Mailchimp

Mailchimp's Free plan supports up to 500 contacts and 1,000 email sends per month with basic templates and single-step automation. The Essentials plan starts at $13/month for 500 contacts with A/B testing, all templates, and 24/7 support. The Standard plan starts at $20/month for 500 contacts adding Customer Journey Builder, predictive segmentation, and advanced automation. The Premium plan starts at $350/month for 10,000 contacts with advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, and phone support. Pricing increases with contact count: 5,000 contacts costs roughly $75/month on Essentials, $110/month on Standard.

Mailchimp works well for small to mid-size e-commerce stores, particularly those using Shopify or WooCommerce. The platform offers product recommendation emails, abandoned cart automation, order notification emails, and purchase-based segmentation. The Customer Journey Builder enables automated flows triggered by purchase behavior. However, for larger stores or complex e-commerce automation (multi-step win-back campaigns, advanced RFM segmentation, SMS+email orchestration), dedicated e-commerce email platforms like Klaviyo typically offer more depth and better per-contact pricing at scale.

Mailchimp counts all contacts in your audience toward your plan limit, including those who have unsubscribed. This means your effective cost per active subscriber is higher than the sticker price suggests. To manage this, Mailchimp provides tools to archive or permanently delete unsubscribed contacts, but you need to do this manually or set up automatic archiving. This pricing approach is a common complaint, and competitors like ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign only count active subscribers. If you have significant churn, regularly cleaning your list is essential to avoid paying for contacts you cannot email.