Mailchimp alternatives: the sending bill decides this one

The finding, before the detail

Self-hosting a newsletter is not cheaper by default. A server costs the same whether it holds 500 contacts or 25,000, so at small list sizes you are paying a fixed floor to replace a bill that is still tiny. Mailchimp's cheapest paid plan at 500 contacts is $156/year. Running listmonk yourself is about $610/year. That is not a saving, it is a 3.9x premium for the privilege of doing your own ops.

The interesting part is that Mailchimp is not the cheapest option at that size either. Both lose to a low-cost hosted provider. And when you follow the arithmetic all the way up the ladder, the self-host case never arrives at all: at 25k contacts running listmonk costs $1,080 a year while EmailOctopus Core does the same job for $1,020. Self-hosting saves $2,160 against Mailchimp and still loses to the field by $60.

That is worth stating plainly because it is the opposite of what this site usually finds. Per-seat tools reward self-hosting because one server serves a whole team while the vendor bill multiplies by headcount. A newsletter does not work that way: your list size drives both the vendor bill and your sending bill, so the saving you expect to keep gets spent on delivery. The reason to run listmonk here is control over your list and your data, not the invoice.

Mailchimp figures are its cheapest paid tier at each rung, from its own pricing API (2026-07-25). Self-host is a 8 GB Vultr server ($480/yr) plus $120/yr ops allowance plus Amazon SES at $0.16 per 1,000 emails, sized to the send volume Mailchimp bundles at that rung. Hosted alternatives verified 2026-07-25.

Why the sending bill is the line everyone forgets

listmonk is not a mail server. It ships an SMTP client and expects you to bring a delivery provider, and its own documentation warns that hosts routinely block outbound ports 25 and 465. So "self-host listmonk" always means "self-host listmonk plus buy sending." Any comparison that prices a VPS and stops there is describing a setup that cannot send email.

This matters most at the top of the ladder, because Mailchimp bundles a send allowance with every contact tier. At 25k contacts that allowance is 250,000 emails a month. Replacing the plan means replacing the sends too. Amazon SES publishes $0.16 per 1,000 outbound on the Essentials plan, so 250,000 a month is $480 a year on top of the server. That keeps self-hosting $2,160 below Mailchimp at this size, but it is also what tips the answer away from self-hosting entirely: EmailOctopus Core bundles both the list layer and the delivery for $1,020 a year, which is $60 less than the server-plus-SES route. Every comparison that prices a VPS and stops there is quietly claiming a saving that the sending line takes back.

What sending actually costs

Postmark's slider jumps from 50k to 125k to 300k, so there is no published price at 250k. We leave it blank rather than interpolate one. SES figures are multiplied from its published per-1,000 rate, which is the unit AWS bills. We cost the self-hosted setup above on Essentials rather than à la carte because AWS puts accounts opened since 21 July 2026 on Essentials by default — you can switch to à la carte at any time and save the difference, but the default is what a new reader will actually be billed. Neither figure includes outgoing mail data at $0.12/GB, which AWS's own 250,000-email example puts at under a dollar a month.

Which self-hosted tool, if you run one anyway

Price is not the only reason to self-host. Owning your subscriber list outright, keeping it on infrastructure you control, and never having an account review freeze your sending are real arguments, and they are the honest ones here. If that is why you are doing it, this is the tool.

listmonk is the one we would run. A single Go binary against one PostgreSQL database, no PHP, no Redis, no queue broker, no external cron. 23.3k stars, AGPL-3.0 with a clean SPDX identifier, last pushed 1 day ago, and 7 CVEs on record in total.

Its four-week commit count is low, 5, and we would rather say so than hide it. Read alongside a release two weeks ago and a push yesterday, we read that as a mature project in maintenance rather than a stalling one. It is the figure to watch if you are betting on it.

Mautic is the other name that comes up and we would not pick it for this job. It is marketing automation, not a mailing-list tool, so you are taking on a much larger system to do a smaller task: PHP 8.2 to 8.4, MySQL or MariaDB, nine PHP extensions, three mandatory cron jobs, and an explicit statement from the project that shared hosting is not supported. Its security volume is the harder objection: 26 CVEs published since January 2024, two of them at CVSS 9.9 in May 2026 alone. It is very actively developed (229 commits in four weeks), so this is not a dead project. It is a large attack surface for a newsletter.

What to do instead

Take a hosted option and skip the server. At 500 contacts Moosend Pro is $84/year against Mailchimp's $156. At 2.5k it is $216 against $540. You are buying the same job done for less money with none of the operational work, which is the honest recommendation even though it is not the self-hosting story this site is named after.

Two caveats on those cheap tiers. MailerLite's Comfort plan caps sends at ten times your contact count, and lifting the cap means its Power plan, which adds between $140 and $648 a year depending on list size. EmailOctopus Connect looks cheapest on list price but is a different shape of product: you supply your own Amazon SES account and it provides only the list and campaign layer. The figures in our table already add that SES bill at the send volume Mailchimp bundles for the same list size, so do not add it twice — but do note that if you send far more than Mailchimp's allowance, your SES line grows and theirs is fixed.

If the free tier is where you land, EmailOctopus carries 2.5k and 10,000 sends a month at no cost, which is the widest free allowance of anything in this table and the reason it beats both Mailchimp and a self-hosted stack at the bottom two rungs. MailerLite's free plan stops at 250 contacts, an order of magnitude smaller, so the two are not interchangeable at small list sizes even though they sit in the same column above. Both links in this paragraph are affiliate links and they pay us nothing on the free tiers — the commission only starts if your list outgrows the free allowance and you upgrade, which is a later problem than the one this section is about.

What we could not verify

Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is missing from the comparison. Its pricing page returns HTTP 403 to our host and we do not use cached snapshots for pricing, so we have no figure rather than a stale one. Brevo prices on send volume rather than contacts and its per-volume ladder sits behind a session-gated calculator, so only the plan entry points are public. Moosend publishes no rung at exactly 2,500 contacts; its neighbours are 2,000 and 3,000. Mailchimp's overage rate is not published at all, which means the ceiling on a Mailchimp bill cannot be determined from its pricing page.

Affiliate disclosure: the EmailOctopus and MailerLite links on this page are affiliate links and we may earn a commission if you later upgrade to one of their paid plans. They pay nothing on the free tiers we actually recommend. We have no affiliate relationship with Mailchimp, Brevo, Moosend or Kit, and none with Listmonk, Keila or Mautic, which are open-source projects with nothing to sell us. The cost table above is generated from the vendor data files in this repository and was written before the affiliate links were added.

Pricing verified 2026-07-25. Project health snapshot 2026-09-08. Server costs 2026-07-25. Working notes in research/mailchimp-commercial-and-sending.md and research/mailchimp-oss-health.md.