MailChimp Payment Options Explained

Your MailChimp payment options are pretty straightforward:

• You have their Forever Free account
• You can pay monthly
• Or you can pay as you go, which is when you buy a block of credits that get used as you send emails; one email equals one credit.

In a moment, we’ll talk a bit more about MailChimp payment options and why you would want to use one or the other. I should note that I’m in no way affiliated with MailChimp. I like them. I use them. I recommend my clients use them. I get asked a lot of questions about MailChimp, so I write the answers in my blog. MailChimp doesn’t pay me to write about them or refer them business.

MailChimp Payment Option 1: MailChimp’s Forever Free account

This account is excellent for getting your feet wet with email marketing.

• You can send up to 12,000 emails a month
• You can have up to 2,000 subscribers, or email addresses, collectively in your MailChimp account.
• You can use any of the MailChimp template designs.
• You can have signup forms on your site.
• You have the ability to have a welcome email send as soon as someone subscribes.

This all sounds really great, right? Yes. It totally is. And I used the MailChimp Forever Free account for a long time until I wanted to send a series of emails automatically. A series of emails that automatically send are usually referred to as autoresponders. Another form of autoresponder could be if you have the dates of your subscribers’ birthdays and you want an email to send on their birthdate automatically. Autoresponders are a paid feature; this is when you’re going to either want the monthly MailChimp payment option or the pay-as-you-go MailChimp payment option.
Researching email marketing software? CLICK HERE to download a free cheat sheet comparing the top email marketing providers!

MailChimp Payment Option 2: A monthly MailChimp payment plan

MaiChimp will bill you monthly and they bill you based on how many subscribers (or email addresses) you have in your MailChimp account. If you’d like to know exactly how much it will cost you based on the number of subscribers you have, go to MailChimp’s pricing calculator.

Once you pay for your MailChimp account, you get everything above plus:

• Autoresponders.
• Unlimited email sends per month.

So what happens if you start out with 2,000 subscribers ($25.00 a month) and one day you find yourself with 2,001 subscribers ($30.00 a month)? MailChimp will automatically increase your account billing to accommodate the new subscriber amount.

If you have less than 2,000 subscribers and you don’t have an autoresponder plan ready to launch, you’ll probably be best off staying with the MailChimp Forever Free account.

Why is there a third payment option? Well, let’s have a look at how it varies.

MailChimp Payment Option 3: Pay As You Go MailChimp payment plan

MailChimp’s Pay As You Go payment plan is based on how many emails you send instead of how many subscribers you have. And, as the name implies, you only pay as you need to. You will get the same account options as the monthly MailChimp payment plan.

Things to know about MailChimp’s Pay As You Go payment plan:

• You buy a block of credits at a time. For instance, 2,000 email credits = $60.00.
• The larger the block of credits you buy, the less expensive each credit is.
  25,000 MailChimp credits purchased at one time = $250.00 = $0.01 per credit.
  7,500 MailChimp credits purchased at one time = $150.00 = $0.02 per credit.
• Each credit counts for one email send.
• If you have an autoresponder series, each email that sends from that series counts as one email.

So if you are confident you are only going to send 300 emails over a two-month period and you want the autoresponder functionality, you could save money by buying a pack of 300 credits. 300 credits would cost you $9.00. If you sent 150 emails per month, you would be spending, in essence, $4.50 per month but you’d have the same features that a monthly MailChimp payment plan has. MailChimp has a nifty calculator to help you figure out which plan makes more sense. However, this calculator assumes you’re sending the same amount of emails per month. So you’ll need to divide your total emails up by month. Example: Say I have 3,000 subscribers and I only want to email them once per quarter. That works out to 1,000 emails per month. So you’d put 3,000 subscribers and 1,000 emails per month in the calculator to get the right comparison. Here’s a link to the MailChimp payment comparison calculator.
Researching email marketing software? CLICK HERE to download a free cheat sheet comparing the top email marketing providers!