16 plans you should never buy from Mailchimp and which ones you should buy instead

I'm currently a paid member on Mailchimp, and I was checking the pricing when my eye caught something interesting. Some plans are an awful deal! Read below this quick post about how to choose a good deal plan instead.

So here it is the table of prices from MailChimp:

• Download as pdf
• Download as excel

And here is the chart of prices from MailChimp:

Bigger the number vertically (on the y-axis) the worse the deal for you, means you pay more per subscriber.

Do you see how the price of the plans immediately after a round number (5k, 10k, 25k) plan goes up? Look at the 5k, 10k and 25k is very apparent.

The bad deal plans from MailChimp

Do you also notice how the "Monthly cost per 1000 subscribers" in the grid doesn't go down as you buy a bigger plan? This means that purchasing a bigger plan with more subscribers is not guaranteed for you to pay less per subscriber.

Usually, the plans that have a few hundred subscribers on top of a round number are a bad deal for you. Examples are the following plans: 2600, 2700, 5200, 5600, 10200, 10600, 11000, 11400, 11800, 12200, 12600, 25600, 26500 (these two plans are so confusing, why they would change the 56 with 65 in the next plan?), 28000, 29500, 31000.

The excellent deal plans from MailChimp

Ok, there are more bad plans than good plans so I will also list the plans I think are a good deal:

• 2000: of course is free!
• 5000: I'm on this plan, right now, even if I have around 6000 subscribers. I keep them in my excel, for now, waiting to get closer to 10k. Here you pay $10 per 1000 subscribers.
• 10000: I nice milestone, I will jump to this one pretty soon. $7.5 per 1000 subscribers.
• 25000: Big milestone again. $11.11 per 1000 subscribers.
• 52000: An excellent price. $4.81 per 1000 subscribers.

So which plan is the best for you?

You shouldn't stay on a lower plan if you have more subscribers because maybe you can make more money from those extra subscribers than the difference in the plan. What I mean is if you have 5.6k emails and you are on the 5k plan, you might pay the extra $15 (65 - 50) for the extra 600 (5600 - 5000) subscribers. If you can make more than $15 from those 600 subscribers then is a good deal for you. That's why you should always know how much your subscribers are worth. I know this advice it's a bit contradictory with what I'm doing, but this is the first month I'm paying for, so it's more like a test drive for now!

I just paid for the Mailchimp 5k emails $50, and I got my money back in 2 days, now is only profit. Of course, I need to work more to send more emails and high-quality content, but I think it is a good deal.

Note: that subscribers that are cleaned or unsubscribed don't count towards your MailChimp subscribers number. So basically if somebody unsubscribes from your list, then you don't need to pay for that users, same for bounced emails.

Should you choose another email provider instead?

The cheapest would be Amazon SES, but you should look at the deliverability of your emails. If you save $10 on mailing costs, but then 2000 subscribers can't read your email because went to spam, then you probably lost money! MailChimp does a lot of tricky and complicated stuff to make sure your email is delivered to your subscribers' email and not to the spam folder. That's pretty hard stuff, even if it seems as simple as sending an email. That's why their pricing is a premium.

Conclusion

Always do the math! Or come back here to see which plan is good. Don't think that having more subscribers you are getting a better plan or better service for your money. In some places, I've seen some promotions like Buy these 2 for $9.99... but each one costs $3.99, so if you buy separately is just $7.98.

See more examples here.

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