Mailchimp is one of the oldest and most popular email marketing tools. They’re also famous for their pioneering ‘freemium’ plan, the free plan which allowed those new to email marketing to get set up for free – that was until it was severely restricted earlier this month. It was great while it lasted.
Mailchimp quick review
Mailchimp started its journey as an email marketing tool in 2001 under the leadership of Ben Chestnut, Dan Kurzius, and Mark Armstrong.
With low competition in the market in the early 2000s and them offering a simple yet quality product with a great free plan, they quickly grew to become first choice for small businesses starting their email marketing journey.
It has all the features you’d need for starting out, such as segmentation, automation, sign-up forms, and much more.
Over the years they’ve also increased the number of features, beyond the essentials. Extras, like transactional mail or multivariate testing, coming at an extra cost.
And while the free plan was a great intro, and initially unique in its nature. Recently Mailchimp has been aggressively limiting their free plan, reducing the number of the contacts you can store, all while increasing the prices of their paid plans dramatically.
Current pricing: Mailchimp comes with a free plan allowing you to send 1000 emails to 500 subscribers. The paid plan for 500 subscribers will cost you $9.99/mo, which comes with some additional features. You have to shell out $299/mo. (10000 subscribers) to unlock all their features.
Mailchimp pricing changes over time
Having been around for 20 years, it’s no surprise that there’s been a number of price tweaks throughout the years.
In the year of 2019, Mailchimp had a generous free plan which allowed you to send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free. Their paid plans started from as little as $10 if you need extra functionality.
In the same year of 2019, they decided to revamp their pricing and features where they added an additional plan which had some extra features. The pricing was completely changed and became more expensive.
Not much of changes occurred from 2020 to 2021, except one major being that the free plan got an email send limit reduced from 12,000 to 10,000 though the allowed subscribers count remained the same.
The biggest change in the pricing structure occurred in early 2022, just after their acquisition by the TurboTax owner Intuit. The January 2022 change saw dramatically increased prices and added several limitations to their free plan. The most notable one being limiting the number of subscribers to 500 in their free plan – almost a 75% reduction in the offering.
Less than 12-months after that change, the intention to sunset the free plan became clear. With the email send limit reduced a further 50% or so. Reducing it from 2,500 sends per month down to only 1,000 – only enough for the newest of people to email marketing.
Impact of these changes
For budget conscious free users, Mailchimp is becoming less and less usable. 12 months ago you could happily send thousands of emails to up to 2,000 contacts. Today, Mailchimp gives you no option but to upgrade to a costly paid plan. That same free plan in 2021, would now cost you around $400 per year.
That leaves those with just 2 choices, either upgrade to the expensive paid plan or switch to another email marketing tool like EmailOctopus, which comes with an industry leading free plan where you can send 10,000 emails per month and receive live chat support.
If you are already a paid user, then you need to ask yourself – does the higher pricing justify the offering?
We may not be the most independent of arbitrators, but it’s highly recommended that you switch to a platform like EmailOctopus, which retains all of the features whilst costing you absolutely nothing.
Quick review of EmailOctopus: feature-rich, simple and affordable
EmailOctopus is an affordable email marketing tool which lets you reach you email marketing goals without hurting your pocket. The key idea is to make email marketing easy – both in terms of ease-of-use and budget.
With all of the essential features, EmailOctopus allows you to create and manage your email marketing campaigns in minutes. It is built with a focus on simplicity, while providing a wide range of features for even the most advanced of email marketers.
With EmailOctopus, you can create beautiful and responsive email templates, easily segment your contact lists, and track the performance of your campaigns. You can also integrate EmailOctopus with a range of third-party applications, making it a great choice.
Overall, EmailOctopus is a great choice for businesses that want to create and manage their email marketing campaigns easily. It is simple to use and provides a wide range of features, making it an exceptional choice for businesses of all sizes.
Some notable features of EmailOctopus:
1/ Drag and drop email editor
3/ Landing Page Builder
4/ Subscription forms
5/ Friendly support
Pricing: EmailOctopus comes with a free plan which allows you to send 10,000 emails to 2,500 subscribers for free. The Pro plan for 2,500 subscribers will cost you $14/mo. which comes with a few additional features.
Conclusion
Mailchimp will continue to make changes to their pricing and that has been clear in past years – it’s now a decision whether to stick with them or not.
If you are looking to save money, while receiving incredible support across all plans why not give EmailOctopus a try. You can see how our pricing stacks up to Mailchimp and the competition using our savings calculator.
No Comments
Leave a comment Cancel