Mailchimp's pricing

Some clients of mine left mailchimp for this very reason (and because the web style editor wasn&#x27;t great, but mostly pricing).<p>You start on a free plan, and get 2000 users, you hit that limit, and are considering moving up, then realise that their lowest plan is actually <i>below</i> the number of users on the free plan - you have to go up to the 5th plan to actually get over 2000 users again. The limits are pretty low and the costs mount steeply, but the worst thing was not having a clear first step <i>up</i> from the free plan.<p>They also have an insane number of plans.

A few things here that I think most are missing:<p>1. Mailchimp is targeted (and priced for) the small business. Most small businesses aren&#x27;t going to have lists more than a few thousand, which means most of Mailchimp&#x27;s customers are going to be paying less than 50ish bucks a month.<p>2. If you&#x27;ve got thousands and thousands of emails to send, and are paying multiple thousands of dollars to mailchimp each month, you&#x27;re probably just going to use mandrill and hire a dev to help you out there.<p>3. For those customers that are spending larger amounrd (500-1000 bucks a month?), they&#x27;re going to marketing managers at midsize businesses who would never get IT love and can easily justify the purchase against conversions to sales.<p>4. Lastly, most people who use mailchimp send more than 1 email a month, therefore, most of the commentary surrounding the pricing divided by one send a month isn&#x27;t really accurate.

Sorry for the shameless plug: I have been developing my own email marketing platform, primarily because I felt that the editor to create emails of some large providers was not easy enough for many people to use.<p>I haven&#x27;t posted it to HN before, and so far have only shown it to friends and clients. Please sign up (free trial) and see what you think?<p><a href="https://emailhamster.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emailhamster.com&#x2F;</a>

Their main pricing page, <a href="http://mailchimp.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailchimp.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>, is much better from a marketing and sales standpoint. I&#x27;m surprised they even provide a link to the &quot;all&quot; page since it probably doesn&#x27;t apply to 99% of their potential customers.

If an infinite number of monkeys type on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually one of them will write an infinitely scrolling, infinitely minute &amp; obtuse pricing list.<p>Pardon the snark; This week I have to move a client off of MC because their WYSIWYG style editor is practically useless. Anyone with a recommended service?

I thought that there was a strange bug on this page, look at the ridicules price hikes.<p>501 - 1,000 $15 1,001 - 1,050 $20<p>5$ for 50 mails ..... 10 cent per email wow, I think you could get a better deal at the post office :)

I think I would much rather roll out my own solution using Mailgun&#x2F;Amazon&#x27;s API with a basic RoR&#x2F;Golang prototype than use these shady monkeys.<p>It&#x27;s their business and they have every right to price it the way they see it fit, but when there&#x27;s something deceptive going on, as an end user I think I have every reason to point it out.<p>For example, when you start with a free plan and you decide to upgrade to a paid plan, you actually need to go about 5 levels to actually get over 2000 users! And it&#x27;s not pretty cheap either. I mean $100k to send just emails? (Keep scrolling down)<p>I once used them when Feedburner bailed out on us, only to never look back at these monkeys (that&#x27;s their trademarked mascot) and I rolled out my own basic solution on my VPS in just good old PHP (with Wordpress) and it worked well. And I definitely didn&#x27;t spend $5 for 50 emails, just $20 for my basic Linode.

A slider for email volume vs price would have been nice.

MailChimp are just spam enablers. The vast majority of e-mail I get from them is to e-mail addresses that definitely never ever signed up for anything. They claim they use double opt in, but that&#x27;s just a damn dirty lie.<p>Furthermore, they are past masters at helping their spammers craft their spam to defeat SpamAssassin and baysian filters, so the spam that actually makes it to my inbox is disproportionately from them. It&#x27;s got so bad that I&#x27;ve got special mail server rules that focus on just them.

I think the real thing here is:<p>0 - 500 $10 unlimited<p>501 - 1,000 $15<p>1,001 - 1,050 $20 &#x2F;&#x2F; $5 = 50 emails<p>1,051 - 1,150 $25 &#x2F;&#x2F;$5 = 100 emails<p>1,151 - 2,500 $30 &#x2F;&#x2F;$5 = 1350 emails<p>2,501 - 2,600 $35 &#x2F;&#x2F; $5 = 100 emails

What are we expected to discuss here? I do not see anything wrong with this page.

Hey guys since we&#x27;re in theme, can we get some feedback on our pricing <a href="https://www.mailjet.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mailjet.com&#x2F;pricing</a><p>- Does the price sound reasonable? - Have you tried our service before, if so what do you think of it? - Does it bother you our infrastructure is hosted in Europe?

If I may add a few things: 1. I think most of the comments here concentrate on price alone. You need to remember that email marketing is a tool. If you have even 2000 subscribers and not making $30 from that list: a) It&#x27;s your hobby. No problem. Hobbies sometimes can get expensive. b) There is something really not right with your list&#x2F;efforts. 2. All the people outraged at Mailchimp&#x27;s prices should compare them to the competition and see that most of the companies offer similar pricing. 3. Try explaining successfully to your local restaurant manager how to set up his&#x2F;her own mail server. 4. After you have successfully explained #3, try explaining all the regulations and SPAM compliance. 5. Finally - Mailchimp is for small and mid-size businesses. Once you go over $1000 in email marketing costs you are in a different ball game.

Seriously.. try <a href="https://madmimi.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;madmimi.com&#x2F;</a>

I started out using mailchimp when I had less than 2000 subscribers. It worked great! But now that my mail list is growing, I find it increasingly expensive. Any recommendations on alternative providers?

disclaimer : I&#x27;m involved with www.mailjet.com.<p>Mailjet is &quot;merging&quot; transactional and marketing email services. Transactional via API and on top of our APIs we build web interfaces for marketers to manage contact list, html and stats pages.<p>We charge per email send, whatever its &quot;origin&quot;.<p>One need to know that managing marketing emails and transactional emails is not the same in daily operations. Marketing emails are send to &quot;lists&quot; and there is an important effort a reliable provider needs to put in place to avoid spammers come on your platform. Lists need to be double opt-in etc. and a lot of marketeers don&#x27;t follow these strict rules. The provider (here Mailjet.com or Mailchimp) has to develop and invest in a lot of work to detect &#x27;spammers&#x27; before and even during the sending process, interact with its support teams to educate customers, etc. Their job is to guarantee to ISPs only high quality, opt-in messages are send out. That&#x27;s the only long term battle a provider needs to fight for.

Mailchimp is ideal for sending a high volume of emails to a small amount of users. I couldn&#x27;t imagine using them with a large volume of users, it&#x27;s literally $0.005 per user, imagine if you only need to send a monthly or even weekly email to 1mil+ users, total rape on the per email basis

I really really dislike their pricing scheme.<p>We have 5000 subscribers, but only send 1 email every month or two. This costs $55. Compare this to someone that has 500 subscribers, and sends each of them 10 emails per month - that only costs $10 per month. It just doesn&#x27;t add up.

A much cheaper alternative is streamsend <a href="http://www.streamsend.com/291.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.streamsend.com&#x2F;291.html</a> (affiliate link).<p>I maintain an unlimited list and pricing is very reasonable. Also their affiliate program is very good.

I&#x27;m happy with CampaignMonitor for my email newsletters, and I find the pricing reasonable <a href="http://www.campaignmonitor.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.campaignmonitor.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>

That is the mother of all pricing tables. It almost looks like a parody.

what do you guys think of postmarkapp?<p>I&#x27;m not a customer but curious about their rep, they have a flat(ish) pricing model at $1.5&#x2F;1000 emails sent (and then lower for more)

maybe paid plans are 2000 (free) subscribers + X (paid) subscribers? Otherwise it&#x27;s pretty flawed

I use Mailchimp, but I&#x27;m getting to hate it. It&#x27;s too expensive, their payment options are limited and customer support is slow. That with a lot of minor idiosyncrasies that are starting to fray my nerves.<p>Migration will no doubt be a hassle, but I&#x27;m looking to move to another service (soonish).