The short answer: Mailchimp costs $0 to start (up to 250 contacts), $13/month on Essentials and $20/month on Standard at the smallest paid tier — both rising as your contact list grows. A 5,000-contact list costs $75/month on Essentials or $100/month on Standard. Annual billing saves roughly 15%, nonprofits get 15% off, and there’s a 14-day free trial of the Standard plan.
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The mechanism: you’re billed for contacts stored, not emails sent
Mailchimp’s bill is set by one primary lever — the number of contacts in your audiences — and understanding exactly how it counts them is the difference between a $45 invoice and a $110 one:
- Contact count sets your tier. You pay for a band (up to 500, up to 1,500, up to 2,500…), and the price steps up as your list grows. The send limit scales as a multiple of your contact tier: Essentials allows 10× your contact limit per month, Standard 12×, Premium 15×. Email volume rarely forces an upgrade — list size does.
- Every contact counts — including the dead ones. Subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your billable total. Only archived, cleaned, or deleted contacts are excluded. Someone who unsubscribed in 2023 is still on your invoice in 2026 unless you archive them by hand. And if your contact total drifts above your tier mid-cycle, Mailchimp doesn’t stop your sending — it just adds the overage charge automatically.
That’s the whole pricing model, and it has one sharp implication: list hygiene is a cost lever. A 6,000-contact audience with 25% unsubscribed or stale contacts bills at the 5,000 tier after archiving the dead weight — a real monthly saving for an hour of cleanup.
The four plans at a glance
| Plan | Price (monthly) | Contacts | Monthly emails | Seats | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 250 | 500 (max 250/day) | 1 | Email, first 30 days |
| Essentials | $13/mo (≈$11 annual) | From 500 tier (max 50,000) | 10× your contact tier | 3 | 24/7 email & chat |
| Standard | $20/mo (≈$17 annual) | From 500 tier (max 100,000) | 12× your contact tier | 5 | 24/7 email & chat |
| Premium | From $350/mo | From 10,000 tier (max 200,000) | 15× your contact tier | Unlimited | Phone & priority |
- Free covers campaigns, popup forms, and basic segmentation across 1 audience — but no automation, no email scheduling, and no removing Mailchimp branding. Sending pauses if you exceed the contact or send limit.
- Essentials adds scheduling, A/B testing, branded templates, 24/7 support — but automation is capped at 4 flow steps, which covers a welcome sequence and little else.
- Standard is where Mailchimp’s automation story actually lives: up to 200 flows, predictive segmentation, generative AI tools, dynamic content, and a personalized onboarding session.
- Premium adds phone support, multivariate testing, comparative reporting, advanced segmentation, and a dedicated onboarding specialist.
Full pricing by list size (researched 2026-10-14)
Entry prices are marketing; the tier table is the real cost. Monthly billing, USD, verified against Mailchimp’s official pricing page and current third-party breakdowns:
| Contacts (up to) | Essentials (monthly) | Standard (monthly) | Premium (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | $13 | $20 | — |
| 1,500 | ≈$26.50 | $45 | — |
| 2,500 | $45 | $60 | — |
| 5,000 | $75 | $100 | — |
| 10,000 | $110 | $135 | $350 |
| 15,000 | $180 | $230 | $465 |
| 25,000 | $270 | $310 | $620 |
| 50,000 | $385 | $450 | $815 |
| 100,000 | — | $800 | $1,025 |
| 150,000 | — | — | $1,325 |
| 200,000 | — | — | $1,600 |
Annual billing takes roughly 15% off the entry-tier prices ($11/$17 at the 500-contact tier). Taxes may apply depending on your country.
Two things worth noticing:
- The ladder is steepest in the middle. Jumping from 5,000 to 10,000 contacts raises Standard from $100 to $135 — and every contact in that gap, live or dead, pushes you up the rungs. The archive-your-unsubscribed habit from the section above is worth real money here.
- The Essentials-to-Standard gap stays narrow. It’s $7/month at 500 contacts and $50/month at 50,000. Because the gap is small, the plan decision should be about automation needs, not price — which brings us to the worked example.
Essentials or Standard: a worked example
Scenario: a newsletter, 2,500 contacts, one email per week (about 10,000 sends/month).
- Essentials at the 2,500 tier: $45/month. Send cap is 10× your tier = 25,000 — your 10,000 sends fit comfortably. Automation limited to 4-step flows. $45/month.
- Standard at the 2,500 tier: $60/month. Send cap 30,000, up to 200 flows, predictive segmentation. $60/month.
- Verdict: if you only send newsletters, Essentials wins and saves $180/year. If you want abandoned-cart recovery, post-purchase sequences, or behavioral targeting, the 4-step cap forces you to Standard — and $15/month extra is cheap for real automation.
The rule of thumb: Essentials is for broadcasters, Standard is for automators. The send multipliers (10× vs 12×) almost never decide it — the 4-step automation ceiling on Essentials does.
Ways to pay less
- Annual billing saves roughly 15%. Essentials at 500 contacts drops from $13 to about $11/month ($132/year). Only commit annually after you’ve used the platform for a month — migrating email lists and automations is painful if you picked wrong.
- Nonprofits get 15% off. Sign up for a free account, then contact Mailchimp’s billing team with your username and organization website. (We priced Mailchimp alongside nine other platforms for the sector in our email marketing software cost guide.)
- 14-day free trial of Standard with no credit card required — a genuine way to test whether the automation depth is worth paying for. There’s also a one-month Premium trial for qualified new customers via the sales team.
- Archive unsubscribed contacts. This is the single biggest Mailchimp cost control. Export what you need for compliance records, then archive — archiving removes them from the billable count while keeping the data recoverable.
- 10,000+ contacts? Check the current offer. Mailchimp is currently offering 15% off the Standard and Premium plans for the first 12 months at 10,000+ contacts. Promotional pricing rotates, so treat it as a discount window, not a price.
- Infrequent senders: Pay As You Go. If you email quarterly, email credits are cheaper than a monthly plan you barely use — though you lose the automation layer entirely.
What changed in 2026 (read this before trusting old reviews)
Mailchimp’s pricing direction has been consistent since Intuit’s 2021 acquisition, and 2026 continued it:
- The free plan shrank again in January 2026. It now covers 250 contacts and 500 emails per month (capped at 250/day) — down from 500 contacts before, and from 2,000 contacts back in 2022. Reviews calling Mailchimp’s free plan “generous” are several generations out of date.
- Paid entry prices keep creeping. Roughly 5–10% per year on the contact tiers. The current $13/$20/$350 starting points are higher than what 2024 reviews quote.
- Promotional discounting rotates. A limited 50%-off-first-year offer ran in 2026; the current live offer is 15% off the first 12 months at 10,000+ contacts. Don’t anchor on a promo price you saw quoted last year.
The practical upshot: if a review says “Mailchimp is free up to 500 contacts” or “$10/month to start,” it’s stale. The numbers in this article were checked against Mailchimp’s live pricing page on 2026-10-14.
The bottom line
Mailchimp’s pricing is one-axis simple — contacts stored, not emails sent — which makes the strategy equally simple: start free if you’re under 250 contacts, pick Essentials at $13/month if you only broadcast, and pick Standard at $20/month if you need real automation. Then run the one hygiene habit that keeps the bill honest: archive your unsubscribed contacts, because Mailchimp bills for every name on the list unless you tell it not to. For how these prices compare across the market — including Mailchimp vs MailerLite head-to-head — see our email marketing software cost guide and our MailerLite vs Mailchimp comparison.
Prices checked 2026-10-14 from Mailchimp’s official pricing page (mailchimp.com/pricing), with tier pricing cross-checked against independent pricing breakdowns updated August–October 2026. Mailchimp changes plans periodically — verify your exact tier on the vendor’s pricing page before committing.