Mailchimp Pricing 2026: Mailchimp Cost, Fees and Plans by Tier

Mailchimp sells four Marketing plans: Free, Essentials at $13 a month, Standard at $20 a month and Premium at $350 a month. Those three paid figures are starting prices, not flat prices. Essentials and Standard start at 500 contacts, Premium does not exist below 10,000 contacts, and every plan gets more expensive as your contact list grows.

The Free plan is much smaller than most people remember. It allows 250 contacts, 500 sends a month with a daily cap of 250, one audience and one seat. Go past 250 contacts and Mailchimp places a hold on sending live emails and test emails until you upgrade or cut the list back. You can still build campaigns and import contacts during the hold.

Each paid plan also stops at a ceiling. Essentials tops out at 50,000 contacts, Standard at 100,000, and above that only Premium is offered. Mailchimp's help center puts the Premium ceiling at 200,000 contacts with custom plans beyond that, which matches the selector: above 200,000 the price display goes blank and you are routed to sales.

This is the part the plan cards hide behind a dropdown. Your monthly bill is set by your plan type multiplied by a contact tier, and there are twenty tiers. Below is the complete US ladder for Essentials and Standard, read live from Mailchimp's own pricing selector.

Essentials ends at 50,000 contacts and $385. Standard ends at 100,000 and $800. One detail worth noting before you budget: the gap between the two plans is small in the middle of the ladder. At 10,000 contacts Standard costs $25 more than Essentials, which is a 22.7 percent premium for a 20 percent larger sending allowance plus the advanced segmentation and multivariate testing that Essentials does not include.

Premium has no small tier. It begins at $350 a month for 10,000 contacts and runs to $1,600 a month at 200,000. If you select a contact tier under 10,000, Premium simply shows no price, because the plan cannot be bought at that size.

At 10,000 contacts Premium costs 2.6 times what Standard costs, and buys 25 percent more sending. Nobody should pick Premium for send volume. It is bought for unlimited audiences, unlimited seats, phone support and the extended onboarding, or because the list has passed 100,000 and Standard has run out of ladder. Between 100,000 and 200,000 contacts Premium is the only Marketing plan Mailchimp sells.

Crossing 10,000 contacts costs more than any other move in Mailchimp's pricing. Standard jumps from $135 to $230, a 70.4 percent increase for 50 percent more contacts. Every other step on the ladder is gentler. This one step is where a growing list gets punished hardest, and it is invisible unless you page through the selector tier by tier.

The effect shows up clearly if you convert each tier to a rate per 1,000 contacts. That rate falls steadily as the list grows, which is what you expect from volume pricing, and then it reverses exactly once.

Read that middle block again. A Standard customer pays $13.50 per 1,000 contacts at 10,000, then $15.33 at 15,000 and $14.25 at 20,000. The list has to reach 25,000 contacts before the rate per contact is better than it was at 10,000. Essentials does the same thing on a smaller scale, going from $11.00 per 1,000 at 10,000 contacts to $12.00 at 15,000. If your list is sitting just above 10,000, pruning it back under the line is worth real money, and it is the one place on this ladder where that is true.

Mailchimp does not sell sends directly. Your monthly send allowance is your contact limit multiplied by a number that depends on your plan: 10 times on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. Mailchimp states this in the plan tooltips on the pricing page and again in its help center, and both agree.

A send is one email to one contact. One campaign to 500 people is 500 sends. Test emails and transactional emails count against the same allowance, which catches people who assume test sends are free.

The multiplier is the reason two businesses with identical list sizes can need different plans. If you email your list twice a month, Essentials at 10 times contacts is generous. If you run a daily send, 10 times your list size is roughly a send every three days, and you will be into overage before the month ends.

Converted to a rate per 1,000 emails, Mailchimp runs from $3.33 down to about $0.53, depending entirely on how big your contact tier is. This is the number to use when you are comparing Mailchimp against a sending API rather than against another marketing platform.

For context, Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails on its a la carte rate, and SendGrid Essentials is $34.95 for 100,000, which is about $0.35 per 1,000. Mailchimp's best rate anywhere on the ladder is roughly five times SES, and its entry tier is more than thirty times SES.

That gap is not evidence that Mailchimp is overpriced. You are buying an audience database, a campaign builder, automation flows, segmentation, reporting and support, and a raw sending API gives you none of that. It does mean that if the only thing you need is delivery of a message you already composed elsewhere, a marketing platform is the wrong shape of tool and you are paying a large multiple for software you will not open. Comparing SMTP providers on cost per 1,000 is the cleaner exercise in that case.

Mailchimp bills on your peak contact total for the month, and unsubscribed contacts still count. Its standard terms are explicit: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your audience. Cleaned, reconfirmed and archived contacts do not, and neither do contacts whose opt-in confirmation is still pending.

Two consequences follow from that, and between them they explain most surprise Mailchimp bills.

The peak rule is the one that bites. Mailchimp calculates the bill on the highest number of contacts stored at any point in the billing period, so importing a large list and deleting it a week later still produces the higher charge. Trimming a list on the 28th does not undo a spike on the 3rd. If you want a lower bill, the cut has to happen before the peak, and it has to hold for a full cycle.

There is a trap in archiving too. Mailchimp's terms note that any profile change on an archived contact, whether you make it, the contact makes it, or an integration makes it, automatically unarchives that contact. A connected store or CRM that writes back to profiles can quietly pull archived contacts into the billable count without anyone touching Mailchimp.

The duplicate rule matters if you run separate audiences per brand or region. A customer who belongs in three audiences is billed three times. Mailchimp's own guidance is to use one audience and segment inside it, and the pricing model is the reason why.

Going over does not stop your sending on a paid plan. Mailchimp keeps delivering and adds an overage charge in the form of an add-on contact block. If you exceed by more than one block's worth of contacts or emails, you are charged for several blocks.

The size and price of a block depend on your plan and your current tier, and Mailchimp only displays them once you are logged in with a contact limit set, so there is no single published overage rate to quote. What is published is the formula the blocks follow. The send multiplier applies to blocks exactly as it applies to the plan, so on Standard a block of 1,000 extra contacts carries 12,000 extra sends.

The Free plan behaves differently and more harshly. Pass 250 contacts and Mailchimp places a hold on sending live or test emails until you upgrade or reduce the list. You keep access to your drafts, templates and imports during the hold, but nothing goes out.

Mailchimp's own advice for avoiding overage is worth repeating because it is the cheapest lever available. Segment to find contacts who never open or buy, archive them, and send to targeted segments instead of the whole audience every time. Archiving removes them from the billable count while keeping their history.

If you are pricing Mailchimp to run cold outreach, stop at the terms rather than the ladder. Mailchimp's Acceptable Use Policy forbids sending campaigns to purchased, rented, third-party, co-registration, publicly available data or partner lists of any kind. The phrase "publicly available data" is the one that settles it, because that is precisely what a prospecting list is.

The Standard Terms of Use repeat the rule in the general rules section: you will not send spam, and you will not use purchased, rented or third-party lists of email addresses. The Acceptable Use Policy adds the evidentiary standard, which is that you must be able to point to an opt-in form or show other evidence of consent for any commercial or marketing email you send. A list built from a data provider or from public company pages cannot meet that test, whatever the quality of the data.

So the honest answer to "how much does Mailchimp cost for cold email" is that no tier on the ladder is licensed for it. This is not a quirk of Mailchimp. Every permission-based marketing platform draws the same line, because their deliverability depends on the whole shared platform maintaining low complaint rates. It is the reason cold outreach is normally run on separate sending domains and separate infrastructure from the marketing list.

The practical split is straightforward. Keep opt-in newsletters, product announcements and lifecycle automation on a marketing platform where the contact database and campaign builder earn their price. Run prospecting on tooling designed for it, on domains you are willing to isolate, with your own sending accounts. Our breakdown of what cold email software actually costs covers that side, and the SMTP sending setup is what carries the volume.

Mailchimp's Marketing plans are billed monthly and the pricing page shows no annual prepay option. The only multi-month discount displayed is a promotional rate advertised as 15 percent off for 12 months, which renders as exactly 85 percent of the list price at the tiers where it applies. On Standard at 10,000 contacts that turns $135 into $114.75, and at 100,000 contacts it turns $800 into $680.

Promotional pricing is offered on new subscriptions and runs for a fixed 12 months, after which the plan reverts to the standard rate for your tier. Budget from the list price, not the promotional one, because the promotional period ends inside most planning horizons.

Pay As You Go is the genuine alternative to a monthly plan. Instead of a recurring charge you buy email credits and spend them as you send, which suits infrequent senders who would otherwise pay twelve monthly bills to run four campaigns. Mailchimp's terms state that credits purchased on or after May 15, 2019 roll over each month and expire 12 months after purchase. The plan carries the Essentials feature set.

Pay As You Go is priced per credit rather than per contact, so a fair comparison against a monthly plan depends on how many sends you actually make in a year. As a rule of thumb, if you send to your whole list more than once a month, the monthly tier is cheaper; if you send a handful of times a year, credits usually win.

Search for Mailchimp pricing and you will find articles quoting different numbers for the same plan in the same month. Four causes explain nearly all of it, and every one of them is checkable.

The currency point deserves emphasis because it is easy to get wrong without noticing. Mailchimp's own tooltip states that non-USD prices are estimates based on current exchange rates and that the exact amount charged depends on the rate at payment time, and it directs you to the USD figures for exact base pricing. Every number on this page is the USD base price.

One inconsistency sits inside Mailchimp's own documentation rather than in third-party articles. The help center describes the Premium ceiling as 200,000 contacts with custom plans above that, while the data behind the pricing page's plan tooltips carries a maximum of 1,500,000 for Premium. The selector reconciles them in practice: tiers above 200,000 are listed but display no price, which is the sales-contact path the help center describes.

We deliberately did not reproduce the review scores that appear on some vendor pages. They are not ours to republish and they are not a price.