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Mailchimp Drastically Reduces Free Plan Limits

Published at Feb 6, 2026

Mailchimp has announced significant reductions to their Free Marketing plan, effective February 17th, 2026. This is another example of a service drastically nerfing their free tier after building a substantial user base.

What’s Changing

Starting February 17th, 2026, the Free Marketing plan will have severe new restrictions:

  • Contact limit: Up to 250 contacts (previously 500)
  • Monthly send limit: Up to 500 email sends (new restriction)
  • Daily send limit: Up to 250 email sends (new restriction)

The features available on the free plan remain unchanged, but these tight limits make the free tier practically unusable for anyone beyond personal hobby projects.

Why This Matters

With only 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends, you can’t even send two emails per month to your entire list. If you send a welcome email, a weekly newsletter, or any transactional emails, you’ll quickly hit these limits.

This is particularly frustrating for:

  • Small businesses just getting started with email marketing
  • Side projects that don’t yet have revenue to justify paid plans
  • Non-profits operating on tight budgets
  • Developers testing and building email workflows

What to Expect

If you exceed 250 contacts, you’ll need to either:

  1. Archive contacts to get back down to 250 or fewer
  2. Upgrade to a paid plan to continue sending

Similarly, exceeding 500 emails per month or 250 per day will require an upgrade.

Alternatives to Consider

If you’re looking for more generous free tiers, consider these alternatives:

  • Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) - 300 emails/day with unlimited contacts
  • MailerLite - 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails/month on free plan
  • Loops - Great for SaaS, competitive free tier
  • Self-hosted solutions - More technical but no vendor lock-in

Check out our email service price calculator to compare options based on your needs.

The Pattern Continues

This follows a troubling pattern we’ve seen across the industry:

  1. Offer generous free tier to build user base
  2. Get users locked into the platform
  3. Dramatically reduce free tier limits
  4. Force users to upgrade or migrate (migration is painful)

Previous examples include Heroku eliminating their free tier entirely, and various other services following similar paths once they achieve market dominance.

The Full Announcement

Here’s the email Mailchimp sent to users:

We’re changing contact and send volume limits for the Free Marketing plan on February 17th

Thank you for being a part of the Intuit Mailchimp community. We are grateful that you’ve entrusted us to help support and grow your brand.

We’re writing to let you know about changes we’re making to the Free Marketing plan. On February 17th, the plan will have new limits on contacts and send volume.

Based on your account’s current contact amount and recent sending volume, you’re not immediately impacted by this change. If your contact or sending needs increase, here’s how these changes could affect you or any other account on a Free Marketing plan you have.

What’s changing

  • Contact limit – Up to 250 contacts
  • Monthly send limit – Up to 500 email sends
  • Daily send limit – Up to 250 email sends

The features on the Free Marketing plan aren’t changing.

If you’re affected by these changes, now is the time to evaluate alternatives before the February 17th deadline.