Is Mailchimp free? What it actually costs in 2026
Mailchimp's Free plan allows 250 contacts and 500 emails a month (250 a day), one seat, with Mailchimp branding. Essentials starts at $13 a month.
Free is a real plan with no time limit, but it is small: 250 contacts, 500 sends a month capped at 250 a day, and one user, with Mailchimp's badge on every email.
What the free tier actually includes
- 250 contacts
- 500 emails a month, at most 250 a day
- 1 seat
- Mailchimp branding on every email
Where the wall is
250 contacts. A newsletter that is working passes it in weeks, and the next step is a paid plan priced by contact count — the bill grows with the list whether or not you send.
After that: At 0–500 contacts: Essentials $13 a month, Standard $20 a month, Premium $350 a month, each an introductory rate for 12 months before regular pricing. 14-day trials on Essentials and Standard.
Can you self-host Mailchimp? No — cloud only
Mailchimp is hosted only. listmonk, Keila and Mautic are the self-hosted options compared here — and self-hosting email means owning deliverability, which is the part Mailchimp is really selling.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting listmonk
Self-hosting Mautic
Self-hosting Keila
Self-hosting phpList
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you do not want to own deliverability. listmonk and the other self-hosted picks manage your list and build your campaigns, but none of them actually sends the mail — you still need an SMTP provider, and with it you inherit sending reputation, IP warm-up, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and bounce and complaint handling. That is specialist, ongoing work, and getting it wrong fails quietly: your email lands in spam rather than bouncing where you would notice. Stay too if your list is small — at a few hundred contacts, Essentials costs less per month than the hours the alternative takes to keep healthy.
What you are locked into
Subscriber lists, campaign content, templates, automations, and reporting history live inside Mailchimp's hosted platform. Contacts and campaigns can be exported as CSV/HTML, but automations, journey logic, analytics history, and template designs do not transfer cleanly to another tool, and sending is coupled to Mailchimp's own delivery infrastructure and pricing.
If you would rather not pay: listmonk
listmonk
Fast, self-hosted newsletter and mailing-list manager in a single binary.
Free / self-host (you pay only your server and SMTP-sending costs)
See all 4 Mailchimp alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Intuit's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-23 — 7 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.