Mailchimp pricing in 2026: what each plan really costs

Mailchimp costs $13 to $1,025 a month on its paid plans, depending on the plan and how many contacts you have. At 10,000 contacts, the size most growing lists reach, it is $110 on Essentials, $135 on Standard and $350 on Premium. The free plan stops at 250 contacts. Every price here is Mailchimp’s US list price, read from its own pricing page on 6 October 2026.

The headline price is the easy part. What surprises people is how Mailchimp counts: unsubscribed contacts are billed, the same person in two audiences is billed twice, and the bill follows the highest contact count you reached that month. Those rules are below the tables.

Mailchimp’s plans at a glance

Plan	From	At 10,000 contacts	Emails a month	Audiences	Seats
Free	$0	not offered (250 max)	500	1	1
Essentials	$13	$110	10 × contacts	3	3
Standard	$20	$135	12 × contacts	5	5
Premium	$350	$350	15 × contacts	unlimited	unlimited

Mailchimp pricing by number of contacts

Each plan is priced in contact tiers. You pay for the tier your list falls into, so 5,001 contacts costs the same as 10,000.

Contacts, up to	Essentials	Standard	Premium
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

What a year of Mailchimp costs

Most people compare monthly prices, but the list only grows. Here is Standard, the plan most businesses end up on, over one year and five, assuming the list stays the same size (it will not).

Contacts	One year on Standard	Five years on Standard
2,500	$720	$3,600
5,000	$1,200	$6,000
10,000	$1,620	$8,100
25,000	$3,720	$18,600
50,000	$5,400	$27,000

Five rules that make the bill bigger

1. Unsubscribed contacts count

Mailchimp’s help centre says it plainly: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts are all included in your contact count. Only archived, cleaned and deleted contacts are left out. A list where a fifth of the people have unsubscribed is billed as if they were all still reading.

2. The bill uses your peak, not your average

Mailchimp bills on the highest number of contacts in your account during the billing period. Import a list, clean it the next day, and that month is still billed at the bigger number.

3. The same person in two audiences is billed twice

Billing is based on the total across all your audiences. If someone is on your newsletter audience and your customer audience, Mailchimp counts two contacts. Its own advice is to use one audience with tags and groups instead.

4. Going over your tier adds a charge you cannot see in advance

On a paid plan Mailchimp does not pause sending when you outgrow your tier. It adds an “add-on contact block” charge to the next bill. The price of a block is not on the pricing page; Mailchimp shows it inside your account or through support.

5. Send limits are a multiple of your tier

Essentials allows 10 emails per contact a month, Standard 12 and Premium 15. Test emails and transactional emails count towards that limit. For a weekly newsletter it rarely bites; for a busy automation programme it can.

Discounts that actually exist

• 15% off the first year for new customers at 10,000 contacts or more, for a limited time. At 10,000 contacts that makes Standard $114.75 and Premium $297.50 a month for 12 months, then the full price. It ends if your list drops below 10,000.
• 15% for nonprofits and charities, verified by Mailchimp. Ask before buying: it is not applied backwards.
• Annual plans only through sales, only for Standard and Premium at 10,000+ contacts. There is no self-serve annual discount.
• A 14-day trial of Essentials or Standard.

The free plan in 2026

Mailchimp cut its free plan in December 2025. It now covers 250 contacts, 500 emails a month and 250 a day, down from 500 contacts and 1,000 emails. It has one audience and one seat, no email scheduling, no A/B testing and no automation flows beyond a preview, and every email carries Mailchimp’s branding. Signup forms and landing pages are still included.

If you are past 250 contacts, the cheapest paid option is Essentials at $13 a month for up to 500.

How to pay Mailchimp less

1. Archive unsubscribed contacts. Archived contacts are not billed, and you can still see that they unsubscribed.
2. Merge audiences. One audience with tags avoids paying twice for the same person.
3. Clean bounces. Cleaned contacts do not count either.
4. Ask for the nonprofit discount before you buy, if you qualify.
5. Time the 15% offer if you are about to cross 10,000 contacts anyway.

Or stop paying per contact

Every rule above exists because Mailchimp prices by the contact. ReplaMail does not: it is email marketing software you buy once for $299 and run on your own server, sending through your own Amazon SES or SMTP account. A 10,000-contact list emailed four times a month is 480,000 emails a year, about $48 on SES’s à la carte rate ($76.80 on the Essentials plan new AWS accounts start on).

10,000 contacts, five years	Total
Mailchimp Standard	$8,100
Mailchimp Premium	$21,000
ReplaMail: licence, sending and a small server	$1,189 to $1,385

What you give up. ReplaMail is not a sending service, so you bring the sending account and you are responsible for your own sender reputation. You need a server (about €5–15 a month), or pay us to set it up. It does email only: no SMS, no social posts.

There is a live demo (demo / demo) if you want to see the designer and the automations before deciding. For a wider look at the options, see Mailchimp alternatives.

Questions people ask

Read next: Mailchimp alternative · Constant Contact pricing · Amazon SES pricing