beehiiv vs Mailchimp pricing

Mailchimp Essentials is cheaper than beehiiv Scale at every breakpoint below 10,000 contacts where both publish a paid price. At 10,000 beehiiv Scale takes over at $109 against $110, and it stays the cheaper paid plan at every larger list size where both publish a price.

At 25,000 contacts Scale is $169 against Essentials at $270. At 50,000 the gap is $249 against $385. Anyone deciding on that gap is deciding on something other than price alone, because beehiiv includes unlimited sends and Mailchimp Essentials includes 250,000 monthly sends at that size.

The two ladders also end in different places. Mailchimp Essentials caps at 50,000 contacts, so a larger list has to move to Standard or Premium. beehiiv Scale publishes all the way to 100,000 subscribers at $329.

Mailchimp. Mailchimp's contact table publishes a yes or no per status. Subscribed, unsubscribed and non subscribed contacts all count toward the monthly contact limit. Cleaned contacts, which is where hard bounces land, do not. Pending contacts do not count and are deleted after 60 days if they never confirm.

beehiiv. beehiiv defines an active subscriber as one who has not unsubscribed and has not been marked inactive, and the tier follows the active count. Paused, pending and inactive subscriptions are all outside it.

Put one list through both rules and the gap stops being theoretical. A list of 2,000 confirmed subscribers carrying 800 people who unsubscribed is still near 2,800 contacts to Mailchimp if those unsubscribers stay in the audience, which is past Launch and into a paid Mailchimp tier. beehiiv counts the active subscribers and leaves the unsubscribed out, which can keep the same list inside Launch. Same people, and one platform is charging $45 a month while the other is charging nothing.

Non subscribed contacts are the quiet one. Someone who bought from a connected store without opting into marketing counts as a billable contact, and so does the same person sitting in two audiences, twice. The two audiences count is read off Mailchimp's audience help page on 26 September 2026. Suppression is not the same as unsubscribing. beehiiv's own advice for working out who can actually receive a send is to take the active count and subtract the suppression list, which means suppressed addresses sit inside the number that sets the bill. The bounced answer is derived from that instruction rather than from a billing statement, so it is marked derived. The rule is recorded for all six vendors.

beehiiv includes unlimited sends on every plan including Launch, so send volume never touches a beehiiv bill. Mailchimp Essentials includes 10 times the contact count in monthly sends, which at 10,000 contacts is 100,000 emails for $110 a month.

Passing that allowance does not stop the account. Mailchimp adds a charge to the bill for that month, so a real invoice can sit above the tier price in the table while the pricing page still says what it said. For a weekly newsletter the allowance is rarely in danger. For a daily sender, or anyone running long sequences on top of campaigns, the Mailchimp number here is a floor rather than a bill.