Mailchimp's free plan went from 2,000 contacts to 250

A candle shop in Westfield has 1,900 people on its email list. Two years ago that list cost the owner nothing. Last month it cost her $60, and she never signed up for a paid plan. Mailchimp kept cutting the free tier underneath her until 1,900 names no longer fit.

The free plan she started on in 2022 held 2,000 contacts. In 2023 it dropped to 500. Today it holds 250. Her list crossed the limit without her adding a single customer, and Mailchimp started charging her without her ever choosing to upgrade.

If you run email through Mailchimp, pull up your last invoice. Most shops I look at pay $30 to $75 a month to store a list, and more than half of that list never opens anything. You can send the same email through MailerLite or Brevo for $0 to $20. The switch takes an afternoon.

Two reasons to stay on Mailchimp, and I will get to both: automations you have already built, and a sending reputation you do not want to reset. Everything else is you paying rent on names.

What Mailchimp actually costs now

Mailchimp bills by the number of contacts you store, not the number of emails you send. That is the part that catches people. A contact who unsubscribed two years ago and never comes back still counts toward your tier until you delete them.

Here is the current card:

Plan	Starts at	What you get
Free	$0	250 contacts, 500 emails a month
Essentials	$13/mo	500 contacts, scales up with your list
Standard	$20/mo	500 contacts, about $60 at 2,500
Premium	$350/mo	large lists, unlimited contacts

The number that matters is the middle one. Standard is where most shops land, and it climbs with your list. At 500 contacts it is $20. At 2,500 it is about $60. At 5,000 you are over a hundred dollars a month. You did not get better software at each step. You got a bigger number in the contacts column.

A list full of dead addresses costs you every month, because Mailchimp charges for the name, not the open.

Is $60 a month a lot to pay for email?

By itself, no. Email returns more per dollar than any other channel a small shop runs. An older Litmus survey, from 2020, put the average around $36 back for every $1 spent. Even if your shop does a third of that, a $60 bill that drives a few hundred dollars in sales is cheap.

So the bill is not the problem. What you are paying it on is.

Say your candle shop emails 1,900 people and 400 open. You are paying to store 1,500 addresses that do nothing. Delete those 1,500 and your list is 400 people, which fits a far cheaper tier, and your open rate on paper triples because you stopped counting people who already left.

Run one number before you touch anything: revenue per send. Take the sales you can trace to email last month and divide by how many emails you sent. If that number looks healthy, keep spending. If you cannot calculate it because nothing is tracked, that is the first fix, not the tool.

Should you switch to something cheaper?

For most shops under a few thousand contacts, yes. Two tools do the same job for far less.

Tool	Free plan	Cheapest paid	How it charges
Mailchimp	250 contacts, 500 emails/mo	$13/mo	by contacts stored
MailerLite	250 subscribers, 2,500 emails/mo	$12/mo	by contacts stored
Brevo	unlimited contacts, 300 emails/day	$9/mo	by emails sent

Look at Brevo's row. It charges by sends, not names, so storing 2,000 contacts costs nothing. The free plan gives you 300 emails a day. A shop that emails its whole list once a week can send a 1,900-person newsletter across two days and pay nothing at all.

MailerLite is the closer match to Mailchimp's look and feel. Its free plan holds the same 250 contacts, but gives you 2,500 emails a month instead of Mailchimp's 500, and paid plans start at $12 for more room. If you like drag-and-drop building and a few simple automations, it is the easy move.

My rule of thumb:

• Under 500 contacts, sending weekly: Brevo or MailerLite free. Pay nothing.
• Growing list, want automations: MailerLite, $12 to $25 a month.
• Big store, deep Mailchimp automations, integrated checkout: stay, and clean your list so you stop paying for the dead weight.

The one cost of switching nobody mentions

Moving lists is a CSV export and a CSV import. Half a day, most of it waiting. The real cost is deliverability. When you send from a new provider, inbox filters do not know you yet, so your first few sends can land in spam more than usual. It settles in a week or two if your list is clean and people open.

So do it in this order:

1. Export your Mailchimp list to a CSV.
2. Delete anyone who has not opened an email in 12 months. Delete them, do not archive them.
3. Import the cleaned list into the new tool.
4. Send your first campaign to your most engaged people first, not the whole list.
5. Keep the Mailchimp account open and empty for a month before you cancel, in case you missed an automation.

Rebuilding automations is the part that takes thought. If you have a welcome series or an abandoned-cart flow wired up, screenshot each step before you leave so you can recreate it. If your Mailchimp account is a newsletter and a signup form, there is nothing to rebuild.

The candle shop owner exported her list on a Sunday, deleted the 1,500 names that had not opened anything since the previous spring, and moved the 400 who had. Her bill went to zero. The next newsletter reached 400 people who wanted it, and 190 of them opened. She sells more candles now than she did emailing five times the people.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Mailchimp Marketing pricing	Free plan caps at 250 contacts and 500 emails; Essentials from $13, Standard from $20, Premium from $350.
2	About Mailchimp pricing plans	Mailchimp bills by stored contact count and tier, not by emails sent.
3	MailerLite pricing	Free plan of 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails; paid plans from $12/mo.
4	Brevo pricing	Free plan of 300 emails a day with unlimited contacts; Starter from $9/mo, billed by sends.
5	Litmus, the ROI of email marketing	Email's average return of about $36 for every $1 spent, from Litmus's 2020 survey.