Mailchimp review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

Free stops at 250 contacts

The free plan is not a trial. It runs forever at 250 contacts and about 500 sends a month, with a daily cap of 250. Pass the contact cap and sending stops until you deal with it.

For a trade shop, 250 contacts is one or two years of jobs. A busy HVAC company blows through it in a season. Work out what you have before you sign up: pull your customer list out of your field software or your books and count the addresses. If the number starts with a 5, the free plan is a week of use, not a plan.

What else is thin on free: one login, a small set of email templates rather than the full library, and a single welcome email instead of a proper sequence. Support is email only, and only for your first 30 days. After that you are on help articles. Separately, there is a 14-day trial of Essentials or Standard with no credit card, so you can look at the paid features without paying.

The bill follows your list, not your sends

Essentials and Standard both start at up to 500 contacts, at about $13 and about $20 a month. Both climb as the list grows. Your send allowance climbs with it, roughly ten times your contact limit on Essentials and twelve times on Standard, so sending more is rarely what costs you. Storing more is.

Owners report the same shape. In one discussion an owner paying $45 a month said it was too much for what he was getting.

Another owner, pricing a list of 11,000, put Mailchimp at about $300 a month at that size, as reported in 2025.

Those are owner figures, not a published table, so treat them as the direction of travel rather than a quote. The direction is what matters: a plumbing company that has served 6,000 homes pays several times what a two-year-old shop pays, for the same buttons. Go past your tier and Mailchimp sells you extra contact blocks on top. You can downgrade at any time, but the change lands at the end of your billing period and there is no refund for the month you already paid.

You keep paying for people who unsubscribed

Mailchimp counts subscribed, non-subscribed and unsubscribed contacts toward your limit. Only archiving takes someone off the count. Nothing warns you about this at signup, and it is the most expensive habit a trade owner can fall into.

Picture a five-year-old drain company with 3,200 addresses out of the job system. Maybe 400 have opted out or bounced. Those 400 are still driving your price tier. You cannot email them, you cannot sell to them, and you are paying to store them.

So build one habit. Once a quarter, archive everyone who unsubscribed and everyone whose address has bounced. It takes ten minutes and it is the only lever you have on this bill. Anyone importing an old list should do it before the first send, not after, because the tier gets set the moment the contacts land.

The follow-up you want starts on Standard

What most trade owners want from email is not a newsletter. It is a sequence. Somebody asks for a quote and does not book, so three emails go out over two weeks. A tune-up falls due at twelve months, so a reminder goes out on its own. That work is gated by plan.

Free gives you a one-click welcome email and nothing more. Essentials caps a flow at four steps. Standard is where branching sequences arrive, with up to 200 flows, A/B testing (sending two versions to see which gets opened) and finer segmenting of who gets what. So the plan you want for a seasonal reminder is Standard at about $20 a month at a small list, and more as the list grows.

Owners who left often left over exactly this. One shop moved to a competitor and named the feeling: paying more to get at features that felt like they should have come with the plan.

Another owner sitting on a big list puts it harder: too much to click through just to send one email, and $45 a month on top.

Texting is bought in credits

Text messaging is an add-on, not a feature of a plan. You need Essentials or higher, you need approval to send, and you buy credits per message. Unused credits are forfeited at the end of each billing cycle, so buying a big block ahead of a slow month wastes money.

For a trade business that is a real consideration, because texting gets read and email often does not. If reminders by text are the main thing you want, price a tool built around it rather than bolting credits onto an email plan.

One more gap at the top of the range: phone support only comes with Premium, which starts around $350 a month. Essentials and Standard get email and chat around the clock. Free gets email for 30 days.

Where we would start, and when to leave

Start free if you have under 250 contacts and want to test whether your customers open anything. Move to Essentials at about $13 when you pass the cap. Move to Standard when you want the tune-up reminder running by itself. That ladder covers most one to five truck shops for years, as long as you archive dead contacts.

What you get for the money is not the email builder, which is drag and drop and about as good as anyone's. It is getting into the inbox. One owner mailing a list of hundreds of thousands defends the price on exactly those terms: what the money buys is deliverability and automation, and the rest you could do out of a spreadsheet.

Leave when one of these becomes true. If your list is big and your emails are simple, cheaper senders charge less for the same job, and owners who left most often name MailerLite. If you need real automation and your list is growing fast, you will hit Mailchimp's limits and pay to get past them. And if you are only emailing because you think your field software cannot, check it first. Some field tools already send job follow-ups and review requests off the customer records you keep, which beats retyping your list into a second system.

What owners actually say