SendBunny vs MailchimpPay once and keep the list, or keep paying Mailchimp by the contact.

The difference is not features first, it is where the platform lives. SendBunny installs as a CloudFormation stack into your own AWS account with one click; the contacts, templates, campaign history and suppression list all sit in your DynamoDB tables and S3 buckets. Mailchimp is a rented seat on Intuit's infrastructure: your list, your sending reputation and your account status all live inside their systems, governed by their Standard Terms of Use.

The pricing follows the same split. SendBunny charges once, $199, and never charges again for the platform itself; sending costs whatever Amazon SES bills, roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails, with contacts unlimited and free to store. Mailchimp prices by the number of contacts on the account, active or not, and that number climbs into a new plan tier as your list grows even if your actual send volume stays flat.

SendBunny's table above is the shorter list on purpose: campaigns, a template editor, automations, a transactional send API, a shared inbox and analytics all ship in the one install, but the surface area is aimed at owning the sending stack rather than matching every Mailchimp integration one for one.

The gap comes from what each side is metering. Amazon SES meters what you actually send, so a newsletter that goes to 10,000 people once a month costs about a dollar in send fees, and a quiet month costs nothing beyond the fixed $199 you already paid. Mailchimp meters the size of the list sitting in the account, so a business with 50,000 subscribers pays the 50,000-contact rate every month regardless of whether it sent one campaign or ten, and every unsubscribed or dormant row still counts toward that number until it is deleted outright.

On SendBunny there is no vendor sitting between you and your list: sending runs through your own AWS account, we never hold your AWS credentials, and there is no SendBunny-side account review that can freeze a campaign mid-send. That does not mean sending is risk-free; AWS still enforces its own SES rules on bounce and complaint rates, and a new account starts in the SES sandbox until it requests production access. It means the switch that matters, the one that can shut off your mail, sits in your account rather than a vendor's support queue.

Mailchimp's Standard Terms of Use give the platform the right to suspend accounts for policy violations, and because sending, list storage and campaign history all live on Mailchimp's side, a suspension takes all three away at once. Most suspensions are legitimate content or compliance calls, but the account holder finds out from inside the same dashboard that just stopped working.

Honesty matters more than a sales pitch here, so this is where Mailchimp is genuinely the better fit. Its template gallery, journey builder, landing pages and hundreds of native app integrations are years ahead of any newcomer, and a marketer who lives inside Shopify or a CMS-driven signup flow will get more out of Mailchimp's ecosystem on day one than out of a platform built around AWS and an API.

• Pick Mailchimp if you rely on its integration marketplace, need a hosted landing-page or signup-form builder today, or your team has no appetite for an AWS account at any price.
• Pick SendBunny if you are tired of contact-tier billing, want the list and sending history to live in infrastructure you control, or need campaigns and a transactional API from the same account.

There is a middle case too: a list that stays under a couple thousand contacts and sends rarely may sit comfortably on Mailchimp's free or entry tier, where the contact-based pricing has not yet started to bite. The crossover tends to happen once a list is large enough, or inactive enough, that the monthly contact charge stops matching the actual volume being sent.

1. Export your contacts as CSV from Mailchimp's audience settings, including tags and merge fields you rely on.
2. Buy SendBunny and run the one-click AWS install, a pre-filled Create stack step that takes about ten minutes.
3. Import the CSV. Uploads process in the background, and a second import later enriches existing rows instead of overwriting them, so partial exports are not a problem.
4. Point new campaigns and any transactional sends at SendBunny, verifying your sending domain on Amazon SES with the DNS records the app generates.
5. Cancel Mailchimp once the new stack is sending cleanly, rather than running both in parallel longer than a billing cycle requires.

None of the consent history or unsubscribe status has to be rebuilt from scratch; it travels with the CSV export as long as the file includes those columns, which is worth checking before the export runs rather than after.