Mailchimp. $20/mo.
The pitch: the email platform almost every small business starts on. Standard costs you $20 a month at the 500-contact tier, and Mailchimp’s own pricing page shows that as a 12-month rate that climbs after the first year. It gets you up to 200 marketing automation flows, generative AI features at no extra cost, custom-coded and branded templates, dynamic content, custom reports, 5 seats, 5 audiences, monthly sends capped at 12x your contact limit, one personalized onboarding session, and 24/7 email and chat support. Essentials costs you $13 a month with 4 flow steps and 10x sends. Premium costs you $350 a month with 15x sends, unlimited seats and phone support. There’s a 14-day free trial, 300-plus integrations on every plan, and a 15% discount if you’re a nonprofit. A free plan exists, but it stops at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, and your sending pauses the moment you cross either one.
The reality: if you send one newsletter a month, you are not paying Mailchimp to send email. You are paying Mailchimp to store names. Mailchimp’s own help doc says it flat out: subscribed, non-subscribed and unsubscribed contacts all count toward your contact limit. You can archive the dead ones to stop paying for them, and almost nobody knows that setting is there, so the customer who unsubscribed from you in March is still on your December bill. Cross the tier you picked and Mailchimp charges you for an add-on contact block automatically, then shows you the number on the next invoice.
Kit’s Free plan holds up to 10,000 subscribers for $0 a month, with unlimited email broadcasts, unlimited forms and landing pages, tagging and segmentation, subject-line A/B testing, digital products and subscriptions at 3.5% plus 30 cents a sale, and API access. That’s forty times Mailchimp’s free contact cap at the same price. What Kit’s free tier doesn’t hand you is the part that decides whether the email works, which is the subject line, the first sentence, and the offer underneath them. Claude writes that. At Sonnet 5’s published $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, four broadcasts a month at three drafts each, rewritten to your voice and your customer’s objections, cost you about 35 cents. Your yearly bill goes from $240 to roughly four dollars.
What Mailchimp still gives you that the free build doesn’t: automation, which is the real reason people stay. Standard’s 200 marketing automation flows have no equivalent on Kit’s Free plan, which has no visual automations, no email sequences and no RSS campaigns at all. SMS as a paid add-on. Predictive segmentation and e-commerce reporting that ties revenue back to a specific campaign. Transactional email through a separate Mailchimp product. 300-plus direct integrations, where Kit’s Free plan locks the paid apps. 5 seats and 5 audiences against Kit’s single user. 24/7 email and chat support against email support only on Kit’s Free plan. And Kit’s branding sits on your emails until you upgrade. If a welcome sequence and an abandoned-cart flow are closing sales you never touch, you’re not paying $20 a month for a send button, and keeping Mailchimp is the honest call. If you log in once a month, write one newsletter and hit send, you’re paying $240 a year to store a list Kit will hold for nothing.
Dropping one Mailchimp Standard plan pays for the $120 annual Vault subscription twice over in year one, and that’s at Standard’s smallest contact tier.