When does leaving Mailchimp pay?

Leaving Mailchimp pays in two situations. The first is when you’re paying for Essentials and a free plan elsewhere holds your list and does what you use. Kit’s free plan holds up to 10,000 contacts with no sending limit, so a weekly newsletter to 1,000 people that costs $26.50 a month on Essentials can cost nothing, if you can live with Kit’s branding and no automated sequences. The second is when the paid plan you need costs clearly less elsewhere: at 1,000 contacts and one email a week, the lowest paid bill in this guide is Brevo (Starter) at $17 a month.

Leaving doesn’t pay while Mailchimp’s free plan fits your list, and it pays less than it looks if you’d rebuild a lot. Before you decide, archive the people who unsubscribed: Mailchimp counts them toward your price, and dropping a band may make staying the cheaper move.

What does Mailchimp cost against the rest at your size?

Here’s every tool in this guide at four list sizes, each on the cheapest plan that fits a weekly email, priced so a month with five sends fits. Each figure is the whole monthly bill, not a price per contact.

Read it against your own column. At 500 contacts, Essentials is $13 a month, two free plans elsewhere still hold the list, and the lowest paid bill is Brevo (Starter) at $9 a month. At 1,000 it’s $26.50 a month, and the lowest paid bill is Brevo (Starter) at $17 a month. At 2,500 it’s $45 a month, and the lowest paid bill is Brevo (Starter) at $25 a month. At 5,000 it’s $75 a month, and the lowest paid bill is Brevo (Starter) at $39 a month. Kit’s free plan still holds the list at all three sizes, for a newsletter without sequences. The cheapest plan in each cell isn’t always the one with the features you use on Mailchimp, so check the plan named under each figure before you count the saving.

Before you leave, archive

Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts toward the total that sets your price. Archived, cleaned, and deleted contacts don’t count. Archive the people who unsubscribed rather than deleting them: archiving keeps their record, and someone who unsubscribed before being archived can’t be imported back as a subscriber. Archiving doesn’t change the bill by itself. If the clean-up puts you under a lower band, lower your pricing tier: under Account, Billing, Monthly plans or credits, click Change Plan, choose the smaller contact limit, and click Downgrade. You keep your current plan until the billing cycle ends, and the lower price starts with the next one. If that makes Essentials cheaper, the case for moving gets weaker. Do this first, then compare.

When does leaving not pay?

• Mailchimp’s free plan still fits. Under its 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, it costs nothing, and moving buys you nothing but work.
• You use what Essentials or Standard gives you. Essentials removes Mailchimp’s branding and includes scheduling, A/B testing, automation flows of up to 4 steps per flow, and 3 users. A free plan elsewhere may not do all of that, and the paid plan that does may cost about the same. Price the plan with the features you use, not the cheapest one.
• The saving is small next to the move. Our view: if the difference is a few dollars a month, the evenings spent rebuilding forms and automations usually cost more than a year of the difference. Move for a free plan that fits, or for a clear saving.

What would you give up?

Mostly what you’ve built. Your sign-up forms on your website belong to Mailchimp, so you’d replace every one. Templates usually need rebuilding, automated emails always do, and your campaign reports stay behind. Mailchimp lets you export your audience in every status (subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, and cleaned), so the list itself moves; the unsubscribes have to come with it and stay unsubscribed in the new tool.

And a little of what you’d keep by staying: a tool many people already know, which matters if you’ll hand the newsletter to someone else. List what you actually use before you decide. If the list is short, leaving is easy; if it’s long, the saving has to be worth the rebuild.

Plan the overlap

Don’t close Mailchimp the day you open the new tool. Import your list with the unsubscribes marked, rebuild your sign-up forms and point them at the new tool, send your next newsletter from it, and keep Mailchimp for a cycle or two to catch anyone who signed up through a form you missed. Then export once more and cancel. What switching email tools costs walks through the export, the forms, and how to count your own hours.

A worked example

Say you run a two-person florist with about 1,300 contacts on Mailchimp Essentials. You send a weekly email with the week’s flowers, and new subscribers get one welcome email with a first-order code. You pay $26.50 a month, and you like that your emails carry no Mailchimp branding.

First, archive. Say 200 of those contacts unsubscribed over the years: archived, you’re at 1,100, still in the same band, so the bill doesn’t change. Now the options. Kit’s free plan holds 1,100 people with no sending limit, so the weekly email costs nothing, but its free plan has no email sequences: it can deliver a freebie automatically at sign-up, and that’s all it sends on its own. It also shows Kit’s branding. On Brevo, a weekly email to 1,100 people needs Starter’s 10,000-email tier, at $17 a month; its automation covers your welcome email, but Starter shows Brevo’s logo unless you pay for the add-on. MailerLite’s Comfort at your size is $33 a month, with automations and no logo.

So the answer depends on the logo. If the branding is fine and the first-order code can travel with a freebie at sign-up, Kit’s free plan saves the whole bill. If the welcome email matters but the logo doesn’t, Brevo Starter saves part of it. If you want no branding and your welcome email, staying on Essentials is the simplest move at this size. Either way, rebuild your sign-up forms first and run both tools until the new one is collecting sign-ups.

Our view

Leave Mailchimp when the numbers are clear: a free plan elsewhere that holds your list and does what you use, or a paid plan that does the same job for clearly less at your size. Archive first and lower your tier if you can, because sometimes that alone fixes the bill. Stay when you’re inside the free plan, when you use Essentials’ branding removal and automations and the alternative costs about the same, or when the saving is small next to the rebuild. What staying costs is a bill set by every contact Mailchimp stores, unless you keep archiving. What leaving gives up is the time to move and whatever you’ve built. Count both before you decide.

Your next step

This week, archive your unsubscribed contacts in Mailchimp and note which band you land in; if it’s lower, change your pricing tier, which takes effect from your next billing cycle. Then write down what you use every month: the newsletter, any automated email, branding removal, a second login. If it’s just the newsletter and your list is under Kit’s free cap, start Kit’s free plan alongside Mailchimp and import a copy of your list. If your list is small enough for AWeber’s free plan, up to 500 contacts, and you want a welcome email, start AWeber’s free plan instead. If you need a paid plan, what email marketing costs at 500, 1,000, 2,500, and 5,000 contacts shows every tool at your size, and Mailchimp or MailerLite for a small list compares the most common move.