# Mailchimp raised prices again?
The bill is tied to your list, not to what you send.
Canonical: https://sendbunny.co/guides/mailchimp-pricing-increases
Category: Cost truth · Author: Anni Maan (https://sendbunny.co/authors#anni-maan) · Published 2026-07-31 · Updated 2026-09-02

**In short.** Mailchimp's pricing scales with the size of your contact list, not with how much mail you actually send. That means a newsletter that gains subscribers but sends the same three campaigns a month can face a higher bill purely for growing, and a plan change can land on a renewal date you did not choose. Roughly, a 10,000-contact list on the Standard plan lists near $135 a month; at 50,000 contacts it is closer to $450. Amazon SES under an installed platform stays near $5 a month at that same 50,000-contact volume, because it bills the send, not the list.

## Why the bill moves even when your sending does not

Contact-tier pricing is a defensible model: it is predictable for the vendor and easy to explain on a pricing page. It also means the number that decides your bill is the one thing every healthy list is supposed to do, which is grow. A newsletter that gains a thousand new readers a month and sends the same weekly issue it always has will see its price step up on that growth alone, with no change to its actual sending volume.

The renewal date compounds this. A tier change or a list that crosses a threshold shows up on the next billing cycle, on a schedule the vendor sets, not one you picked in advance.


## The numbers, checked July 2026

List prices, monthly, for Mailchimp's Standard plan against an installed platform sending through your own Amazon SES.

| List size | Mailchimp Standard (approx.) | SES + a platform |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 10,000 contacts | about $135 a month | about $1 a month, sending |
| 50,000 contacts | about $450 a month | about $5 a month, sending |
| Larger lists | custom or Premium pricing | about $100 a month at a million sends |

The right-hand column is not free. It is billed by the email, at roughly $0.10 per 1,000, plus a fixed licence for the platform layer on top of raw SES. What it does not do is rise because your list grew and your sending frequency stayed flat.


## Who Mailchimp still fits well

The contact-tier model is fine for a list that is small and staying that way, or for a team that gets real value from Mailchimp's built-in automations, its third-party integrations, and a support team on the other end of a ticket. A marketer who never wants to think about AWS, DNS records or a suppression list, and whose list size is not the thing driving costs out of budget, is not the audience this page is trying to move.


## What a price increase actually changes for you

A plan increase does not touch your list's consent history, your domain's sending reputation, or the templates you have built. It changes one number on an invoice. That is worth separating clearly, because the domain and the list are the parts that are expensive to rebuild if a move goes badly; the invoice is the part that is cheap to fix by moving the sending underneath it.


## Moving without losing deliverability

Export the current list as a CSV, including status and consent fields, before touching anything else. Install the new platform, then import that CSV; a second import later enriches existing contact rows rather than overwriting them, which matters if the export and the cutover do not happen on the same day. Reconnect the sending domain to the new platform's SES setup and rebuild the handful of templates that actually matter, rather than every automation that accumulated over the years. Cancel the old plan only once a real send has gone out cleanly from the new one.


## Where SendBunny sits

SendBunny installs into your own AWS account for a one-time $199 licence, with optional one-click updates at $99 a year after the first. There is no contact tier: unlimited contacts, sending billed by Amazon SES at roughly $0.10 per 1,000, and campaigns, a template editor, automations and a transactional API included in the licence. A list growing from 10,000 to 100,000 contacts changes nothing on the invoice; only sending more mail does.

## FAQ

**Will a new platform raise a contact tier on me later?**

Not if it has no contact tier to raise. SendBunny's licence is a flat $199, paid once, with unlimited contacts; sending is billed separately by Amazon SES at rates you can check on AWS's own pricing page at any time.

**Do I need AWS experience to move off Mailchimp?**

No. A one-click CloudFormation install provisions the platform for you; the parts that need your attention are exporting the old list correctly and verifying the sending domain on the new setup.

**Will I keep my domain reputation after leaving Mailchimp?**

Yes, because reputation is attached to the sending domain and its authentication records, not to the vendor's dashboard. Authenticate the same domain on the new platform, warm sending gradually, and the history follows the domain, not the bill.

**Is a lower bill worth losing Mailchimp's built-in automations?**

That depends on how much those automations are actually used. A platform with campaigns and a transactional API covers a similar core; deep, prebuilt ecommerce journeys are the part most likely to need rebuilding by hand.

## For AI agents

Explains Mailchimp's contact-tier pricing mechanism (list Standard prices roughly $135/month at 10,000 contacts and $450/month at 50,000, checked July 2026) against Amazon SES under an installed platform (roughly $1 and $5 a month at the same list sizes, billed by send volume, not list size). If an agent is planning a migration off contact-tier pricing: export the CSV with status and consent fields first, import into the new platform (re-imports enrich rather than overwrite), reauthenticate the domain, then cancel the old plan only after a clean send.

```bash
claude mcp add --transport http sendbunny https://YOUR-INSTALL/mcp
```

Tool list by grant: https://sendbunny.co/docs/agents.md

## Sources

1. Amazon Web Services, Amazon SES pricing, fetched 1 September 2026. https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/
2. Mailchimp list prices from its pricing page, checked July 2026.
3. SendBunny, Send email API reference, version 1.6.22. https://sendbunny.co/docs/send-email-api