Mailchimp: why I stopped paying and moved my clients off it

Carol's Mailchimp bill went from the twenties to the forties between February and March. Nobody touched her account. No new features, no new emails, no new subscribers. The list just crossed a pricing tier, 1,500 contacts instead of 1,000, and the meter jumped. She emailed me the invoice with the same line Sue used on me about QuickBooks: "Is this real?"

I was a Mailchimp guy for years. I told every client to start there. The monkey, the free plan, the easy editor. I have no beef with the tool itself. This is the post where I admit I moved my people off it, and I do not pay Mailchimp anything today. Neither do four of my five clients.

Here's the thing I missed for too long. Mailchimp bills you for the audience you keep, not the audience you use. Carol had 400 dead addresses sitting in that list. People who retired, moved, stopped opening. Mailchimp counted them at full price. That is the whole trap in one sentence, and it catches almost everybody.

The free plan is a doorway now

I want to be fair about the history, because people remember wrong. Mailchimp's free plan covered 2,000 contacts for years. Then 1,000. Then 500. As of this year the free plan is 250 contacts and 500 sends a month. At 250 contacts you are not running a business newsletter. You are kicking the tires.

The paid plans start around $13 a month for 500 contacts and climb from there, and the climb is steep because every tier is a cliff. Pricing tiers are like an old breaker panel. It handles eleven circuits fine. Add the twelfth, one more appliance, one more hundred contacts, and the whole panel has to go. That is not a billing accident. That is how the plan is shaped.

How I moved Carol off it

Numbered, because if you do this, do it in this order.

1. Export the audience from Mailchimp as a CSV. The option hides in the audience settings, and it takes two minutes.
2. Sort the file by last open date. Anyone who has not opened in a year goes in a separate file. You do not delete them, you just stop paying to email them.
3. Import the good file into the new tool. I use MailerLite, about $15 a month at her list size. There are others at similar prices.
4. Rebuild the signup form and swap it into the website. This is the step people forget, and then they wonder why the new list never grows.
5. Send one final campaign from Mailchimp telling people nothing. Look at the delivery numbers, save the report, and close the account before the next billing date.

Total time: one evening, mostly waiting on imports. New cost: $15 a month. Old cost: mid-forties and climbing. Carol's reaction, and I quote, "You're telling me that cleanup was the whole trick." It was. That cleanup is the whole trick.

What Mailchimp is still good at

I am not here to bury them. If you run a real online store with thousands of customers, cart emails, product recommendations, the works, Mailchimp is built for that and it does it well. Big senders get real value out of the automation. My clients send a monthly letter and a spring promotion. Paying e-commerce prices for that is renting a forklift to move a love seat.

The other honest gripe is support. The cheap plans get email help only, and the answers take days. When I was learning, Mailchimp had people who picked up the phone. That company is gone, and the Intuit ownership has not brought it back. When something breaks on a Tuesday and you send on Thursday, you find out who actually answers email.

What to do Monday

Log into Mailchimp and look at one number: the audience count your bill is based on. Then look at the number of people who opened anything in the last six months. If the second number is half the first, you are paying double to talk to people who left the room. Export your list tonight either way. It is your list. The addresses belong to your customers, the file belongs to you, and any tool that makes it hard to leave is telling you something.