Mailchimp charges you for people who unsubscribed. That's not a gotcha from a forum thread, it's how audience billing works. Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward your bill until you archive them, per Mailchimp's own documentation. Sit with that policy for a minute and you understand the product. Mailchimp is an email marketing tool built to bill businesses per contact, and at that job it's often fine. It just has very little to do with running a newsletter in 2026.
We're a performance marketing agency, and this isn't a hit piece. Across 12+ years and 400+ brands we've run Mailchimp for e-commerce clients, and when the job is store email, it earns its keep. But we moved our own newsletter to beehiiv, and the reasons apply to almost anyone whose list is the product rather than a side channel. If you want the deep product teardown first, our full beehiiv review has it, and we've run this same matchup against Substack, Kit, and Ghost.
beehiiv vs Mailchimp at a glance
| beehiiv | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | To 2,500 subscribers, unlimited sends | 500 contacts, 1,000 sends a month |
| Pricing model | Flat plans, Scale from $49 | Per contact, climbs with every band |
| Paid newsletter subs | Built in, 0% cut | None |
| Ad network | Yes, built in | No |
| Growth | Boosts, referrals, recommendations | Forms, landing pages, ads add-ons |
| Automations | Solid on paid plans | Deep, journeys and store triggers |
| E-commerce | Light | Extensive store integrations and CRM |
| Best for | Newsletters and media | Businesses emailing customers |
| Try it | Try beehiiv |
Two different species
Start with what each product is for, because the confusion here sells a lot of wrong subscriptions. Mailchimp exists so a business that sells something else can email its customers. Campaigns, promotions, abandoned-cart nudges, the monthly update. Intuit bought Mailchimp for about $12 billion in 2021 because millions of small businesses use it exactly that way, and nothing in that sentence involves a newsletter anyone reads on purpose, let alone pays for.
beehiiv exists so the email itself can be the business. It was started by people who built Morning Brew's growth engine, and the whole product leans that direction. Paid subscriptions with a 0% platform take, an ad marketplace, a referral engine, and a recommendations network connecting 130K+ publishers. Every part assumes your list is an asset with a P&L, not a marketing expense.
Neither tool is a worse version of the other. They're different species, and one question sorts you. Does the money come from the list itself, or does the list point at money somewhere else? First answer, beehiiv. Second answer, Mailchimp, and this post will still be honest about where it beats beehiiv at that job.
The pricing models, flat vs per contact
Free tiers first, since that's where most newsletters start. Mailchimp's free plan covers 500 contacts and 1,000 sends a month, with Mailchimp branding on every email. beehiiv's Launch plan is free to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. That's not a rounding-error difference. A weekly send to 800 readers is over Mailchimp's contact cap before the first email goes out, and it's not even a third of the way through beehiiv's free tier.
Paid plans split by model. Mailchimp prices per contact band, Essentials from about $13 a month, Standard from about $20, Premium from about $350, and every band your list crosses raises the bill, per Mailchimp's pricing page. Monthly send volume is capped as a multiple of your contact count too. beehiiv charges flat plans by subscriber range, Scale from $49 a month, and our beehiiv pricing guide maps the whole curve up to $109 on Max.
A worked example. A 5,000-contact list on Mailchimp Standard runs about $100 a month on the published bands, before any padding from unsubscribed contacts you haven't archived. The same list on beehiiv Scale is $49 flat, sends included, with the ad network and referral program in the box.
Then there's the billing detail we opened with. Mailchimp counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts as billable until you archive them, per their own help docs. We've audited accounts where a meaningful slice of the monthly bill was people who left months ago. Nobody at Mailchimp hides this, but nobody's rushing to archive your dead contacts for you either.
The monetization gap
Here's the section Mailchimp can't answer. Suppose the list works and 10,000 people read you every week. On Mailchimp, turning that into revenue is entirely your problem. There's no paid subscription product, so gating content means duct-taping a payment tool to a manually managed segment. There's no ad marketplace, so sponsorships are cold emails and a media kit PDF. No referral program, no cross-promo network, nothing that treats the newsletter as an asset.
beehiiv ships all of it. Paid subscriptions with a 0% platform take, so you keep everything after Stripe's processing. The Ad Network books sponsors against your sends and pays per placement or per click. Boosts pays you for recommending other newsletters, and lets you buy your own growth the same way, typically a few dollars per verified subscriber. We run paid acquisition for a living, and Boosts is the closest thing email has to a real ad channel with a knowable cost per subscriber.
The blunt version. On Mailchimp your list is a cost line that grows with every signup. On beehiiv the list is the P&L.
Where Mailchimp wins, honestly
Automations, and it isn't close. Mailchimp's customer journeys trigger off store behavior, purchases, abandoned carts, site visits, and tags, and it integrates with more e-commerce and CRM tools than beehiiv will likely ever bother with. If your email program is really a marketing automation program for a store, Mailchimp is the right shape, and moving to a newsletter platform would be trading a toolbox for a megaphone.
The testing depth is real too. A/B testing from Standard up, send-time optimization, multivariate testing on Premium. beehiiv covers subject-line A/B tests and the practical basics, which is genuinely enough for a newsletter, but a lifecycle marketer would feel the missing gears within a week.
We've kept clients on Mailchimp for exactly these reasons. The rule is about the job, not the logo. Store email and lifecycle flows, keep Mailchimp or graduate to a heavier CRM. Audience and content, get out, because every one of Mailchimp's strengths sits in a part of the product a newsletter never touches.
Growth tools, a network vs a form builder
Mailchimp's growth tooling is a form builder, landing pages, and add-ons that spend your budget on Meta and Google inventory. Functional, but the list only grows when you push it. There's no network on the other side of the tool, no readers flowing between publications, nobody recommending you to their audience.
beehiiv sits inside a network of 130K+ publishers reaching 425M+ unique readers, and its growth tools use that network. Recommendations move subscribers between newsletters. Boosts prices that movement per verified subscriber, so growth becomes a media buy you can forecast. The referral program gives readers a reason to forward you. For a B2B or SaaS list feeding a pipeline, that stack grows a small, high-value audience without waiting on SEO, the same logic we lay out in our SaaS performance marketing playbook.
There's a website angle too. beehiiv gives every newsletter an SEO-indexable site with archives on a custom domain, which turns every issue into a page Google can rank. Mailchimp's campaign archives were never built for search, and nobody's finding your emails through them. Over a year of weekly sends, that's 52 pages of compounding search surface that one platform builds for you and the other doesn't.
Migrating off Mailchimp
The move is a CSV and an afternoon. Export your audience from Mailchimp, import it into beehiiv, and bring only subscribed contacts across, since dead weight hurts deliverability on any platform. Set up your custom sending domain in beehiiv before the first send, keep your normal cadence so engagement stays steady, and hold the old account read-only for a month in case you need campaign history.
Permission carries over because these are your subscribers, not Mailchimp's. There's no network or app to leave behind, which makes this an easier exit than leaving Substack. Nothing about a Mailchimp list is stuck in Mailchimp, and your first beehiiv invoice is likely smaller than the one it replaces.
Who should stay on Mailchimp
- You sell products, and email is your lifecycle channel, carts, promos, and post-purchase flows.
- Your automations trigger off store and CRM events beehiiv doesn't track.
- The team already runs campaigns in it and the integrations do real work.
- Nobody's trying to earn revenue from the list itself.
Who should pick beehiiv
- The newsletter is the product, or it's becoming one.
- You want paid subscriptions, sponsorships, or Boosts income without duct tape.
- You're under 2,500 subscribers and would rather pay $0 while you grow.
- You'd rather buy growth at a known cost per subscriber than rent forms and hope.
The verdict
Mailchimp is a fine email marketing tool wearing the wrong costume in this comparison. If your list exists to sell something else, keep it and ignore the switching content, ours included. If the list is the business, Mailchimp gives you nothing beehiiv doesn't beat, and its per-contact pricing actively punishes the growth you're chasing.
Start on beehiiv's free plan and the test costs you a CSV export. 2,500 subscribers of runway is five times what Mailchimp's free tier allows, and the monetization stack is waiting when you're ready for it.