Mailchimp's free plan is now 250 contacts and two emails each

29 puts Mailchimp in our bottom band, Barely free, which reads "free in name, expect to pay before you finish anything real". Nothing else in this category scores lower. For contrast, Sender scores 77 and Brevo 73, and both are free products with a paid tier attached rather than paid products with a free door.

This is not our view of Mailchimp the platform. It ranks eighth here on the free plan question while remaining the most complete tool in the category, with reporting, integrations and customer journeys that genuinely earn their price for the businesses that use them. None of that is on the free tier. Generosity scores 16 and freedom 28, and the second of those matters more than the first: a plan that has been cut from 2,000 to 500 to 250 is a number that keeps falling, and the pillars below say so.

Three counters and a support clock (as of July 2026):

• 250 contacts. Paid plans count contacts too, and the count includes unsubscribed and inactive addresses unless you archive them.
• 500 emails a month, which is two per contact on a full list.
• 250 emails a day, so even that small monthly allowance cannot be spent at once.
• Support ends after your first 30 days.

The feature gaps are the sharper problem, because they are things this category now gives away. There is no A/B testing and no scheduling on free. The customer journey builder and predictive segmentation, which are the actual reasons to choose Mailchimp over anything cheaper, sit on Standard at $20 a month. Mailchimp branding stays on every send.

Compare that with what a free plan looks like elsewhere in 2026: Sender includes automation, landing pages and popups at 2,500 subscribers for nothing. Mailchimp's free tier is not competing in that conversation, and it does not appear to be trying to.

Essentials starts at $13 a month and buys branding removal, A/B testing, scheduling and 24/7 support, with a monthly send allowance of ten times your contact count. Standard starts at $20 and adds the customer journey builder, send-time optimisation and predictive segmentation at twelve times your contacts. Premium is $350 with unlimited contacts and up to 150,000 emails a month.

Read those as entry rates rather than prices. Every one of them is quoted at the smallest contact tier and climbs as your list grows, which is the mechanism that makes Mailchimp bills feel like they rise on their own. A 15% discount applies above 10,000 contacts, which tells you where the model expects the pain to be.

One detail worth planning around: Essentials and Standard begin as 14-day free trials rather than starting immediately at the paid rate, so the route onto paid features is timed. It is a trial, not a grace period.

What people upgrade for is nearly always the contact ceiling. What they leave for, later, is the same thing.

No, and our answer is taster. Two hundred and fifty contacts and two emails each is a demonstration of the product, and the free plan's history says it is meant to be one: 2,000 contacts became 500, and 500 became 250.

The only people who can genuinely stay: someone testing the editor and the integration catalogue before their company buys, or a very small club emailing under 250 people once a month. Nobody running a business on email fits inside these numbers, and nobody should build an automation on a tier that has been cut twice.

Who should still pay for Mailchimp: ecommerce teams who actually use the Shopify and ad integrations, customer journeys and predictive segmentation. That capability is real, it is the best in this category, and if you use it the price is defensible. If you open your email tool to send a newsletter, you are paying for depth you will never touch, on a model that charges you for subscribers who stopped reading years ago.

Free Mailchimp alternatives is the ranked answer, Brevo's free plan is the direct fix for contact-based pricing, and the best free email marketing tools puts every option side by side.