Done overpaying Mailchimp?Keep the list, own the platform, stop paying for people you rarely email.

Mailchimp's pricing runs on contacts, not campaigns. A store with 40,000 people on the list and one email a month pays the same tier as a publisher sending daily to the same count. The bill tracks the size of the audience sitting in the account, and unsubscribed or bounced rows can still occupy a paid slot until you clean the list out yourself.

Two things make this sting over time. Plans climb as the list grows even when the volume you actually send stays flat, so a quiet quarter does not lower the invoice. And the list itself lives on Mailchimp's servers: you have access to it, but the platform holding the rows, the consent history and the send button belongs to Mailchimp, not you. Renting access to your own audience is usually the part people notice only after the third price increase.

Honesty first, because it is the whole point of this page. Stay on Mailchimp if you will not create or touch an AWS account under any circumstances; that alone rules SendBunny out, and there is no way around it. Stay too if you run a store that needs Klaviyo-depth ecommerce features today, predictive segmentation, deep platform sync, SMS in the same tool, because SendBunny does not build that layer and is not trying to.

• Switch if the bill tracks your contact count more than what you actually send, and that gap bothers you every month.
• Switch if you already have, or are willing to create, an AWS account and click through a ten-minute install once.
• Switch if you want campaigns and a transactional API in one platform you control, instead of two vendor relationships.

A list is not just a CSV of addresses. Owning one means holding the rows, the consent record showing who agreed and when, the suppression and unsubscribe history, the sending domain, and the ability to send, all at once. On a rented platform, the first three of those sit on the vendor's servers and the ability to send is subject to the vendor's own account policy. The domain is the one piece that was already yours.

This matters most at the exact moment you decide to leave. Addresses without a consent record are not always a list you can lawfully mail from a new platform, and re-adding someone who unsubscribed on the old one is a fast route to a complaint rate that gets the new sender flagged too.

Mailchimp's Standard-tier pricing scales with the number of contacts on the account, not the number of emails sent in a month. SendBunny separates the two: a one-time $199 license for the platform, then Amazon SES bills you directly for what you actually send, about $0.10 per 1,000 emails, with nothing owed in a month you send nothing.

The gap widens because the two are billed on different axes. Mailchimp charges more for more contacts, independent of whether you mail them. SES charges more for more emails sent, independent of how many rows sit idle in your account. A list with a long tail of people you rarely email costs Mailchimp the same either way; it costs SendBunny almost nothing until you actually send to them.

1. Export your contacts as a CSV from Mailchimp's audience settings.
2. Buy SendBunny and run the one-click AWS install, a pre-filled CloudFormation stack that takes about ten minutes.
3. Import the CSV. Running it again later enriches existing rows instead of wiping them out, so a partial or repeated import is safe.
4. Point your campaigns, and any transactional sends your app makes, at your new SendBunny install.
5. Cancel Mailchimp once you have confirmed the new stack is sending cleanly.

What the CSV import does not do is bring your automations or your saved templates with it. Those steps above cover contacts and campaigns; nothing in them moves a customer journey or a designed template automatically. SendBunny has its own automation and template tools, and anything more than a plain broadcast needs to be rebuilt there by hand before you cancel the old account.

There is also no middleman platform standing between you and your sending, which cuts both ways: nobody can suspend a Mailchimp account you no longer have, but AWS's own rules for SES still apply, and an account that ignores its bounce and complaint rates can still land in review with Amazon.