If price is your only concern, you can do mail merges for free and just have your Outlook send the emails for you. But I think you would be underestimating the value of an ESP:<p>- Establishing trust is <i>everything</i> for email. Even outside of traditional spam filters, you need to stay outside of clutter or bulk filters as well. Mailchimp does such a good job of cleaning their instance of spammers and spam traps that their IP addresses are pretty trusted by inboxes. When you pay for Mailchimp, you are piggy backing on their reputation.<p>- Compliance is important and getting more important. It's real nice to just have a service like Mailchimp just handle liability and you don't need to worry about lawyers.<p>- UX. Consumers are familiar with Mailchimp and the subscription settings, etc. Not a big deal, but a nice way to establish trust.<p>But to more of a point, if you are taking on the responsibility of handling a database of <i>thousands of people</i>, is $30 a month really too expensive a price?