Mailchimp cost calculator
How much of your Mailchimp bill pays for people who never read your email? Move the sliders to see what your inactive contacts cost you every year.
What are your ghosts costing you?
Estimated from Mailchimp's public Standard-plan tiers. Your audit returns the exact number for your account.
$480 a year back in your pocket
How Mailchimp bills your contacts
Mailchimp prices its plans by the number of contacts in your account, and that count includes more people than most marketers expect: subscribed contacts, but also unsubscribed and non-subscribed ones (the contacts your store or integrations sync in without an opt-in). Contacts that bounced for good are cleaned and stop counting; everyone else counts until you remove them.
Plans come in contact tiers. Cross the top of a tier, even by a few contacts, and the whole account moves to the next price. A list full of people who stopped reading years ago doesn't just add a little: it can push you a full tier up.
- SubscribedBilled
- UnsubscribedBilled
- Non-subscribed (synced, no opt-in)Billed
- Duplicates (same email in several audiences)Billed
- Archived, then un-archived by a store syncBilled
- Cleaned (hard bounces)Not billed
- ArchivedNot billed
How to lower your Mailchimp bill
A contact is dead weight when they haven't clicked, bought or engaged in a long time, or when they're unsubscribed or never opted in. Lean on clicks and purchases: some email apps open every message automatically.
- 1
Archive, don't delete
Archived contacts stop counting toward your bill but keep their history, and you can bring them back at any time.
- 2
Remove duplicates across audiences
The same email in three audiences is billed three times. Keep the most active copy.
- 3
Clear unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts
They still count toward your plan, and you can't email most of them anyway.
- 4
Do it every month
Lists decay continuously: a one-off cleanup is back where it started within a year.
Swap the estimate for your real numbers.
The free audit reads your account and shows exactly which contacts you pay for and never reach. Read-only: nothing is archived until you say so.