starts with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 rather than with any marketing platform. Both are $7.00 per user a month on annual commitment, verified from Google's and Microsoft's own pricing pages on 3 September 2026.

Which one should you actually pick?

Pick Brevo if your list is large relative to how often you mail it. Anything under roughly one send per contact per month, and Brevo will be dramatically cheaper. It is also the better answer if you want automation without paying for it: marketing automation, A/B testing and landing pages all arrive on the $18 Standard plan.

Pick Mailchimp if you mail a moderate list frequently, or if you are running ecommerce. Above about two sends per contact per month the contact meter starts working in your favour, and Mailchimp's Shopify, WooCommerce and Square integrations are genuinely deeper than Brevo's.

Pick neither if you are prospecting. Both will close the account, and the money you saved comparing $9 against $13 is irrelevant next to a suspended sender domain.

One note on sourcing. Both vendors publish aggregate review ratings in the structured data on their pricing pages. We have not reprinted either, because a vendor's own rating of itself is marketing rather than evidence.