Mailchimp's free plan stops at 250 contacts. Here's what the alternatives actually cost.

Prices checked 12 September 2026. All figures in USD. By Jeff Peckham.

The wall

Mailchimp's free plan allows 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, with a hard ceiling of 250 sends in any single day. Go past either limit and Mailchimp doesn't bill you — it stops sending.

That's the part people don't expect. You're not nudged toward an upgrade over several weeks. Your list crosses 250, or your newsletter goes to 300 people twice in a month, and sending pauses.

If that's where you are, you have three real options: pay Mailchimp, move somewhere cheaper, or restructure how you send. This piece is about the second one — what the alternatives genuinely cost at the list sizes small senders actually have, and how much work moving would be.

A warning about the second half: the migration section is less cheerful than most comparisons. Moving a mailing list is mostly easy and partly not, and the parts that aren't easy are the parts nobody advertises.

Three things that make these comparisons misleading

Before the table, three traps. They're the reason published comparisons disagree with each other and with the invoice you eventually get.

1. The advertised price is usually an introductory price. Mailchimp is currently running 50% off for twelve months across its paid tiers. So Essentials for a 500-contact list is advertised at $6.50/month — and becomes $13/month in month thirteen. That's not a trick, it's disclosed, but it does mean a table built from headline prices compares a first-year discount against competitors' standing rates. Everything below uses regular monthly pricing as the basis, with promotional prices shown separately.

There's a quieter version of this. Several of these pricing pages default to the annual view, showing the discounted monthly-equivalent figure first. Benchmark's does. The annual saving is real, but it's a different product — you're prepaying a year.

2. Not everyone charges for the same thing. Mailchimp, MailerLite, EmailOctopus and Benchmark charge by how many contacts you store. Brevo charges by how many emails you send, with contacts essentially uncapped. For a 5,000-person list you email twice a year, that difference is enormous — and it means Brevo can't honestly be placed in the same column as the others. It gets its own row and its own explanation.

3. “Free plan” describes a size, not an experience. Two free plans with identical contact limits can differ on whether the provider's logo appears at the bottom of your emails, how long your reports are kept, how many forms you can build, and whether you can send at all before a human approves your account. Those restrictions are where free plans actually differ.

The quick answer

If you want the short version:

• Under 250 contacts and content? Stay on Mailchimp. Moving costs you a weekend and gains nothing.
• Under 2,500 contacts, sending a straightforward newsletter, and EmailOctopus branding on your emails doesn't bother you? EmailOctopus's free plan probably covers you completely. Look there first.
• Want to move with the least manual work? MailerLite is the only one here that documents a Mailchimp importer of its own.
• Between 250 and 500 contacts and you'd rather not carry a vendor's branding? Benchmark's free plan is worth a look — it's the one product here I've actually opened an account on. Expect 500 contacts and 1,000 emails a month, not the 2,500 the pricing page leads with, unless you have a domain to verify.
• Big list, infrequent sends? Brevo's send-based pricing may cost you far less than contact-based pricing.
• Running Mailchimp automations you'd have to rebuild by hand? Staying may genuinely be the cheapest option once your own time is counted.

There is no single winner here, and any article that gives you one hasn't looked at the prices carefully.

Disclosure

Right now this article contains no affiliate links, and I have no affiliate relationship with any product in it. I may add affiliate links to some of these products later. If I do, and you sign up through one, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you.

No affiliate relationship influenced any of this. The ordering, the recommendations and the decision tree were settled from pricing and documentation before any link was considered, and I've recommended products I have no commercial relationship with — including in the cases where the honest answer is “use the free plan and pay nobody,” or “stay where you are.”

If that ever stops being true, this article should stop existing.

What they cost

Regular monthly pricing, billed monthly. Promotional and annual prices are called out separately so you can see which is which.

Sources: pricing pages for Mailchimp, MailerLite, EmailOctopus, Benchmark and Brevo, as read on 12 September 2026.

Promotional prices, where they apply: Mailchimp is 50% off for twelve months — Essentials $6.50 / $13.25 / $22.50, Standard $10 / $22.50 / $30, reverting to the regular prices above in month thirteen.

Annual-equivalent monthly prices, if you prepay a year: MailerLite Comfort $10.80 / $17.10 / $29.70. EmailOctopus Pro $9 / $12 / $18. Benchmark Pro $16 at 1,000 and $31 at 2,500. Brevo Starter $8.08.

Two structural notes. Mailchimp prices in bands — 0–500, 501–1,500, 1,501–2,500 — so a 1,000-contact list and a 1,500-contact list cost exactly the same, and crossing 1,500 is a cliff rather than a slope. And Mailchimp's paid plans carry overage charges if you exceed your contact or send limit, where the free plan simply stops.

The products

Mailchimp

Who it still suits: anyone whose Mailchimp setup is doing real work. If you have multi-step automations, a tagging scheme you rely on, or integrations wired into the rest of your business, the cost of leaving is not the subscription — it's rebuilding all of that somewhere else.

Where it's attractive: the automation tooling is genuinely more capable than most of the cheaper options here, and it has by far the largest integration catalogue.

Where it's weak: price, at every size in this table. Essentials at 2,500 contacts is $45/month against EmailOctopus at $20. The free plan is also the most restrictive here by some distance — 250 contacts and 500 sends is a tenth of what EmailOctopus gives away.

If you're leaving: export before you cancel. Your campaign history and reporting don't come with you, and once the account is closed you can't go back for them.

EmailOctopus

Who it suits: someone sending a straightforward newsletter to fewer than 2,500 people who would rather not pay at all.

Where it's attractive: the free plan is the most generous in this comparison by a long way — 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, which is roughly ten times Mailchimp's contact limit and twenty times its send limit. If you've just hit Mailchimp's wall at 250 contacts, you would have to grow your list tenfold before EmailOctopus asks you for money. The paid tier is also the cheapest here at every size checked: $13.50 at 1,000 subscribers against $19 for both MailerLite and Benchmark, and $20 at 2,500 against $33 and $37.

Where it's weak: the free plan puts EmailOctopus branding on your emails, keeps your reports for only 30 days, and gives you one form, one landing page and one user, according to EmailOctopus’s pricing page. Those are the things Pro buys back. It's also a deliberately simpler product than Mailchimp — if you want branching, condition-heavy automation, this is not where you'll find it.

If you're switching: I couldn't establish from public documentation what EmailOctopus's import does with unsubscribed contacts or Mailchimp tags, and I haven't tested either in an account. That matters — see the migration section. The free-plan branding, too, is documented rather than observed in a received email.

MailerLite

Who it suits: someone who wants to move with the least manual work, and who's willing to pay for it fairly soon.

Where it's attractive: MailerLite is the only product here that publishes its own Mailchimp import guide. By MailerLite's documentation, the importer brings across subscribers along with their custom fields, creates MailerLite groups from your Mailchimp tags, and handles field-based segments. It can also optionally bring across contacts with Unsubscribed and Unconfirmed status, placing them in separate categories that cannot receive newsletters — which, as the migration section below explains, is the part of a move most likely to cause real trouble. The paid tiers are reasonable — $19 at 1,000 subscribers with 10,000 emails included — and it's a more polished product than its price suggests.

Where it's weak: the free plan is now 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails, which is no better than Mailchimp on contacts. If you're leaving Mailchimp because you hit 250 contacts, MailerLite's free plan does not solve your problem — you'd be paying from day one. Several published comparisons still quote an older, much more generous MailerLite free tier; the figures above are what its pricing page shows today.

A caution on the importer: it covers subscribers and simple structure. MailerLite states plainly that historical, behavioural and e-commerce segments cannot be migrated automatically, and that templates, forms, landing pages and automations have to be rebuilt by hand.

All of that is MailerLite's own account of its importer. I haven't run a Mailchimp account through it, so I can't say whether anything fails to arrive without warning, or confirm that unsubscribed contacts end up where the documentation says they will.

Benchmark

This is the one product in this article I actually signed up for. Everything below described as observed comes from a new free account I created on 12 September 2026 and used for two days. That's a single account over two days, not a review — but it settles several questions the documentation couldn't.

Who it suits: someone between roughly 250 and 500 contacts who wants a large free contact allowance, values a simple product over a powerful one, and either has a domain to verify or sends fewer than a thousand emails a month.

Where it's attractive: the free plan holds 500 contacts — double Mailchimp's and double MailerLite's — which lands exactly where a lot of people hit the Mailchimp wall. The account's billing page showed exactly that: a Free plan with a 500-contact allowance. For a list that has just outgrown Mailchimp's 250, that's the most directly useful free contact ceiling here.

Where it's weak: the paid tiers aren't competitive. $19 at 1,000 contacts matches MailerLite for the same send allowance and costs 40% more than EmailOctopus; $37 at 2,500 is more than both MailerLite and EmailOctopus charge at that size. If you expect to grow past the free plan soon, you're choosing a more expensive ladder. And on the free plan the send allowance, not the contact allowance, is what you'll hit first — 1,000 emails a month against 500 contacts, as the next section explains.

What a new free account actually shows. Benchmark's own pages disagree with each other about the free plan — the pricing page says 500 contacts and “up to 2,500” sends a month, a January 2026 knowledge-base article says 3,500 emails, and a June 2026 help-centre page says 525 contacts and splits the send limit by domain. Rather than pick whichever number suited the argument, I opened an account.

The Plans & Billing page of a new free account showed:

• Plan: Free
• Contacts: 500
• Emails (Shared Domain): 1,000
• and a reset notice: “Your send limit of 1,000 emails/month will reset on Oct 12, 2026.”

So the practical answer to the question the documentation muddles is 1,000, not 2,500 and not 3,500 — because a new account starts on Benchmark's shared sending domain, and that is the state most people signing up will be in.

That isn't a contradiction on Benchmark's part so much as an unlabelled condition. The tooltip next to the send allowance says so directly: “Shared domain sending limits are lower to maintain deliverability and platform reputation. Verify your domain to increase your sending limits.”

Two limits on what this establishes. First, these are the numbers the product displays. I didn't add a 501st contact or attempt a 1,001st send, so what happens at the boundary is still unknown — whether sending pauses the way Mailchimp's does, or something gentler. Second, no domain was verified, so what the raised allowance actually becomes is unconfirmed. Benchmark's pricing page says “up to 2,500”; that is reported here as Benchmark's claim, not as something I watched happen. The 2,500-versus-3,500 discrepancy between Benchmark's own pages remains unexplained, and nothing in the account explains 500 versus 525.

One small thing may be worth knowing if you go looking for other people's write-ups: the new account offers an explicit “Import from Benchmark Classic” route, so there are two Benchmark product experiences in circulation. Only the current one is covered here, and I'm not going to guess which of Benchmark's conflicting pages describes which — but if an older review of Benchmark doesn't match what you see on screen, that's a plausible reason to check before assuming the review is wrong.

What this means for you: if you don't have a domain you can verify, plan on 500 contacts and 1,000 emails a month. For a 400-person list that's two sends a month. If that's enough, Benchmark's free plan is the strongest free contact allowance here that doesn't put a vendor line in your footer. If you need to mail a 500-person list weekly, it isn't — look at EmailOctopus instead.

Importing contacts. I ran a 12-row synthetic test file through the CSV importer. Benchmark's pre-import review screen showed what it was about to do before it did it — 12 total, 11 new, 0 existing, 1 skipped — and the skipped row was the deliberately malformed address I'd planted. Eleven contacts landed, all Active.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it's a mistake I made myself: a column in your CSV that says a contact is unsubscribed does not make them unsubscribed. The test file had rows named to suggest unsubscribed and bounced contacts, with a status column saying as much. Every one of them imported as Active. Benchmark reads your file as contacts, not as statuses. Getting suppression right needs the specific mechanism described in the migration section below — not a well-labelled spreadsheet.

Sending, and who your email appears to come from. On the free shared-domain configuration, the From address I was given was a Benchmark-owned benchmarksend.com address, not my own. The Reply-To I configured — an ordinary Gmail address — was preserved, and the message arrived in Gmail showing the benchmarksend.com sender. If you care about your newsletter appearing to come from your own domain, that's the thing domain verification buys, and it's a presentation question as much as a limits question.

Branding. The free plan's main selling point against EmailOctopus is supposed to be that it doesn't stamp a vendor logo on your emails, so I checked. The one controlled test email, sent to a mailbox I own, arrived carrying the business identity configured in the account, a physical mailing address, an Unsubscribe link and a Report Abuse link — the required compliance footer. I didn't see a “Powered by Benchmark” line, a Benchmark logo, or Benchmark promotional footer content. That is one email from one free account, which is not a basis for saying “Benchmark never brands free emails.” But it's consistent with what the plan advertises, and it's more than can be said for any other free plan in this article, none of which were tested.

Brevo

Who it suits: someone with a large list who sends infrequently.

Where it's attractive: Brevo doesn't charge by list size. Starter is $9/month for 5,000 emails a month, and that price doesn't move as your contacts grow. If you have 4,000 subscribers and mail them once a quarter, every contact-priced product here will charge you for storing 4,000 people; Brevo charges you for the sends.

Where it's weak: the free plan's limit is 300 emails per day, and it's a hard daily cap rather than a monthly pool. That matters more than it first appears — if you have 500 subscribers, you cannot send one newsletter to all of them in a single day on the free plan. Reaching all of them would take two days. Free-plan emails also carry Brevo branding; removing it is what Starter buys.

There's one more gate worth knowing: according to Brevo’s pricing-page FAQ, a new free account can upload contacts immediately but can only start sending once Brevo approves the account. Plan for that if you're migrating against a deadline. I haven't opened a Brevo account, so how long approval takes — and how the daily cap handles a send that's too big for it — are both untested.

What I couldn't verify: Brevo's official contact allowance on the free plan. Third-party comparisons quote figures in the tens of thousands, but no Brevo-owned page found in this research pass states one, so this article doesn't print a number it can't stand behind.

What switching actually costs

The subscription price is the easy part. This is the part that decides whether moving is worth it.

Your contacts move fine

Every product here imports a CSV. MailerLite can pull directly from Mailchimp. Benchmark accepts CSV, XLS and TXT with column-to-field mapping. This step is genuinely straightforward and usually takes minutes.

For Benchmark specifically, that's confirmed hands-on: a 12-row test file imported in under a minute, with a review screen that showed the counts — new, existing, skipped — before committing, and a malformed address correctly skipped rather than silently mangled. I haven't run the same file through the other importers.

Your unsubscribes are the part that can get you in trouble

This is the most important paragraph in this article.

A full Mailchimp audience export gives you subscribed, unsubscribed and cleaned (bounced) contacts as separate files. Keep those groups separate, and import the unsubscribed and bounced addresses into the new platform as a suppression list, not as active contacts — the same approach Mailchimp’s own help documentation recommends for contacts arriving in Mailchimp.

If you export everything into one file and import it as your new list, you will email people who explicitly opted out. That is a compliance problem, not a tidiness problem, and it's also the fastest way to generate spam complaints on a brand-new sending reputation — at exactly the moment you can least afford them.

Benchmark documents a Master Unsubscribe List that this maps onto. MailerLite's Mailchimp importer can bring unsubscribed contacts across into separate categories that cannot be mailed, which is the behaviour you want. For EmailOctopus and Brevo, I couldn't establish the equivalent from public documentation.

I tested this on Benchmark, and it works — but only if you use the right control. Two findings, and the order matters.

The first is the trap, and I walked into it twice. The first test file carried a status column marking some rows unsubscribed and others bounced, with contact names to match. Every one of them imported as Active. Then came a second, smaller file of addresses intended for suppression — and, because I didn't select the relevant import option, those arrived Active too.

Neither was the product misbehaving. Both times I had described the contacts as unsubscribed to myself and not to Benchmark. Nothing in a CSV's contents tells an email platform that a row is suppressed — not the column names, not the values in them. That instruction comes from the import option you choose, and if you don't choose it you have just loaded opted-out addresses into a mailable list. This is the exact failure the paragraph above warns about, it produces no error message, and it is easy to walk into while believing you've handled it.

The second finding is the mechanism that actually does the job. Benchmark's import flow offers an option to “Unsubscribe all contacts in file.” I took the three contacts that were by then sitting in the account as Active, re-imported the same three addresses with that option selected, and watched the account go from 15 active of 15 total to 12 active of 15 total. All three showed a status of Unsubscribed, with updated timestamps. They stayed in the account as records — which is what a suppression list is for — but left the mailable population.

So for Benchmark, a Mailchimp suppression migration has a real path: export your unsubscribed and bounced contacts as their own file, import that file with the unsubscribe-all option selected, and verify your active count drops by what you expect. The scope of that test is three synthetic addresses in one account, moved from Active to Unsubscribed. I didn't test it at list scale, or test whether importing unknown addresses with that option pre-suppresses them before they ever subscribe.

None of this has been tested on the other three platforms. MailerLite's handling of unsubscribed contacts is documented but unverified; for EmailOctopus and Brevo, the question is open on both counts. Whichever you move to, find its own suppression control before you import anything, and don't rely on a status column in your file to do that job.

Your automations do not move. Anywhere.

No platform here imports another platform's automations. Every workflow you've built gets rebuilt by hand. For a simple welcome email that's twenty minutes. For a multi-branch sequence with conditions and delays, it is the single largest cost of switching, and it's the reason “stay on Mailchimp” is a legitimate answer for some readers.

The same applies to anything behavioural. MailerLite's importer handles basic segments filtered on static fields; segments built on engagement history or purchase behaviour have to be recreated.

Tags and groups: partly documented

MailerLite's importer creates groups from your Mailchimp tags. For the others, how tags survive an import is not documented publicly and needs checking against a real export.

Your history doesn't come with you

Past campaigns, open and click history, subscriber engagement records — none of it transfers to any platform here, as far as public documentation goes. Whatever reporting you want to keep, export it before you close the old account. Worth noting: EmailOctopus's free plan only keeps reports for 30 days anyway, so if long-term reporting matters to you, that's a reason to be on Pro.

You will have to redo sender authentication

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate their domains — SPF and DKIM records plus a DMARC policy (see Gmail’s sender guidelines and Yahoo’s sender best practices). That authentication is specific to the platform doing the sending, so moving platforms means doing it again, in your domain's DNS.

Two practical consequences. First, budget an hour and access to your DNS. Second — and this catches people out — if your first sends from the new platform land in spam, the cause is often incomplete DNS setup rather than the platform being worse. Finish authentication before you judge deliverability.

Forms and templates

Signup forms are quick to rebuild and usually improved by the exercise. Templates generally need recreating; whether an HTML template can be pasted across varies, and I haven't verified it per platform.

To be clear about what's established here: the suppression-list risk, the sender-authentication requirement, and the fact that automations don't transfer are documented. The claim that complex segments need rebuilding is documented for MailerLite specifically. The Benchmark import and suppression behaviour described above is tested hands-on, on one account, at the small scale stated. Anything described above as untested is not verified and shouldn't be treated as though it were.

Which one should you actually look at

Starting points, not instructions. Your situation decides.

You're under 250 contacts and Mailchimp is working. Stay. You'd spend a weekend migrating to save nothing.

You want the largest free allowance and can live with vendor branding on your emails. Look at EmailOctopus first. 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month free covers most small senders, and if you outgrow it, its paid pricing is the cheapest here.

You want the move itself to be as painless as possible. Look at MailerLite. It's the only one that documents a Mailchimp importer of its own. But check its free plan against your list size first — at 250 subscribers it probably won't cover you, so price the Comfort tier honestly.

You're between 250 and 500 contacts and don't want vendor branding. Look at Benchmark — and read its free-plan section above before you commit. The contact allowance is the real 500 the pricing page promises, but a new account sends on a shared domain with 1,000 emails a month, not 2,500. Work out how many sends your list actually needs per month before you move; if it's comfortably under a thousand, or you have a domain to verify, this is the free plan to beat.

Your list is large but you send rarely. Look at Brevo. Send-based pricing can be dramatically cheaper for that pattern. Check the 300-a-day free cap against your list size, and don't count on sending the day you sign up.

You have Mailchimp automations you'd have to rebuild. Price your own time into the comparison. Mailchimp Essentials at $26.50/month is $318 a year; if migrating costs you two days of rebuilding workflows and a month of deliverability wobble, staying can be the cheaper decision.

You're moving mainly because Mailchimp annoyed you. Fair enough — but run the numbers on the tier you'd actually land on, not the promotional price on the pricing page.

What this is based on, and what it isn't

It's worth being exact about this, because most comparison articles are not.

This version is based on: current official pricing pages and plan documentation from each provider, checked on 12 September 2026; official migration and import documentation; and each provider's own published plan limits. Where two of a provider's own pages disagreed — which happened with Benchmark — the article shows both rather than picking one.

Plus, for Benchmark only, hands-on testing. I created a free Benchmark account on 12 September 2026 and used it for two days. In that account I read the displayed plan limits, imported a 12-row synthetic test file, imported a second three-address file and then re-imported it using the unsubscribe-all option, and sent exactly one campaign to a mailbox I control. No real subscriber received anything. Wherever this article describes something observed on Benchmark, that's what it rests on.

What that testing was not. One account, two days, synthetic contacts, one email. The account was never pushed to its contact or send ceiling, so the limits quoted are the ones Benchmark displays, not ones I watched being enforced. No sending domain was verified, so what the send allowance becomes afterwards is unknown. One received email is not a branding audit, and one send is not a deliverability test.

This version is not based on: hands-on use of the other four products. I haven't run an identical list through each importer, built the same automation five times, compared the editors side by side, tested deliverability, or contacted five support teams with the same question. Nothing here should be read as a verdict on how Mailchimp, MailerLite, EmailOctopus or Brevo feels to use — and the Benchmark testing above deliberately doesn't give Benchmark a better write-up than the others, only a better-evidenced one. I've been careful not to let “the one I tested” become “the one I recommend.”

Wherever this article says something hasn't been tested, that's a place where testing would change or confirm what's written. Better to show you the gaps than write around them.

Deliverability specifically: this article makes no claims. Inbox placement depends on your list quality, your sending history, and your domain authentication at least as much as on your provider, and anyone presenting a deliverability league table from a handful of test sends is telling you more than they know.

Prices change. All figures were read from the providers' own pricing pages on 12 September 2026, using regular monthly billing as the basis. Promotional pricing and annual-prepay pricing are labelled separately wherever they appear. Check the current price before you buy — particularly with Mailchimp, where the promotional rate and the regular rate differ by a factor of two.

Sources

Vendor pages as read for this article on 12 September 2026. The links go to each page as it stands now, which may no longer match what is quoted here. The Benchmark observations above come from my own test account and have no external source.

• Mailchimp: pricing · viewing and exporting contacts · importing suppression lists
• MailerLite: pricing · how to switch from Mailchimp to MailerLite
• EmailOctopus: pricing
• Benchmark: pricing · Free Starter Plan (knowledge base) · Subscription Plans (help centre) · Master Unsubscribe List · accepted list formats
• Brevo: pricing and FAQ
• Sender authentication: Gmail email sender guidelines · Yahoo sender best practices

Prices retrieved 12 September 2026. Errors are corrected when found.