For years, Mailchimp’s free plan was the default recommendation for anyone starting out with email marketing. It was generous, easy to use, and genuinely capable of running a small newsletter or business without spending a dollar. That reputation has not kept pace with reality. Mailchimp’s free tier has been quietly and repeatedly cut down since Intuit acquired the company in 2021, and the version available today looks very different from what longtime users remember. This guide lays out exactly what the free plan offers now, how it got here, and what your realistic options are.
The Timeline: How Mailchimp’s Free Plan Shrank
Understanding the current state of Mailchimp’s free plan requires understanding its trajectory, because the pattern itself tells you something important about where things are headed. Before 2022, Mailchimp’s free plan allowed up to 2,000 contacts and 10,000 emails sent per month, a genuinely generous offer that made it the obvious starting point for small businesses, nonprofits, and hobbyist newsletter writers alike.
In 2023, that was cut to 500 contacts and either 1,000 or 2,500 sends per month depending on the source and exact timing of the change (different reports place the exact 2023 figure slightly differently, but the direction is consistent: a steep cut from the 2022 numbers). In December 2023, automation features were removed from the free plan entirely, meaning free users lost access to automated welcome sequences, abandoned cart emails, and similar workflows that had previously been available at no cost.
Then, starting in January 2026, the free plan was cut again, down to just 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, with a daily sending cap of 250 emails. That is a roughly 96 percent reduction from the original 2022 free tier limits in under four years. For context on how restrictive that actually is, independent industry data on average nonprofit email list sizes puts the typical nonprofit list at close to 4,700 contacts, meaning even a small community organization, church, or school PTA with just a few hundred members now exceeds Mailchimp’s free plan limit entirely.
What Mailchimp Free Actually Includes Today
As of 2026, the free plan gives you up to 250 contacts and 500 emails sent per month, with a daily send limit of 250 emails. This is genuinely tight. If you have a mailing list of even a modest size, a single monthly newsletter send can eat through most or all of your monthly email allowance in one shot, leaving little to no room for additional campaigns, welcome emails, or follow-ups within the same month.
Automation workflows are not included on the free plan at all, having been removed in December 2023. This means no automated welcome sequences for new subscribers, no abandoned cart recovery emails, and no behavior-triggered campaigns of any kind. You are limited to manually sending one-off campaigns.
The free plan also lacks several features that matter for anyone doing serious email marketing: no multi-step automation or customer journeys (a significant gap for anyone running an online store), no predictive or behavioral segmentation, no dynamic content that changes based on subscriber data, no retargeting ad integration, no custom-coded templates, and no phone support if something goes wrong.
The Contact-Counting Trap Worth Knowing About
One detail catches a lot of Mailchimp users off guard, on both free and paid plans: subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts are all counted toward your contact total. According to Mailchimp’s own documentation, the only contacts excluded from your count are those you have manually archived, cleaned, or deleted. This means someone who unsubscribed from your list two years ago can still be quietly counting against your 250-contact free limit unless you go in and manually remove them. If you are close to the free plan’s limit, it is worth actively cleaning your contact list of old unsubscribes before assuming you need to upgrade.
What Mailchimp’s Paid Plans Look Like
Mailchimp’s paid tiers scale based on both contact count and monthly sending volume, which makes pricing a little more complex to estimate than a flat monthly fee. The Essentials plan is the entry-level paid tier, starting around $13 per month for 500 contacts and roughly 5,000 monthly email sends, with a 14-day free trial available and no credit card required to start that trial. As your contact list grows, Essentials pricing scales up, capping out around 50,000 contacts at the top end of that tier.
The Standard plan is Mailchimp’s most commonly recommended tier and starts around $20 per month, and it is the first plan to include full multi-step automation and customer journeys, a major upgrade for anyone running an online store or a lead-nurturing email sequence. Standard’s monthly send limit is roughly 12 times your contact count, with a cap around 100,000 contacts.
Premium sits at the top of the standard plan lineup, starting around $350 per month, and includes advanced features aimed at larger organizations and more complex sending needs, such as deeper reporting and higher send allowances. For contact lists above 10,000, Mailchimp typically offers a discount of around 15 percent for those who commit to annual billing.
The Free Trial Advantage Over the Free Plan
It is worth understanding that Mailchimp’s free trial and free plan are two different things. Essentials, Standard, and Premium plans all come with a 14-day free trial that requires no credit card to start, giving you full access to that tier’s features for two weeks before you have to make a purchasing decision. If you are seriously evaluating whether Mailchimp fits your business, trialing a paid tier for two weeks will give you a far more accurate picture of the platform’s real capabilities than testing the increasingly stripped-down free plan.
Who the Free Plan Still Works For
Despite the cuts, Mailchimp’s free plan is not completely without a use case. If you are a brand-new solo creator or a very small side project with fewer than 250 subscribers and you only send an occasional update, the free plan can still function as a genuinely no-cost starting point. It is also a reasonable way to get familiar with Mailchimp’s interface and campaign-building tools before deciding whether to commit financially, as long as your expectations are calibrated to what the current, much-reduced free tier actually offers.
Who Should Consider Alternatives Instead
For anyone managing a mailing list of a few hundred contacts or more, particularly nonprofits, schools, churches, and small community organizations that historically relied on Mailchimp’s free plan, the current limits are simply too restrictive to be practical. A single monthly update to a congregation or PTA list can now exceed the entire monthly sending allowance.
Several competitors currently offer more generous free tiers meaningfully. Brevo (formerly SendinBlue) offers a free plan that allows up to 300 emails per day regardless of list size, which can work out to a significantly higher monthly volume than Mailchimp’s flat 500-email cap, and it is often recommended for users with larger contact lists who only send a modest number of campaigns per month. Benchmark Email’s free plan allows 500 contacts and 2,500 sends per month with no credit card required and includes all features at every tier rather than gating functionality like automation behind paid plans. MailerLite and EmailOctopus are also commonly recommended for users who specifically want automation features on a limited budget, since Mailchimp removed automation from its free tier entirely.
For organizations specifically, some purpose-built alternatives exist, aimed at simple, reliable member communication rather than full marketing automation, with free tiers around 500 members and 1,000 emails per month, roughly double Mailchimp’s current free limits on both counts, and with a support model built around human assistance rather than self-service documentation.
How to Decide What to Do Next
The right next step depends mostly on your list size and how central email is to your operation. If you have fewer than 250 contacts and send infrequently, staying on Mailchimp’s free plan or an equally generous free competitor makes sense while you figure out your longer-term needs. If you have a list in the low hundreds to low thousands and need to send more than once a month, it is worth doing direct math: compare what Mailchimp Essentials would cost at your list size against a competitor’s free or entry-level paid tier at the same size, since Mailchimp is not always the cheapest option once you are paying regardless.
If automation, whether that is welcome sequences, abandoned cart recovery, or behavior-triggered campaigns, is central to how you plan to use email, budget for Mailchimp Standard at minimum, since that functionality was removed from lower tiers. Alternatively, several competitors include automation even on their free or lowest-cost paid tiers, which may be more cost-effective if automation is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.
The Bottom Line
Mailchimp’s free plan in 2026 is a fraction of what it used to be, down to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month from an original 2,000 contacts and 10,000 emails just a few years earlier, with automation removed entirely along the way. For very small, occasional senders, it can still technically work, but for anyone managing a real mailing list, whether that is a small business, a nonprofit, or a growing newsletter, the free plan is unlikely to meet real needs anymore. The good news is that the broader email marketing software market has responded to this shift, and several competitors now offer meaningfully more generous free and entry-level paid tiers than Mailchimp currently does. It is worth comparing your actual list size and sending frequency against a few alternatives before assuming Mailchimp, free or paid, is your only or best option.
