Best Mailchimp Alternatives Now That They've Priced Out Everyone Under 10K Subscribers

Mailchimp used to be the free, friendly default. Then the pricing tiers happened, the free plan got gutted, and now your list crosses some arbitrary threshold and suddenly you're staring at a $50+/month bill for automation features that were basic ten years ago. Here's where people are actually migrating to, and why, depending on what kind of sender you are.

MailerLite

The move for anyone whose only crime was having a list that grew past a small number. MailerLite strips out the enterprise bloat Mailchimp piles on and just lets you send clean, good-looking emails without the pricing cliff.

I move clients here the second Mailchimp's billing starts feeling punitive rather than proportional. No bloated CRM tacked on, no forced upsells at every corner of the dashboard. UI is genuinely pleasant, not an afterthought bolted onto a legacy product. It's not the most powerful tool on this list — automations are solid but not ActiveCampaign-tier — but for straightforward newsletter sending at a fair price, it's the default answer now.

ActiveCampaign

Mailchimp calls its workflows "automations." ActiveCampaign makes that word look like a joke. Real conditional logic — click this, wait two days, check for a purchase, branch accordingly — the kind of stuff that actually functions as a sales funnel instead of a glorified autoresponder.

This is the only serious option once you need behavior-based sequencing rather than "send this on day 3." It comes with genuine CRM capability built in, not a thin integration. The tradeoff is obvious: it's more tool than most solo creators need, and the learning curve reflects that. Nobody's opening ActiveCampaign for a simple monthly newsletter. They're opening it because Mailchimp's automation builder hit a wall they needed to blow through.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Built entirely around one type of sender: the solo creator selling something. Courses, digital products, a personal newsletter with an actual voice — not e-commerce blasts dressed up in heavy graphic templates.

The deliverability angle matters more than people give it credit for. Kit leans text-first by design, which keeps emails out of the Promotions tab that swallows most Mailchimp campaigns whole. If the goal is a newsletter that reads like a person wrote it and actually converts to sales, this is the tool built for that exact job, not a repurposed marketing platform pretending to be one.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Different pricing logic entirely, and it's the whole pitch: Brevo charges based on emails sent, not contacts stored. Mailchimp does the opposite, which quietly punishes anyone sitting on a large list they don't email often.

Fifty thousand contacts, one email a month — Mailchimp treats that like an enterprise account. Brevo charges pennies for it because the actual send volume is low. If your list size and your send frequency don't match Mailchimp's assumptions about how you should be using it, this fixes that mismatch directly instead of making you shrink your list to dodge a price bracket.

Beehiiv

For people whose newsletter isn't a marketing channel bolted onto a business — it is the business. Beehiiv functions as CMS and sender at once, and it's built around growth mechanics Mailchimp never bothered with: referral programs baked in, an actual monetization network, analytics that go deeper than open rate and click rate.

Comparing this to Mailchimp for a publication-style newsletter isn't really fair anymore. Mailchimp's still thinking in terms of campaigns and audiences. Beehiiv's thinking in terms of subscriber growth loops and ad revenue. If that's the model you're running, everything here is purpose-built rather than repurposed.

Which One

MailerLite if you just got priced out and want the same basic job done without the extortion. ActiveCampaign if you need automation logic complex enough to function as a funnel, not a newsletter. Kit if you're a solo creator selling something and want your emails read as personal, not promotional. Brevo if your contact count and your send frequency don't match Mailchimp's billing assumptions. Beehiiv if the newsletter itself is the product. Mailchimp still works fine for the exact use case it was built for in 2015 — it's everything since then that's the problem.