Mailchimp vs Kit pricing

Mailchimp Essentials is cheaper at every breakpoint below 25,000 contacts. At 25,000 Kit Creator takes over at $199 against $270, and it stays the cheaper paid plan at every larger list size where both publish a price.

The margin at 50,000 is thinner than the crossover suggests: $379 against $385, which is a difference of $6 a month on a list of fifty thousand people. Anyone deciding on that gap is deciding on something other than price.

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 and the comparison stops being entry plan against entry plan. Kit Creator publishes all the way to 100,000 subscribers at $679.

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.

Kit. Kit bills confirmed subscribers only, and its help pages list every other status as outside the billing total: unsubscribed, complained, bounced, blocked and unconfirmed. Hard bounces are unsubscribed automatically.

Put one list through both rules and the gap stops being theoretical. A list of 9,000 confirmed subscribers carrying 2,000 people who unsubscribed and 500 who bought from a connected store without opting in is 11,500 contacts to Mailchimp, which is past the 10,000 tier and into the next one. Kit counts the 9,000 and nothing else, which is inside the free Newsletter ceiling. Same list, and one platform is charging $270 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. Cold subscribers still count. Anyone who has not opened or clicked in 90 days keeps the confirmed status, so the cheapest list in this dataset to keep clean is also the one where inactivity is invisible on the invoice until it is removed. The rule is recorded for all six vendors, and Mailchimp is the only one of them that bills unsubscribed contacts outright.

Kit includes unlimited sends on every plan including the free one, so send volume never touches a Kit 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 never 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.

What Kit takes instead is a transaction fee on anything sold through the platform, on every plan including free. A list being monetised through Kit costs more than the subscription line says, and the amount depends on sales rather than on list size, so it cannot be placed at a breakpoint.