Six email platforms compared on the one thing that makes people leave Mailchimp: what happens to the bill as your list grows. Prices taken from each vendor's own page in September 2026 — and we say so where a vendor would not show us one.
6 tools compared · Last reviewed
Mailchimp is charged by the size of your audience, not by how much email you send. That is the whole reason this page exists. A list that grows while your sending stays flat still costs more every month, and for a newsletter, a small shop or a nonprofit that collects addresses faster than it mails them, the bill drifts upward for no visible return.
Worth noting before the list: when we checked Mailchimp's own pricing page on 14 September 2026, it rendered its tier prices in JavaScript and returned none of them in the page source. The only dollar figure present in the HTML was $299 per month, quoted as the spend threshold above which Mailchimp will discuss a custom plan. Its contact tiers begin at 250. We mention this because the same opacity shows up on two of the alternatives below, and you deserve to know which numbers on this page came from a vendor's site and which did not.
Every price below carries the date we read it and the subscriber count it applies to. Email pricing is tiered by list size, so a headline figure without a subscriber number attached is close to meaningless — a plan that is cheap at 500 contacts can be the most expensive option on this page at 25,000.
Pricing steps up as contacts accumulate, whether or not those contacts ever receive anything. Anyone running a low-frequency newsletter against a large list is paying for storage rather than delivery, and that is the single most common complaint behind this search.
The free tier is small enough to outgrow quickly
Mailchimp's free plan is capped tightly on both contacts and monthly sends. It works for a first list, but most people hit the ceiling within months and the jump to paid is the moment they start comparing. Two platforms below offer free tiers several times larger.
No published nonprofit discount
Mailchimp historically offered nonprofit pricing and no longer promotes one. For a charity mailing donors a few times a year against a long list, that change alone can justify a migration — and 60 searches a month for nonprofit-specific alternatives suggests it has.
Prices you cannot read without running JavaScript
When we checked on 14 September 2026, Mailchimp's pricing page carried no tier prices in its HTML. That is a legitimate technical choice, but it makes the plan genuinely hard to compare against competitors who publish a number in plain text — and it is a bad sign when budgeting is already the reason you are here.
How we chose
We started from email and newsletter platforms already in our directory, then opened each vendor's own pricing page on 14 September 2026 rather than copying figures from other comparison articles. Where a price appears below, it came off the vendor's site that day and the subscriber tier it applies to is stated with it. Three pages would not give us a number: Mailchimp's, Klaviyo's, and AWeber's — AWeber's returned a run of consecutive single-digit dollar tokens that are template artifacts rather than prices, and publishing them would have been an error. Those entries say so plainly instead of guessing. We have not ranked self-hosted open-source options such as Listmonk or Mautic: they are a real answer to this search, but they are a server decision rather than a signup, and neither is in our directory.
Best for: The closest like-for-like swap, and the best free tier here
The default answer for most people leaving Mailchimp, and it has been for several years. You get campaigns, automations, landing pages and signup forms in an interface that is genuinely simpler than Mailchimp's, without losing the features a small sender actually uses. Its pricing page listed plans starting at $12 per month on 14 September 2026, with the subscriber tiers beginning around the 250–500 mark, and a second tier starting at $25 per month.
Free tier: Yes — and it is the main reason MailerLite appears at the top of almost every list like this one. The free plan covers a materially larger list than Mailchimp's before you pay anything.
Watch out: MailerLite screens new accounts before approving them, and applications do get rejected — affiliate-heavy content and bought lists are the usual reasons. Migrate only after your account is approved, not before. Some of the more advanced segmentation and reporting in Mailchimp's higher tiers has no direct equivalent here.
Best for: Automation, funnels and webinars in one place
The pick if your reason for leaving is capability rather than cost. GetResponse bundles the marketing-automation builder, landing pages, funnels and webinar hosting — the last of which genuinely has no Mailchimp equivalent and is normally a separate subscription. Its pricing page stated plans from $19 per month, explicitly described as priced by list size, with the entry tier referenced at 1,000 subscribers, when we checked on 14 September 2026.
Free tier: Yes, with a contact limit; the paid tiers are where the automation builder opens up.
Watch out: It is a bigger product than most people leaving Mailchimp need, and the interface reflects that — there is more to learn. Because pricing is list-size banded, confirm which band your list falls into before comparing the $19 headline against anything else here; the entry figure assumes a small list.
Best for: Newsletters that are meant to become a business
Built for publishers rather than marketers, and it shows in what it ships: subscriber growth tools, referral programmes, a paid-subscription layer and an ad network for monetising an audience. If you are writing a newsletter rather than sending campaigns to customers, this is a better-shaped product than anything else here. Its pricing page stated that paid plans start at $49 per month on 14 September 2026, with tiers referenced at 1,000, 2,500 and 5,000 subscribers.
Free tier: Yes, and a genuinely generous one for a new newsletter.
Watch out: The highest entry price on this list by a wide margin, and it is deliberately not a general email-marketing tool — transactional email, e-commerce automations and CRM-style segmentation are not what it is for. If you are a shop rather than a publisher, look at MailerLite or Klaviyo instead.
Best for: A simple, cheap send with a free tier attached
The straightforward option. Drag-and-drop builder, decent templates, basic automation, and a free plan for getting started, at a price that undercuts most of this list. Its pricing page listed $15 per month when we checked on 14 September 2026 and referenced contact tiers from 500 up to 100,000. For a small business that wants to send a monthly newsletter without learning a marketing platform, that is the entire requirement met.
Free tier: Yes, with monthly send limits rather than a hard contact wall.
Watch out: Less depth than GetResponse or Klaviyo once you want conditional automation or fine-grained segmentation, and the template library feels dated next to MailerLite's. This is a competent send, not a growth stack.
Best for: E-commerce, where the email needs to know what the customer bought
The strongest pick on this list if you run a store. Klaviyo reads order and browsing data directly and builds segments from purchase behaviour — abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back and replenishment flows work out of the box rather than needing to be assembled. For a Shopify or WooCommerce seller, that closes the gap Mailchimp leaves and usually pays for itself in recovered revenue.
Free tier: Yes — a free plan exists, capped tightly on contacts and monthly sends.
Watch out: We could not verify its pricing. Klaviyo's pricing page renders its figures in JavaScript and returned no tier prices in the HTML on 14 September 2026, so we are not publishing a number we did not read — get a current quote for your contact count directly. Klaviyo is also widely understood to become expensive as lists grow, so model your 12-month list size, not today's.
Best for: A long-established sender with a free tier and no reinvention
AWeber has been doing this since before most of this list existed, and the case for it is stability rather than novelty: reliable deliverability, phone support that answers, and a free tier for small lists. If you are leaving Mailchimp because it keeps changing rather than because it costs too much, the lack of reinvention here is the feature.
Free tier: Yes, capped by subscriber count — one of the longest-standing free tiers in email marketing.
Watch out: We could not verify its pricing either. AWeber's pricing page returned a run of consecutive single-digit dollar values that are template or slider artifacts rather than plan prices, and quoting them would have been wrong — confirm the current figure for your list size with AWeber directly. The builder and templates also feel their age next to MailerLite's.
MailerLite, for most people. Its free tier covers a substantially larger list than Mailchimp's before anything is due, and the free plan includes automations rather than withholding them as a paid feature. Benchmark Email is the alternative worth checking if your constraint is monthly sends rather than list size, because it limits differently. Klaviyo and AWeber also have free tiers, but both are capped tightly enough that a growing list will clear them quickly.
What is the cheapest Mailchimp alternative?
Among the plans we could actually verify on 14 September 2026, MailerLite was lowest at $12 per month, followed by Benchmark Email at $15 and GetResponse at $19. beehiiv was highest at $49. All four are banded by subscriber count, so those figures apply to small lists — check your own band before treating them as a ranking. Klaviyo's and AWeber's prices are not published in a form we could read, so they are absent from this comparison rather than assumed cheap or expensive.
Which Mailchimp alternative is best for nonprofits?
This comes up often enough to have its own search demand, and the honest answer is that none of these advertises a headline nonprofit discount, so the right pick is the one whose pricing shape suits a charity rather than the one offering a badge. Nonprofits typically hold a large list and mail it infrequently — exactly the pattern that makes contact-based pricing painful. MailerLite's larger free tier usually wins on that shape. Ask each vendor directly about nonprofit rates before you migrate; several negotiate without publishing it.
Are there open-source Mailchimp alternatives?
Listmonk and Mautic are the established self-hosted options, and both can genuinely cost nothing beyond your server and a sending provider such as Amazon SES. We have not ranked them above because they are a different kind of decision: you take on deliverability, bounce handling, list hygiene and security yourself, and that work is what the subscription was buying. If you have engineering capacity they are excellent. If you do not, MailerLite's free tier will cost you less in practice.
What does Mailchimp actually cost?
We could not tell you from its own website, which is part of why people end up here. When we checked on 14 September 2026, Mailchimp's pricing page rendered its tier prices in JavaScript and exposed none of them in the page HTML; the single dollar figure in the source was $299 per month, given as the spend level at which custom plans are discussed. Its contact tiers start at 250. For a current figure you will need to load the page in a browser and select your contact count.
Will my subscribers and templates survive the move?
Subscribers, yes — every platform here imports a CSV, and exporting your audience from Mailchimp is straightforward. Templates, usually not: custom HTML generally needs rebuilding, and Mailchimp's merge tags and conditional blocks use its own syntax. Automations almost never transfer and should be treated as a rebuild. The part people forget is sending reputation: a list that has been mailed from one provider for years starts fresh on a new IP pool, so warm up gradually rather than sending to everyone on day one.
