Mailchimp alternatives in 2026

Mailchimp counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts toward your bill, and it never archives them automatically: you pay every month for people you cannot legally email until you prune the list by hand. Add the January 2026 free-plan cut (down to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month, effective February 17, 2026) and the tier ramp that turns $13 per month into $110 by 10,000 contacts, and the search volume for alternatives explains itself. This page compares six of them at checked August 2026 prices. For the wider market math, our email pricing guide prices 14 providers side by side.

Why people leave Mailchimp

The billing model is the first reason, and it is worth stating precisely: subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts all count toward the plan tier. Not one competitor on this page does that. MailerLite, Kit, Klaviyo, Buttondown, and Brevo all exclude unsubscribed contacts from billing in one way or another. On Mailchimp, a cleaned list is a manual chore and a dirty list is a recurring charge.

The second reason is the ramp. Essentials starts at $13 per month at 500 contacts (monthly billing; Mailchimp publishes no per-tier annual prices), then climbs to about $26.50 at 1,000, $75 at 5,000, and $110 at 10,000. Standard runs $100 at 5,000 and $135 at 10,000. Crossing a tier mid-month triggers overage charges or paused sending.

Third, sends are chained to contacts: 10 times your contact count per month on Essentials, 12 times on Standard. Daily senders with small lists get pushed up-plan even though their list never grew.

Fourth, the free plan was gutted in January 2026, from 500 contacts and 1,000 sends to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month with a 250-per-day cap and Mailchimp branding.

In fairness: Mailchimp runs a 50%-off promo for the first 12 months as of August 2026, and the automation depth (up to 200-step journeys) is real. The complaints are about what happens after month 12, and after contact 501.

The six alternatives

1. LetterDuck (that's us)

LetterDuck is a different shape of tool: an email workspace on your own domain where the newsletter lives next to a threaded team inbox, so a reader who hits reply lands in a conversation, not a noreply void. The deliverability layer that Mailchimp leaves partly to you is managed by us: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a warm-up throttle that ramps new domains gradually, automatic suppression of bounces and complaints, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe stamped on every campaign send. The honest limits: no automation journeys, no A/B testing, no ecommerce hooks, and we are onboarding from a waitlist rather than self-serve signup.

Price (August 2026): $50 per month per domain, flat. That covers unlimited subscribers and unlimited teammates; the number never changes as the list grows.

2. MailerLite: the value pick

MailerLite delivers the core Mailchimp feature set (automations, landing pages, forms, websites) at roughly half the price at small list sizes, and unsubscribed and bounced contacts do not count toward your bill. It suits anyone whose Mailchimp usage is campaigns plus a welcome automation, which describes most small senders. Two cautions from June 2026: the paid tiers were repriced upward 10 to 30% with no grandfathering (the plans are now named Comfort and Power), and the free plan shrank to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails per month. Our MailerLite pricing breakdown has the full tier table.

Price (August 2026, annual-billing effective): Comfort $10.80 per month at 500 subscribers, $17.10 at 1,000, $44.10 at 5,000, $80.10 at 10,000. Monthly billing: $12, $19, $49, $89.

3. Brevo: pay for emails sent, not contacts stored

Brevo inverts the billing model: contacts are free (100,000 stored even on the free plan) and you pay for email volume. A monthly newsletter to 5,000 subscribers is 5,000 emails, which fits the cheapest Starter tier; on contact-billed tools the same list costs 5 to 10 times more. Pick it if your list is large and your sending is occasional. Know the catches: the Brevo logo stays on your emails unless you pay $12 per month extra on Starter, marketing automation requires Standard, and the free plan's 300-per-day cap means a 1,000-person blast cannot go out in one day. See our Brevo pricing analysis.

Price (August 2026, annual-billing effective): Starter $8.08 per month including 5,000 emails per month ($9 monthly billing); 20,000 emails $28.75; 40,000 emails $41.42.

4. Kit: built for creators

Kit's free Newsletter plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, landing pages, and digital product sales, which makes it the largest genuinely free tier on this page. The paid Creator tier exists for automations, sequences, and integrations, and the Creator Network cross-promotion engine is a real subscriber-acquisition channel no pure email tool offers. Watch the price history: Creator jumped from $29 to $39 per month at 1,000 subscribers in October 2025 with no grandfathering, and crossing 1,000 subscribers raises it another 51%. Full tiers in our Kit pricing breakdown.

Price (August 2026, annual-billing effective): Creator $32.50 per month up to 1,000 subscribers, $74.17 at 5,000, $115.83 at 10,000. Monthly billing: $39, $89, $139. Free to 10,000 subscribers without automations.

5. Klaviyo: built for ecommerce

If you run a store, Klaviyo is the specialist: real-time storefront integrations, predictive analytics (customer lifetime value, churn risk), and revenue attribution on behavioral flows. Suppressed and unsubscribed profiles are not billed, so list hygiene lowers the invoice. The costs of that depth: no annual discount exists (Klaviyo bills monthly only), the February 2025 billing change auto-upgrades your tier when the list grows, and sends are capped at roughly 10 times active profiles per month. Our Klaviyo pricing guide covers the tier mechanics.

Price (August 2026, monthly billing, the only kind offered): $20 per month at 500 profiles, $30 at 1,000, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000.

6. Buttondown: the indie option

Buttondown is a one-person-company product for one-person newsletters: Markdown, an API, SMTP access, and flat published tiers that bill only active subscribers. Writers who find Mailchimp's editor and audience model heavy tend to find Buttondown light in exactly the right places. The pricing cliffs are sharp (subscriber 1,001 more than triples the bill), there is no annual discount, and the prices assume at most one email per day to the full list.

Price (August 2026, monthly billing, the only kind offered): free to 100 subscribers, $9 per month to 1,000, $29 to 5,000, $79 to 10,000.

The numbers side by side

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Mailchimp: Essentials on monthly billing, the cheapest paid tier. Standard runs $20 to $135 across the same contact counts. First-year promotional discounts are excluded. MailerLite: Comfort plan (renamed from Growing Business in June 2026) on annual billing. On monthly billing the same sizes cost $12, $19, $49 and $89. Brevo: Brevo bills by emails sent rather than contacts stored, so these figures assume a weekly send to the whole list. Starter plan on annual billing. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

A note on free plans, since "free Mailchimp alternatives" is usually the real question: Kit's free tier is the biggest by far (10,000 subscribers, but no automations or integrations), Brevo's is the most flexible for storage (100,000 contacts, 300 sends per day), MailerLite allows 250 subscribers with 2,500 sends per month, Buttondown covers your first 100, and Klaviyo allows 250 profiles with 500 sends. Mailchimp's own free plan, at 250 contacts and 500 sends, is now the one being compared against rather than the benchmark.

When Mailchimp is actually the right choice

Stay on Mailchimp if you actively use the automation depth: multi-branch journeys, predictive segmentation, send-time optimization, and store-connected triggers are things MailerLite approximates and LetterDuck does not attempt. The established sending infrastructure also matters at volume; a fresh domain elsewhere needs warm-up time that Mailchimp's shared pools have already banked. If that paragraph does not describe your usage, do this before your next renewal: export your list, archive everyone you cannot email, count the active remainder, and price that number against the table above on the billing period you will actually use.

Last verified August 7, 2026. Every price here was read off the provider's own live pricing page that day, and the table re-renders from the same dataset on each build.