Most of an email marketing bill is not a bill for sending email. It is a bill for names sitting in a database, including the ones you have not written to in a year and the ones who unsubscribed and were never archived. That is the part of Mailchimp’s pricing people rage about, and it is the part every “cheaper alternative” quietly reproduces unless it changes the billing unit.
Mailchimp made the arithmetic sharper in 2026. As of October 2026 the free plan allows one audience with a maximum of 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, capped at 250 a day — it used to be 500 contacts, and the cut matters if you are close to the line. Paid tiers start at about $13/month for Essentials and $20/month for Standard at 500 contacts, with a monthly send allowance of 12 times your contact count on Standard and 15 times on Premium, which starts around $350/month at 10,000 contacts. Overages on contacts or sends are billed, not blocked.
So the useful question is not “which tool is cheaper than Mailchimp” but “which meter do I want to be on”. There are three: contacts, sends, and a server you rent yourself.
Screenshot from OpenAI’s product page. Copywriting is now table stakes in every tool below; the billing unit is what actually separates them.
Four tools that move the meter
Brevo bills on email volume, and that single decision makes it the default answer for most lists under roughly 20,000 people. The free plan is capped by daily sends — 300 emails a day — rather than by list size, so a 3,000-name list costs nothing until you need more volume or want the branding removed. Starter runs about $9/month for 5,000 emails (about $8 on annual billing), and Business about $18/month adds automation, A/B tests and landing pages. Marketing and transactional mail share one account, which is convenient and also the thing to watch: a password-reset spike eats the same quota as your newsletter. Brevo has also shipped an MCP connector so campaigns and contacts can be managed from ChatGPT or Claude, which is more useful for reporting queries than for writing.
MailerLite is the closest like-for-like swap and still per subscriber. Free covers 250 subscribers, Comfort about $10.80/month on annual billing (about $12 monthly) up to 500, and Power about $22.50/month annual up to 500. The editor is the reason people stay: cleaner than Mailchimp’s, with automations and landing pages included on the cheap tiers. At 500 subscribers the saving against Mailchimp is a few dollars a month, so switch for the interface and the simpler pricing ladder, not for the money.
Listmonk removes the meter entirely. It is a single Go binary backed by Postgres, MIT-licensed, and the current release is v7.0.0-beta.1, published on 20 October 2026 — a project that has been shipping since 2018 and is still actively developed. What you pay for is SMTP. Amazon SES bills $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails at low volume, so 10,000 subscribers on four campaigns a month is 40,000 emails, about $4. The catch is that there is no drag-and-drop builder; campaigns are Go templates, and you are the deliverability team. For a company already running a server, that trade is excellent. For a two-person shop with no one on call, it is a liability.
Mautic is the other open-source route, and it is a different animal: marketing automation first, newsletter second. The 7.x series has been the actively supported line since January 2026, with 7.3 designated LTS in Q3 2026, and 8.x in development. It gives you campaign journeys, lead scoring, segments and a CRM-shaped contact view on your own PHP/MySQL stack, with cron jobs that must actually run. Choose it when lifecycle automation is the requirement and a newsletter tool is just the delivery mechanism. Choose anything else when you mainly send a weekly email.
| Tool | Free allowance | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | 250 contacts, 500 sends/month | Contacts, with sends as a multiple |
| Brevo | 300 emails/day | Emails sent |
| MailerLite | 250 subscribers | Subscribers |
| Listmonk | Software free; you pay SMTP | Emails sent through your provider |
| Mautic | Software free; you pay hosting | Nothing — you run it |
Deliverability and compliance: where the savings disappear
Self-hosting does not improve inbox placement. It moves the reputation problem onto your domain, and a fresh domain sending 10,000 emails in week one looks exactly like a spammer to every major provider. Warm up in the hundreds, then the low thousands, and only then send to the full list.
Authentication is no longer optional. SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment are the price of entry, and since February 2024 Google and Yahoo require them for bulk senders — along with one-click unsubscribe and a spam complaint rate under 0.3%. A tool that makes this easy is worth more than one that saves $10 a month. Brevo and MailerLite handle the DNS records for you; Listmonk and Mautic leave the records, the bounce processing and the feedback loops in your hands.
The expensive mistake is buying or scraping a list. It is also the fastest way to lose a domain you use for transactional mail, because reputation is shared across everything sent from it. Consent has to be recorded, not assumed — GDPR expects an affirmative opt-in with a timestamp, and double opt-in is the only cheap way to prove it later. A single-opt-in import from a “partner” is a liability disguised as growth.
Then the quieter one: unsubscribed contacts usually still count toward a contact-based bill until you archive or delete them. A list that has been running for three years can be 30% dead weight. Pruning it lowers the invoice and improves engagement rates, which is the metric inbox providers actually read.
A stack that fits a small team
Start on Brevo’s free tier and stay until daily volume or branding forces an upgrade. It is the least work for the most capability, and the transactional/marketing overlap means one integration instead of two. Move to MailerLite if the team lives in the editor and the list stays under a few thousand.
Past roughly 5,000 subscribers with a predictable sending rhythm, the arithmetic favours Listmonk on SES — but only if someone owns the server, the backups and the DNS. Budget the engineer’s hours honestly; at $4/month for sending, the labour is the entire cost.
Keep measurement outside the email tool. Attribution belongs in analytics, not in a dashboard that only sees opens — our Google Analytics alternatives covers the privacy-friendly options, and if you are assembling the rest of a small-team toolkit, the AI tools for business roundup covers the pieces around it.
Questions that come up
Is Listmonk actually free? The software is. Sending is not: you need an SMTP provider, a Postgres instance and a host. Expect a few dollars a month in infrastructure plus whatever your time is worth.
Can I import my Mailchimp audience? Yes, as a CSV export, and consent travels with the list — people who opted out must not be re-imported. Keep the opt-in timestamps; they are your defence if a provider asks.
Do I need a dedicated IP? Not below a few hundred thousand sends a month. A dedicated IP with low volume has no reputation to inherit and takes weeks to warm, which is worse than a well-managed shared pool.
Which is cheapest for 10,000 subscribers? Listmonk plus SES, by an order of magnitude, if you can run it. Otherwise Brevo, because volume — not list size — is what you are buying.
Sources: Mailchimp and Brevo pricing pages, MailerLite pricing, listmonk.app release notes (20 October 2026), mautic.org release schedule, AWS SES pricing, all checked in October 2026. Prices change; verify before you commit.