Mailchimp is free for up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends a month, with a daily cap of 250, one seat, one audience and a Mailchimp badge you cannot remove (checked Nov 3, 2026 on mailchimp.com). Above 250 contacts, sending is held until you upgrade or shrink the list. The cheapest paid plan, Essentials, is $13 a month for 500 contacts. Every price in this post was checked on Nov 3, 2026 from the vendor's own pricing page, in US dollars.
Is Mailchimp free?
Yes, with a hard stop at 250 contacts. Mailchimp's pricing page says “Under 250 contacts? It's free.” and its plan article spells out the rest: “The Free plan includes up to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month, with a daily send limit of 250.” The Free plan comes with 1 audience, 1 seat with Owner permissions, a limited selection of templates and basic reporting. The compare-plans table marks email scheduling, A/B testing and branding removal as “Not included” on Free, and limits support to “Email support for first 30 days”. If the list grows past 250, Mailchimp says “a hold is placed on sending live emails or test emails until you upgrade to a paid plan or reduce your contact total.” There is no time limit on the plan itself. The limit is the list.
Does Mailchimp still have a free plan, and did it shrink?
Mailchimp still has a free plan, and it is smaller than it was. The current footnote on the pricing page reads “The monthly email send limit for the Free plan is 500 sends (daily limit of 250).” The same page's source code, as served on Nov 3, 2026, still contains the earlier version of that footnote: “The monthly email send limit for the Free plan is 1,000 sends (daily limit of 500).” Mailchimp has not published a dated announcement of the change that we could find, and the help centre articles carry no change note. So the honest statement is this: the Free plan's monthly sends were halved at some point before Nov 3, 2026, and Mailchimp's own page is the evidence.
What Mailchimp costs after the free plan
Mailchimp's paid plans price the list, and the send allowance is a multiple of it. On Nov 3, 2026 the pricing page lists these prices at the lowest contact tier.
Essentials, $13 a month for up to 500 contacts, with a monthly send limit of 10 times the contact limit, 3 seats and 3 audiences. The plan scales to 50,000 contacts at $385 a month.
Standard, $20 a month for 500 contacts, “Send up to 6,000 emails each month” (12 times the contacts), 5 seats and 5 audiences, scaling to 100,000 contacts at $800 a month. Mailchimp's FAQ says “The free trial of Standard or Essentials lasts for 14 days.”
Premium, $350 a month for 10,000 contacts, 15 times the contacts in sends (“up to 150,000 emails each month”), unlimited seats and audiences, and up to 200,000 contacts before the table says “Contact us for a custom plan”.
Two footnotes matter more than the stickers. “Overages apply if contact or email send limit is exceeded.” And, from the plan article: “If your contact total increases beyond your contact limit… we won't interrupt your service. Instead, you'll see an additional charge on your bill.” Mailchimp does not stop you. It bills you.
| Plan | Price (Nov 3, 2026) | Contacts included | Sends a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 250 | 500 (250 a day) |
| Essentials | $13/mo | 500 | 10x contacts |
| Standard | $20/mo | 500 | 12x contacts |
| Premium | $350/mo | 10,000 | 15x contacts |
Mailchimp's free plan does not expire. It fills up. Contact 251 is the paywall, and after that the list is the meter.
Who still gives you a real free plan?
Kit gives the biggest free plan among the paid email tools we checked: 10,000 subscribers for $0. Kit's pricing page lists the Free plan as “up to 10,000 subscribers” and its FAQ says “There are no sending limits on any of our plans at Kit.” Kit's Creator plan starts at $33 a month for 1,000 subscribers, or $390 billed yearly (checked Nov 3, 2026).
MailerLite matches Mailchimp's 250 subscribers on its Free plan but allows 2,500 monthly emails and 2 user seats, five times Mailchimp's sends and one more seat, and its Comfort plan starts at $12 a month. EmailOctopus gives 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month on its Starter plan, with Pro at $9 a month billed yearly. Buttondown charges “Absolutely nothing for your first 100 subscribers.” All of these were checked on Nov 3, 2026.
Of the 379 email marketing tools in the AppClap catalog (Nov 3, 2026), 199 have a free tier, 39 can be self-hosted and 14 are open source.
Open source Mailchimp alternatives
listmonk is the open source Mailchimp alternative with no contact limit at all, because there is no vendor to count them. listmonk is AGPL-3.0, has about 24,100 GitHub stars, runs as a “single binary alongside a Postgres database”, and version 7.0.0-beta.1 shipped on Oct 20, 2026 (repo). You bring your own SMTP or sending API and pay that provider per email; listmonk itself costs nothing. We covered it in the open source beehiiv alternative.
Keila. Keila is AGPLv3 and self-hostable, with about 2,260 stars (repo). Keila's cloud has no free plan, on purpose, and its pricing page explains why. It starts at €8 a month for 2,000 emails with unlimited contacts (checked Nov 3, 2026). Unlimited contacts is the opposite of Mailchimp's model: Keila counts sends, not the list.
Plunk. Plunk is AGPL-3.0 with about 5,570 stars (repo). Plunk's cloud is free for 1,000 emails a month with unlimited contacts, then $0.001 an email with no base fee and a monthly spend cap. Self-hosting is free with no per-email cost (checked Nov 3, 2026).
Mautic. Mautic is GPL-3.0 marketing automation with about 10,900 stars (repo). Mautic's download page says it “is and will always be free to download and use”, recommends installing with Composer on your own server, and points to partner hosting if you would rather not.
The AppClap flat-price test, where a tool passes when the price on its pricing page is the price on the invoice, sorts them cleanly. listmonk, Mautic, and self-hosted Keila and Plunk pass, since there is no invoice. Mailchimp fails on automatic overage billing. Kit and MailerLite pass only inside the tier you bought.
Why is Mailchimp so expensive?
Mailchimp is expensive because it charges for the size of the list every month, whether or not you mail it. Standard at 500 contacts is $20 a month; the same plan at 100,000 contacts is $800. What the money buys is real: deliverability someone else manages, templates, a landing page builder, support that answers, and integrations with the shop platforms. For a business with 2,000 customers and nobody who wants to run a server, $13 to $20 a month is a fair rent. The complaint is not the price. It is that the free plan used to be the on-ramp, and the on-ramp is now 250 names long.
How to read an email marketing pricing page
- What is counted? Contacts (Mailchimp, MailerLite, Kit), sends (Keila, Plunk) or nothing (listmonk).
- What happens at the limit? Mailchimp Free holds sending. Mailchimp paid plans bill overage. Plunk caps spend.
- How many seats come with it? Mailchimp Free 1, Essentials 3, Standard 5. MailerLite Free 2.
- Can you take the list with you? Ask how the export works before you import. A self-hosted tool never asks.
- Where does the footnote disagree with the headline? Read the small print under the Free card first.
What we do about it
AppClap reads pricing pages so you do not have to, we never take vendor money, and when a page quietly changes its footnote we say so. The Mailchimp alternatives and MailerLite alternatives pages list everything we track in this category.
Or describe what you need in plain words: a newsletter tool I can self-host with no contact limit.
Sources: mailchimp.com, Pricing (marketing) and Compare plans; mailchimp.com/help, About Mailchimp Pricing Plans; kit.com, Pricing; mailerlite.com, Pricing; emailoctopus.com, Pricing; buttondown.com, Pricing; listmonk.app; keila.io, Pricing; useplunk.com, Pricing; mautic.org, Download; GitHub repos knadh/listmonk, pentacent/keila, useplunk/plunk and mautic/mautic; AppClap catalog counts, Nov 3, 2026. All checked Nov 3, 2026.
