Free alternatives to Mailchimp

Brevo removes the exact mechanism that makes Mailchimp expensive. You can hold up to 100,000 contacts for free and pay only for emails sent, which means an old list full of quiet subscribers stops being a liability. The free plan covers 300 emails per day, around 9,000 a month, and includes the drag-and-drop builder, signup forms, basic automation, a CRM, and transactional sending. Paid Starter plans begin at $9 a month for 5,000 emails and stay priced by volume.

• Free plan, paid from $9/month (as of July 2026)
• France

Best for:

People whose Mailchimp bill grew because their list grew, not their sending

The catch:

The free tier's 300 is a daily ceiling, not a monthly pool, so you cannot blast 3,000 people in one afternoon without paying.

Sender hands out ten times Mailchimp's free contact allowance and thirty times its free sending. The Free Forever plan covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, and unusually it includes automation workflows, landing pages, signup forms, and popups rather than reserving them for paid tiers. For a list under 2,500 running a weekly newsletter, this is the closest thing to a free replacement for a paid Mailchimp plan.

• Free plan, paid from $7/month (as of July 2026)
• Lithuania

Best for:

Small shops and creators with under 2,500 subscribers who want to pay nothing

The catch:

The editor is a clear step behind Mailchimp's and MailerLite's, and the free plan is single-seat so nobody else on your team can log in.

EmailOctopus is what Mailchimp looks like with fifteen years of features removed. Free covers 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, and Pro starts at $9 a month billed annually. Its distinctive feature is EmailOctopus Connect, which routes your campaigns through your own Amazon SES account so you pay Amazon's raw per-email rate. At high volume that is cheaper than anything priced per subscriber, Mailchimp very much included.

• Free plan, paid from $9/month (as of July 2026)
• United Kingdom

Best for:

Newsletter writers who want a simple tool, and high-volume senders who can use SES

The catch:

Subscribers and monthly sends are counted as two separate limits, so a small list on a daily email can hit the send cap while nowhere near the subscriber cap.

MailerLite is where people go when the complaint about Mailchimp is the interface rather than the invoice. The editor is calm, the templates look good without being rescued, and paid plans start at $12 a month for 500 subscribers on the Comfort tier. It also supports paid newsletter subscriptions and digital product sales, which Mailchimp does not. The free plan is the weak point: 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, matching Mailchimp on contacts.

• Free plan, paid from $12/month (as of July 2026)
• Lithuania

Best for:

Anyone who cares how their emails look and is willing to pay a small amount

The catch:

The free plan has been cut over time and now stops at 250 subscribers with only 3 active automations, so treat it as a trial rather than a destination.

listmonk is a single Go binary and a Postgres database that manages unlimited subscribers, lists, and campaigns under an AGPL-3.0 licence. There is no vendor, so there is no contact-based pricing to escape. It is genuinely fast, with the project documenting a seven million email campaign on under one CPU core. The honest asterisk: listmonk does not deliver email itself, it queues campaigns to SMTP servers you configure, so you still pay Amazon SES, Postmark, or Mailgun per email, plus a small server.

• Completely free (as of July 2026)
• India
• Open source (AGPL-3.0)

Best for:

Technical teams with large lists where per-contact pricing has stopped making sense

The catch:

Free means free software, not free email. You own the server, the SMTP bill, and every deliverability problem: SPF, DKIM, bounces, and blocklists all become your job.

Buttondown attacks Mailchimp's pricing model directly by charging for subscribers who are actually receiving your emails rather than every address you have ever collected. It is a small, writer-first tool: Markdown editor, custom sending domain, hosted archive, and very little else. Free covers your first 100 subscribers, then you pay a base rate on your active list and add features one at a time. Registered nonprofits get 50% off.

• Free plan (as of July 2026)
• United States

Best for:

Personal newsletters and writers starting from zero

The catch:

100 free subscribers is the smallest free tier here, and the pieces Mailchimp bundles are priced separately. Analytics, segmentation, and paid subscriptions are $9 a month each, automations are $29, so a familiar-looking setup stacks up fast.

Loops is the pick if you are leaving Mailchimp because you run a software product, not a shop. Campaigns, automated sequences, and transactional email share one contact record, so onboarding emails and receipts come from the same place. There is a single paid plan with every feature, priced only by contact count, which removes the which-tier-unlocks-what guessing that Mailchimp trades on. Free covers under 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends per 30 days.

• Free plan, paid from $49/month (as of July 2026)
• United States

Best for:

SaaS teams replacing a marketing tool and a transactional provider at once

The catch:

The step from free to paid is $49 a month for 5,000 contacts with nothing in between, the steepest jump on this list, and Loops has revised its free plan more than once.