Mailchimp review

by Mailchimp (Intuit)

Email marketing you can run yourself to stay in front of past customers, send seasonal reminders and promotions, and turn your customer list into repeat and referral work.

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What it costsas of August 2026

Free: $0/moUp to 250 contacts, about 500 emails a month
Essentials: From about $13/moAt up to 500 contacts
Standard: From about $20/moAt up to 500 contacts
Premium: From about $350/moFor larger lists of 10,000+ contacts

Paid plans are priced by how many contacts are on your list, so the monthly price climbs as your customer list grows. Texting is a paid add-on from Essentials up, bought as credits per message.

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What Mailchimp does

Pricing & terms

Starts atThe real monthly cost to get in the door, before add-ons.

Free up to 250 contacts; paid starts about $13/mo at up to 500 contacts

How pricing worksFlat tiers, per user, or per job. This decides how fast the bill grows as you add people.

Priced by how many contacts you keep, not by how many people use it

Free trial or planCan you try it with your own jobs before paying?

Free plan runs forever at 250 contacts, plus a 14-day paid trial, no card

ContractMonth-to-month vs a year-plus commitment you can't easily leave.

Month to month, cancel or downgrade anytime, no refund for the month paid

Fit & support

Ease of useHow hard it is to get a non-technical crew actually using it.

Drag-and-drop emails are easy; the plan limits and billing tiers confuse people

SupportWhat owners say about reaching a human when something breaks.

Free gets email help for 30 days; paid adds 24/7 chat, phone only on Premium

What it does

Email campaignsSend a seasonal offer to past customers to fill a slow week.

Signup forms, one-off blasts, and open and click reports on who read it

Automated follow-upsSet it once so past customers hear from you without you remembering.

Free is one welcome email; 4-step flows on Essentials, real flows on Standard

Ready-made templatesYou are not a designer, so the email should look right out of the box.

Every template on paid plans; the free plan only gets a small selection

Text messagingTexts get read, and customers answer them.

Texting is a paid add-on from Essentials up, bought as credits per message

How pricing scalesMost of these charge by list size, so the bill grows as you collect customers.

Price is set by contact count and climbs as the list grows; unsubscribes count

Alternatives to Mailchimp

Other tools that do the same job for a trade business.

Birdeye

A reputation and local-marketing platform that automatically asks finished customers for Google reviews, pulls reviews from 200-plus sites into one dashboard so you can reply in one place, and keeps your business listings, texts, and social posts consistent so more local homeowners find you.

ChatGPT

The AI chat assistant with the best hands-free story for a truck: you can talk to it on a CarPlay screen, and it will write a quote or read a photo of a nameplate. It reads the words in a manual but not the diagrams, which is the catch for equipment paperwork.

Claude

The AI chat assistant that handles paperwork best: it reads a manual or a contract up to 100 pages with the diagrams included, and turns rough notes into a quote or a follow-up. Talking to it hands-free still carries a beta label, and the vendor will not say how much the free plan gives you.

Constant Contact

An email marketing tool that lets a trade owner build a customer list and send branded promotions, seasonal reminders, and follow-up campaigns from ready-made templates without any design work.

Google Gemini

The AI chat assistant already sitting in the Google account most shops run on: it drafts inside Gmail on paid plans, reads photos and spec sheets, and takes hands-free questions with the phone locked. Its free plan is the least restricted of the three.

Housecall Pro

Field-service management for home-service trades, strong on dispatching, service agreements, and customer marketing.

HubSpot

A CRM with a free tier that lets a trade owner keep every lead, call, and email in one place, then add paid marketing and sales tools like email campaigns and forms as the business grows.

Method:CRM

A QuickBooks-native CRM that trades use for customer management alongside a scheduling tool.

How we research this

Pricing comes from Mailchimp (Intuit)'s own pricing pages and is dated at the time we checked it. Features are taken from the vendor's documentation, not from a sales call. We are independent and rank on fit alone. See how we review.