Brevo vs Mailchimp pricing

The cheapest Brevo band allows 5,000 emails a month and caps stored contacts at 500. Mailchimp Essentials at 500 contacts allows 5,000 emails a month. Same list ceiling, same send ceiling, and both numbers are read straight off a vendor page rather than derived. Brevo charges $9 for it and Mailchimp charges $13.

That row is worth pausing on because it is the only place in this comparison where two different billing models produce an exactly like for like quote. Everywhere above it the two vendors are selling different amounts of email, and the price difference stops meaning what it looks like it means.

At 5,000 contacts the headline gap looks enormous. Brevo Starter is $32 and Mailchimp Essentials is $75, which reads as Mailchimp being more than twice the price. Per email they are $1.60 and $1.50 per thousand, close to level, with Brevo slightly dearer per email. Brevo is cheaper in total because it is selling less email, not because it is selling email more cheaply.

By 25,000 contacts that stops being true and Brevo is genuinely cheaper per email, at $0.82 per thousand against $1.08. A big list that mails once a week is the case Brevo is priced to win, and it wins it clearly.

The Mailchimp allowance is ten times the contact count on Essentials, which is two and a half times the weekly send this site assumes. So a sender who mails twice a week is still inside the Mailchimp allowance and has already been moved up a Brevo band. The assumption behind every Brevo row is set out on per contact against per send, and it matters more on this page than on any other.

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.

Brevo. Brevo bills send volume, so a blocklisted contact costs nothing to send to and Brevo says as much. It also says blocklisted contacts are still added to the total number of contacts, and since October 2025 that total is capped by the send band. So they do not cost sends and they do consume the cap.

The practical difference is where the damage lands. On Mailchimp a dead contact costs money at every list size, because the contact count is the meter. On Brevo it costs nothing to send to and still fills the storage cap, so it only bites at the bottom three bands where the caps are 500, 1,500 and 2,500 contacts. Above that the cap is 500,000 and the question stops mattering. The same question asked of all six vendors has the full table.

Mailchimp Essentials caps at 50,000 contacts, so the largest column carries no Essentials price and a list that size has to move to Standard or Premium. Brevo Starter stops at 100,000 sends a month, which under the weekly assumption is a 25,000 contact list, so its last two columns are empty for a different reason: not a contact ceiling but a volume one.

At 100,000 contacts only the Standard plans are left. Mailchimp Standard is $800 and Brevo Standard is $429, which is the widest gap on the page. It is also the number most exposed to the send assumption: the Brevo figure is derived from the 500,000 send band, and it assumes the list is mailed once a week and never more.