Mailchimp pricing: free means 250 contacts, and overages bill instead of stopping
Two things about Mailchimp changed and both are in the fine print. The free tier now stops at 250 contacts, not the 500 it was known for. And when you exceed a limit on a paid plan, Mailchimp does not pause your sending — it bills you for the overage. One of those is a pricing change. The other is a budgeting risk.
The tiers, and what the page will and will not tell you
| Free | Essentials | Standard | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contact limit | 250 | Priced by contact tier: 500 up to 1,000,000+ | ||
| Monthly sends | 500/mo, max 250/day | 10× contacts | 12× contacts | 15× contacts |
| Seats included | 1 | 3 | 5 | Unlimited |
| Audiences | 1 | 3 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Support | Email, first 30 days | 24/7 email and chat | 24/7 email and chat | Phone and priority |
| Price at 0–500 contacts | $0 | Not captured | $20/mo | Not captured |
The free plan, accurately
Free is real and it is not a trial: 250 contacts, 500 emails a month with a hard ceiling of 250 in any single day, one user, one audience, pre-built templates with Mailchimp branding, no send scheduling, and email support for the first 30 days only. Popup forms, segmentation and basic reporting are included.
Two of those limits bite earlier than the contact count. 250 sends a day means a list of 250 cannot be mailed twice in a day, and no scheduling means every campaign goes out when you are at the keyboard. For a newsletter that publishes weekly to 200 people, neither matters. For a launch sequence of four emails in 48 hours, both do.
The overage mechanism is the real risk
This is the sentence to read twice, because it is the difference between a pricing page and a bill: if you exceed your contact or send limit, Mailchimp automatically charges you for the overage. Sending is not paused. Campaigns are not stopped. The account keeps working and the invoice gets larger.
Compare that with systems that hard-stop at the limit. A hard stop is annoying and cheap — you notice immediately, you export your list, you decide. An automatic overage is convenient and expensive — you find out at the end of the month, after the list has grown, and the fix is now a tier change rather than a decision.
Free-tier behaviour is slightly better: sending pauses and the account is blocked at the limit, so nothing accrues silently. It is the paid tiers where overages bill.
There is a second mechanism worth knowing: during a free trial, if your audience grows to a size where a different contact tier would be more economical, Mailchimp may move you into that tier so that billing starts at the right level. That is helpful. It is also a reminder that the tier you signed up for is not necessarily the tier you will be billed on.
The 50% promotion is a two-stage price
Standard is advertised at $10/month for the first 12 months, then "starts at $20 per month". That is a doubling, not a discount, and a budget built on the first number will be wrong in month thirteen. Mailchimp's terms extend the promotional rate if you move to Essentials or Premium within the 12 months, and allow a downgrade to Free at any time.
The structural detail that catches teams: annual billing is only available on Premium, and on Standard at 10,000+ contacts. So a 500-contact customer cannot buy a year upfront at a discount — they are on monthly billing whether they want to be or not. Anyone who plans their subscriptions around annual prepayment needs to know that before comparing Mailchimp to a platform that quotes annual prices by default.
What 500 contacts costs elsewhere
At 500 contacts Standard is $20 a month, or $240 a year once the promotion ends. In the same range, a newsletter-first platform will carry 10,000 subscribers on its free plan, and a paid tier at roughly $33 a month lifts the sending and automation limits without a contact ceiling that small. We compared those two directly in Kit vs MailerLite, and the four-way version — including the 0% take rate question — in beehiiv vs Kit.
That gap is not evidence that Mailchimp is overpriced. It is evidence that Mailchimp is not selling the same thing. It is a marketing platform with a CRM attached — audiences, tags, customer journeys, e-commerce sync, a website builder and ad tools. If you need a newsletter, you are paying for an inventory you will not use. If you need the whole stack, the bundle is the point.
When each tier is the right buy
- Free — a list under 250, one campaign a week, one person sending. Nothing here will surprise you.
- Standard — you need automations, send scheduling or removal of the Mailchimp footer. At 500 contacts this is the tier the pricing page pushes, and the one whose overage behaviour you must budget for.
- Essentials — 3 seats and 24/7 support, for a small team that sends together. Worth checking its price against Standard before assuming it is cheaper; it is a lower tier with fewer automation features, not a cheaper Standard.
- Nothing — if you send a plain newsletter to a growing list and do not need the marketing suite. This is the case where switching is worth the 72 hours it costs, which we costed in what switching tools actually costs.
What we cannot verify
Contact limits, send multipliers, seat counts and the Standard price at 500 contacts were read from Mailchimp's pricing page on October 23, 2026, with USD selected. Essentials and Premium prices are rendered client-side after a contact tier is chosen and were not captured — we have printed no figures for them. The $10 first-year promotion is subject to Mailchimp's promotional terms, including eligibility, and we have not tested whether it can be taken twice. We have not sent a campaign through Mailchimp, so deliverability, automation reliability and the real-world size of an overage charge are unverified. See How We Test and what happens when you hit a free plan's limit.