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Is Mailchimp still free?

Mailchimp's Free plan today: 250 contacts, 500 sends a month, API and webhook limits, how it got here, and developer-friendly alternatives.

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VeloCMS

Yes, technically. Mailchimp still sells a Free plan, but it now stops at 250 contacts, 500 emails a month and 250 a day, with one seat, one audience, Mailchimp branding on your emails and no automation flows. Cross the contact cap and Mailchimp puts a hold on sending until you upgrade or shrink the list. For a developer, that makes it fine for wiring up a signup form against a prototype, and not much more: webhooks (according to the help center), transactional email and any newsletter that goes out weekly to more than about a hundred people all sit on paid plans.

Everything below was read from Mailchimp's own pages on 2026-10-23, except some plan history that only exists in third-party coverage (labelled where it appears). After the plan itself: the API and webhook details that matter when you build on it, what a small project would pay over a year, and the alternatives, judged from a developer's chair.

Disclosure: I work on VeloCMS, a hosted blog CMS with a built-in newsletter. It is one of ten products here, it has no free plan, and I've written up its weak spots the same way as everyone else's.

Last verified: 2026-10-23.

A note on method: several pricing pages open in local currency (Mailchimp showed pounds, so I switched it to USD). Unless I say otherwise, figures are USD, monthly billing, before tax.

What does Mailchimp's Free plan include today?

Mailchimp's pricing page and its free plan help article agree on the numbers. Here is the plan as they describe it:

  • Contacts: up to 250
  • Sends: 500 per month, with a ceiling of 250 per day
  • Seats and audiences: one seat (with Owner permissions), one audience
  • Branding: Mailchimp branding stays; "Remove Mailchimp Branding" is listed as not included
  • Templates: a limited set of prebuilt ones; custom-coded templates show as "Create, upgrade to send"
  • Left out: marketing automation flows, email scheduling, dynamic content, custom reports, role-based access, the SMS add-on and the generative AI features
  • Included: popup forms (marked "Included" on the pricing table, though a footnote calls them a beta with "very limited availability"), 300+ integrations, basic reporting, and trial access to landing pages and forms (that last wording is from the help article)
  • Support: email support for the first 30 days, per the pricing page
  • Regions: not stated on either page

I found no country carve-out on either page. The pricing page does say SMS is available "in select markets" on paid plans, so Mailchimp evidently spells out regional limits when it has them (my inference, not a promise of worldwide availability).

Do the arithmetic before you plan around it. The 500-a-month send cap bites long before the 250-contact cap if you mail on a schedule. A weekly newsletter sends four times in a typical month, so 125 subscribers uses the whole allowance (4 x 125 = 500). In a month with five send days, the limit is 100 subscribers. A fortnightly newsletter gets roughly 250 subscribers out of two sends.

How does Mailchimp count contacts against the limit?

This is the part that surprises people. The help article defines a contact as an individual member of your audience, and says subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward the total. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts don't. The article describes the limit as the most contacts you can store at any point during your billing cycle, so I'd assume a spike counts even if you tidy up afterwards.

A separate article on non-subscribed contacts confirms they count toward the contact limit too. As I read it, these are people kept in the audience without marketing consent, which can happen when an integration syncs customers over. If you push rows from your app database into Mailchimp, check what status your sync assigns, because a contact that never opted in can still use up the allowance.

Mailchimp's legacy pricing FAQ explains where this comes from: accounts created on or after May 15, 2019 moved to "whole audience" pricing, where unsubscribed people stay in the billable total. The practical effect: 220 happy readers plus 40 people who unsubscribed is 260 contacts, over the cap, and sending stops. The fix is to archive the unsubscribed, which takes them out of the count (the help article says archived contacts don't count toward your total).

What has changed about the free plan over the years?

Mailchimp's own help center documents one date. Third-party coverage fills in the rest, and the sources disagree in places.

  • May 15, 2019 (Mailchimp's FAQ): the whole-audience structure applied to new accounts. The FAQ describes the legacy Free plan as 12,000 monthly sends and 2,000 contacts.
  • 2022 or early 2023 (third parties, not Mailchimp): the contact cap fell from 2,000 to 500. EmailOctopus, an email-platform competitor, dates it to 2022 and says the send cap later dropped from 2,500 to 1,000. A North Carolina State University IT notice says the 500-contact limit started on "Friday, March 10" (the notice is dated February 15, 2023, which fits 2023). I couldn't find Mailchimp's own announcement, so treat the exact date as unresolved.
  • Mid-January 2026, effective 17 February 2026 (a Sage community post): free accounts limited to 250 contacts, 500 emails a month and a daily maximum of 250, with sending paused for accounts over the contact limit. EmailOctopus gives the previous figures as 500 contacts and 1,000 sends.
  • June 22, 2026 (Mailchimp, developer-facing): new API keys began expiring after a year. More on that below.

Stack the figures and the direction is plain. The legacy plan Mailchimp's FAQ describes (2,000 contacts, 12,000 sends) against today's (250, 500) is an eightfold cut in contacts and a 24-fold cut in sends. Assume the limits can move again.

Can you use the Mailchimp API on the free plan?

Probably yes for the basics, with a caveat I'll come back to. The Marketing API root page documents no plan restriction, and the account object it returns can report forever_free as a plan type, so free accounts are a first-class citizen of the API. I haven't made calls from a Free account, and individual features are gated (automation flows are paid, per the pricing page), so test your exact endpoints before you commit.

Authentication is an API key sent as a bearer token, or OAuth. Mailchimp's API key article has several details worth knowing before you write a line of integration code:

  • Keys grant full access to the account, so Mailchimp suggests one key per integration.
  • Effective June 22, 2026, any new key expires one year after creation. Keys made before that date are unaffected. Put the renewal in a calendar, or your newsletter signup will fail silently in a year.
  • The full key appears once, and a revoked key can't be restored.
  • Mailchimp "doesn't support client-side implementation of our API using CORS requests". So a static site can't post to the API directly; you need a small server function in between, or you use Mailchimp's hosted or embedded forms instead.

The rate limit documentation is short. The Marketing API allows 10 simultaneous connections, per user rather than per key, and you get a 429 when you hit it. Calls time out at 120 seconds. The Batch endpoint adds its own limit: at most 500 pending batch webhook events per user, and a new batch beyond that also gets a 429. It's a concurrency cap, not requests per minute, so a parallel import script is what trips it.

Webhooks are where I'd be careful. The developer webhook guide lists no plan requirement. It says Mailchimp cancels a delivery if your endpoint takes more than 10 seconds, retries over 75 minutes at increasing intervals, and returns a signing_secret when you create a webhook, shown once. But the help center's About Webhooks says you must be on Standard or Premium, and that Free and Essentials users can set a webhook up but have to upgrade before it's enabled. Two official pages, two answers. I'd plan on webhooks being a paid feature until a test on a Free account proves otherwise.

What about transactional email?

If your side project needs password resets or receipts, the Free plan won't help. Mailchimp Transactional (formerly Mandrill) is a separate product, and its pricing page says it's an add-on to the Standard and Premium plans or the legacy Monthly plan. Essentials isn't eligible. It's sold in blocks of 25,000 emails at $20 a block for the first 20 blocks, with an optional dedicated IP at $29.95 a month. New users get up to 500 free sends to a verified domain, with restrictions.

By my arithmetic, the cheapest current route in is Standard (the pricing page shows it starting at $20 a month) plus one $20 block, so about $40 a month before you've sent a marketing email. If transactional mail is the whole need, that's a lot to pay for the bundle. The alternatives section covers sending-only services.

What happens when you hit the limit?

On the Free plan, the help article says a hold is placed on sending live and test emails until you upgrade or cut your contact total. You can still edit emails and templates and collect and import contacts. Nothing is deleted, nothing is billed. Your readers just stop getting mail.

Paid monthly plans behave differently. The plans article says going over your contact limit adds a charge to your bill and that Mailchimp won't interrupt service. Monthly send limits are tied to your contact tier (10 times for Essentials, 12 times for Standard, 15 times for Premium), and the pricing page footnote says overages apply when you exceed them. I couldn't find the overage rate. For a developer, the takeaway is that Free fails closed and paid fails open, which suits a production signup flow far better.

When does free stop being free?

Here's a made-up but plausible path for a developer's weekly newsletter, so you can see where the bill starts. It's my arithmetic, not a statistic. Assume four sends a month, no unsubscribed contacts inflating the count, and a list that grows through the year but stays under 500: 100 subscribers in months 1 to 3, 400 in months 4 to 9 and 480 in months 10 to 12. I kept it under 500 on purpose, because that is the only range where I could confirm each vendor's starting price on its own page; I couldn't read the higher contact bands from Mailchimp's pricing page, so I haven't priced them.

On Mailchimp, months 1 to 3 fit the Free plan (400 sends a month, under the 500 cap). From month 4 you're past 250 contacts, so you move to a paid plan. The pricing page shows Standard starting at $20 a month and Essentials at $13 a month (both starting prices, which I'm taking to cover the 0 to 500 contact band). Nine paid months come to:

  • Mailchimp Essentials: $117 for the year (9 x $13)
  • Mailchimp Standard (the cheapest plan with webhooks, per the help center): $180 (9 x $20)
  • MailerLite Comfort: $108 (the free plan covers months 1 to 3; Comfort "starts at $12" a month, which I'm treating as the entry tier for up to 500 subscribers)
  • Brevo Starter: $81 (Free covers months 1 to 3; from month 4 a single send to 400 people exceeds the 300-a-day Free cap unless you split it across two days, and Starter is $9 a month at 5,000 emails, which allows up to 500 contacts)
  • Resend marketing: $0 (the Free tier covers up to 1,000 contacts)
  • Kit: $0 (free up to 10,000 subscribers, but no automations and Kit branding stays)
  • Amazon SES sending only: about $1.66 (16,560 emails at $0.10 per 1,000), plus whatever you spend to run a list tool and a server
  • VeloCMS Pro: $108 on monthly billing (12 x $9, ignoring the 14-day trial), and that bundles a blog, which you may not want

Most of that spread isn't price per subscriber. It's what each plan counts and what it locks. Mailchimp counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts, while MailerLite's FAQ says unsubscribed and bounced subscribers don't count (though it uses a cumulative count within each billing cycle). A real Mailchimp list is usually bigger than the number of people reading it, and the list above ignores that.

What are the developer-friendly alternatives?

The ones below are chosen for how they behave when you build on them, not for who has the nicest editor. Every price and limit was read from the vendor's own page today.

MailerLite

MailerLite's Free plan allows 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with two seats, three automations of up to five steps, one website and one landing page. The paid plans are Comfort (from $12 a month at 500 subscribers on monthly billing) and Power (from $25). Its API is documented at developers.mailerlite.com: a global limit of 120 requests per minute, rate-limit headers in responses, and a separate 5-per-minute limit on import endpoints.

The catch for developers is that the pricing page marks the API, MCP server and webhooks as "Limited" on Free, and its FAQ says sending through the API isn't available there. So you can read and manage subscribers but not send from code until you pay. When a free account passes 250 active subscribers, campaigns and automations lock.

Brevo

Brevo's Free plan sends up to 300 emails a day. Brevo's own developer pages describe the Free plan as including its REST API, an SMTP relay and outbound webhooks, which makes Brevo the one platform here that covers both marketing and app mail without an add-on (I read these on Brevo's marketing pages and haven't tested them from a Free account). The Starter plan is $9 a month at 5,000 emails; Brevo's machine-readable pricing doc lists contact caps tied to the email tier: 500 contacts at 5,000 emails, 1,500 at 10,000 and 2,500 at 15,000.

The weaknesses are the daily cap and the branding. Three hundred a day means a single campaign to 1,000 people can't go out in one day on Free. On Starter, removing the Brevo logo is a paid add-on ($12 a month on monthly billing, per the pricing doc).

Kit

Kit's Free plan is the most generous on list size: up to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited broadcasts, landing pages and forms. It leaves out the visual automation builder and email sequences, and Kit branding stays until you pay. Creator is $33 a month with yearly billing ($390 up front) at 1,000 subscribers.

For developers, the open question is the API. Kit's API reference says access works "as long as the authenticated account's plan is eligible," and links to pricing without naming the eligible plans. I couldn't confirm that Free qualifies. Ask before you build on it.

Buttondown

Buttondown is a small newsletter tool that charges nothing for your first 100 subscribers and then scales by active subscriber count. The base price includes a markdown or rich text editor, sending from a custom domain and hosted archives. Add-ons are priced separately: automations are +$29 a month, tagging and segmentation +$9, paid subscriptions +$9. The prices assume at most one email a day to your whole list.

There's a REST API, but the pricing page doesn't say which tier includes it, and the vendor's llms.txt describes a different, older-looking plan structure from the pricing page. Treat API availability as unconfirmed.

listmonk (self-hosted)

listmonk is a self-hosted newsletter manager: a single Go binary plus PostgreSQL, licensed AGPL v3 per its GitHub repository. Subscribers, lists, campaigns, analytics and templating (Go templates) are built in, and it supports multiple SMTP queues with rate limiting. Its API uses basic auth or a token header, with users and roles managed in the admin.

You pay in operations, not dollars. You run the server and the database, you take on deliverability by choosing an SMTP provider, and the project's site currently advertises a v7 beta as the latest release. It's an excellent fit for developers who want no per-subscriber pricing and are happy to maintain a service.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails, plus extra for attachments, and new AWS customers can get up to $200 in Free Tier credits. It's a sending service rather than a newsletter product, so pair it with listmonk or your own list code. The catch is the sandbox: new accounts can only send to verified addresses, at 200 messages per 24 hours and one per second, until you request production access, and AWS says its first response takes up to 96 hours (docs). You also own bounce and complaint handling.

Resend

Resend is an email API with two pricing sides. Transactional: Free is 3,000 emails a month with a 100-a-day limit, Pro is $20 a month for 50,000. Marketing: Free covers 1,000 contacts, and Pro marketing is $40 a month for 5,000 contacts; the page says marketing plans are limited by contacts, not by emails sent. Its comparison lists a RESTful API and an SMTP relay, and the transactional Pro tier lists five webhook endpoints.

The trade-offs: the free daily cap constrains bursts, the segment count is limited on Free (three), and Resend isn't a full marketing suite, so don't expect a visual journey builder. I'd also note, in the interest of disclosure, that VeloCMS delivers its newsletters through Resend.

Postmark

Postmark focuses on transactional mail. The Developer plan is free at 100 emails a month with no expiry, Basic is $15 a month at the 10,000-email setting (extra emails $1.80 per 1,000), and Pro at $16.50 adds inbound email processing. Its comparison lists a REST API, SMTP and batch sending, and shows no daily email limit on any plan.

That makes it a strong answer to "I just need reliable app mail," and a poor answer to "I need a newsletter with a list UI." Its Free tier is a testing allowance, not a working one.

VeloCMS

VeloCMS is a hosted blog CMS with a newsletter inside it, and the entry here that is not like the others. There is no free plan; every plan starts with a 14-day trial that takes a card (unless you hold a cardless trial code), with the first charge on day 15. Pro is $9 a month and includes newsletter sending with tag segmentation, up to 5,000 subscribers, membership, a custom domain and API access at 10,000 calls a day. Business is $29 a month and adds a custom sender domain for email.

Its limits matter to developers. It's not open source and you can't self-host it. Its public v1 API has routes for posts, members, products, comments, media, site settings and webhooks, and I didn't find an endpoint that sends a newsletter campaign. The automation editor is a basic trigger-plus-delay builder rather than a branching journey tool. If you already have a site elsewhere, adopting VeloCMS means moving the site, not just the list.

Which option fits which developer?

  • Mailchimp: best for someone who wants one vendor for campaigns, automations and a mature API, and will pay Standard prices for it.
  • MailerLite: best for a small list that wants Mailchimp-style features at a lower monthly figure and doesn't need API sends on the free tier.
  • Brevo: best for developers who need marketing and transactional email from one account, and can live with a daily cap on Free.
  • Kit: best for creators who want a very large free list and don't need automations until they sell something.
  • Buttondown: best for writers who like markdown and a small independent vendor, once the API tier is confirmed.
  • listmonk: best for developers who want to own the stack and pay per server rather than per subscriber.
  • Amazon SES: best as the cheap sending layer under your own code or listmonk.
  • Resend: best for API-first sending with a usable free tier, plus a growing broadcast side.
  • Postmark: best for dependable transactional delivery.
  • VeloCMS: best for a writer or small team who wants a blog, membership and a newsletter under one login and doesn't need the source or a free tier.

When is VeloCMS the wrong choice?

For this question, quite often. If your reason for asking is "I want free," it isn't free. If you want to own and audit the code, it's closed and hosted only. If you need to trigger campaigns from your own application, I couldn't find a send endpoint in its public API, and Brevo, MailerLite (on paid plans), Resend or listmonk are better fits. If your list belongs to an existing app on another stack, a standalone tool is less migration than a new CMS.

FAQ

Is Mailchimp's free plan really free?

Yes, there's no charge, within 250 contacts, 500 monthly sends and 250 daily sends. Exceeding the contact limit places a hold on sending rather than billing you (Mailchimp help).

Do unsubscribed people count toward the 250 contacts?

Yes. Mailchimp's help article says subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count; archived, cleaned and deleted ones don't.

Does the free plan include automations?

No. The pricing page lists marketing automation flows, email scheduling and dynamic content as not included on Free.

Can I send transactional email from Mailchimp's free plan?

Not through Mailchimp Transactional. It's an add-on to Standard and Premium or the legacy Monthly plan, and Essentials isn't eligible (pricing page).

Do Mailchimp API keys expire?

New ones do. Effective June 22, 2026, any API key you generate expires one year after creation; earlier keys aren't affected (help center).

Is there a free alternative with no subscriber limit?

Self-hosting listmonk has no per-subscriber fee (AGPL v3, plus your own server and an SMTP provider), and Kit's Free plan goes to 10,000 subscribers with limits on automations. No hosted service I checked is unlimited and free.

Last verified: 2026-10-23. Pricing pages and limits change often, so check the linked vendor pages before you commit.

Sources

Official vendor pages, all accessed 2026-10-23:

Third-party reporting used only for the history section (not Mailchimp's own words):

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