Moosend vs Mailchimp (2026): Price the Contacts You Email

Before you open either pricing page, open your Mailchimp audience and look at the Email Marketing column. Some contacts carry a Subscribed badge. Some say Unsubscribed. Some have no badge at all, which in Mailchimp's language makes them non-subscribed: store customers, imports, people who wrote to you. All three kinds count toward your Mailchimp bill. Only the first kind can get a campaign.

Moosend bills a different number. Billing, per its subscription help, "is based on the number of unique active subscribers in your account." So the switch question isn't what Moosend would charge for your audience. It's what Moosend would charge for the Subscribed badges in it, and what the other badges cost you on Mailchimp.

None of the seven Moosend-vs-Mailchimp pages I saved for this one, Moosend's own included, says how either tool counts unsubscribed or duplicate contacts, and Moosend's savings calculator takes a single list size for both sides. That single number is the step I'd change first.

Two counts for one audience

Here is the whole comparison in one paragraph. Mailchimp counts every subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contact, and counts a person twice if they're in two audiences. Moosend counts each active email address once, across all its lists. Price Moosend on your subscribed count, not on Mailchimp's total. Then price Mailchimp twice: as your audience stands, and after archiving the contacts you can't email. If Moosend still wins against the archived figure, the price case for switching holds. If it only wins against the unarchived figure, the saving comes from cleaning your audience, and you can do that without leaving Mailchimp.

Who Mailchimp bills, status by status

Mailchimp's help article "About Your Contacts" lists each status, whether it counts toward the monthly contact limit, and what it can receive. This is that table, shortened:

Non-subscribed contacts, per the same article, "can be from your online store, an integration, a manual import, or from a forwarded email to your Mailchimp Inbox." If your store is connected, its customers who haven't opted in land in that group.

So the number to write down is the Subscribed count, and next to it the total of the first three rows. The difference is what you pay Mailchimp for people you can reach by ad or receipt but not by campaign.

What Moosend counts

Moosend's subscription help says "Each subscription plan has a limit on the number of active subscribers" and that "Recipients with the same email address across multiple mailing lists are counted only once for billing." Its list dashboard keeps active, unsubscribed, bounced and archived recipients as separate categories, and its archiving help says an archived recipient "does not count towards its active subscribers or its billing."

That leaves one Moosend number: unique active subscribers. Unsubscribed recipients sit in their own category and don't move the price.

Moosend has its own quirk on top. Pro's price changes at fixed subscriber counts: 500 and 1,000, then each thousand up to 3,000, then 5,000, 8,000 and the 10,000 mark, then a jump to 25,000 and another to 50,000. Whatever count you bring is rounded up to the next of those. I worked through where those steps land against MailerLite separately; here the steps matter only once you know which count to round.

One store audience, three prices

A hypothetical store audience on Mailchimp: 6,000 contacts, of which 4,200 are subscribed, 1,100 have unsubscribed and 700 are non-subscribed customers who came in through the store connection. Seventy percent of the audience can get a campaign.

Monthly prices, October 9, 2026. Mailchimp tiers: 2,501 to 5,000 and 5,001 to 10,000.

My first pass at this comparison put 6,000 into both calculators. That's the number on the audience page, and it's wrong for Moosend: it prices Moosend at $64 when the bill would be $48, overstating it by $16 a month, $192 a year.

Read the table in this order:

• Standard as stored against Moosend on the subscribed count: $87 a month apart, $1,044 a year. That's the gap a switcher on Standard actually sees.
• Archiving alone saves $35 a month on either Mailchimp plan, $420 a year, because 4,200 drops the audience from the 5,001–10,000 tier into 2,501–5,000.
• After archiving, Standard is $52 a month above Moosend ($624 a year) and Essentials $27 ($324 a year).

So for this audience, about two fifths of the Standard gap is cleaning you could do inside Mailchimp. The rest is the price difference between the two tools. If $27 a month is the figure that matters to you (Essentials against Pro), the decision rests on features more than price; if you're on Standard, $624 a year is a real saving.

The same person in two audiences

Mailchimp's help on creating audiences says its "audiences don't share data, so contacts who appear in multiple audiences increase your total contact count," and gives the example plainly: "if [email protected] is in 2 of your audiences, we count that as 2 contacts." Essentials allows three audiences and Standard five.

A hypothetical newsletter with two Mailchimp audiences, 2,000 and 1,200 people, with 900 addresses in both. Mailchimp counts 3,200. The unique count is 2,300.

Merging saves $360 a year on Essentials and $480 on Standard, and needs no new tool. Against the merged figure Moosend is $13 a month below Essentials ($156 a year) and $28 below Standard ($336 a year). Mailchimp's own advice is the same: its help recommends "1 primary audience" organized with tags or segments.

If your Mailchimp audiences overlap, merge them before you compare. Moosend dedupes across lists on its own, so pricing it on your separate audience totals overstates it the same way.

Archived doesn't mean gone

Archiving is Mailchimp's answer to all of this. Its help says "Archived contacts don't count toward your billing tier," and that you keep their data and history. Three details decide how much that's worth.

Archived contacts can come back without you. The same article: "A contact can also unarchive themselves if they sign up through your Mailchimp signup form or interact with your connected online store." An archived customer who buys again returns to the audience. Unarchived contacts return "with their most recent email marketing or SMS subscription status," so an unsubscribed customer comes back unsubscribed, which is billable and still can't get a campaign. Imports do it too: "When you import contacts that are currently archived, we'll automatically unarchive them back to your audience."

The bill uses the month's peak. Mailchimp's help on additional charges says that "even if your contact total decreases, your bill will reflect the highest number of contacts stored in your account that month." Archiving lowers the next bill, not the one already running.

Archiving isn't deletion. For EU contacts who ask to be removed, Mailchimp says "archiving is not a legal substitute for deletion."

Customers run into this as a chore. A November 2024 thread in r/Emailmarketing opened with the cost: "Mailchimp charges you based on the number of contacts, so if people unsubscribe or otherwise just have non subscribed contacts, you're being charged for people you don't reach." One reply argued for archiving over deleting: "Don't just get rid/delete because if you end up importing them again for some reason you won't have the unsub on file." Another commenter granted Mailchimp's side ("I totally get their argument about having to store contacts/history/events/analytics for unsubscribes being a cost to them") and still wanted a switch: "But if they charge automatically for unsubscribers, it's only fair that they add an 'auto-archive' feature you can turn on."

With a store connected, I'd treat archiving as a monthly check, not a one-time cleanup, because the store can put contacts back. Archive the unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts you won't use for ads or receipts, check the count again before each billing date, and price Moosend against that cleaned number rather than the one you started with.

Moosend has an archive too, and archived recipients don't count there either. The difference is that on Moosend you don't need it to stop paying for unsubscribes.

Both price lists at Mailchimp's tier lines

Monthly prices at the top of each Mailchimp tier, with Moosend Pro at the same count:

Mailchimp prices are the regular monthly prices its page shows after any offer ("Then, starts at"). From the 5,001–10,000 tier up, the page also offers 15% off for the first 12 months: $93.50 for Essentials and $114.75 for Standard at that tier. Mailchimp's Premium plan starts at $350. Above 50,000 contacts Essentials isn't offered; Standard is $630 up to 75,000 and $800 up to 100,000. Mailchimp lists annual plans only for Premium and Standard at 10,000+ contacts, through sales. Moosend's annual rate is 20% off and is a published price.

On equal counts, Moosend Pro is the cheaper bill at every size in the table but one band: between 25,001 and 30,000 contacts, Essentials ($300) is $15 a month under Pro on monthly billing ($315, because Pro jumps to its 50,000 step at 25,001). Against Pro's annual rate ($252) even that band goes to Moosend. Standard is above Pro at every size I checked, up to 100,000.

Equal counts are the conservative case for Moosend. With the subscribed-count method above, the Moosend figure can only fall or stay put.

What the unmailable contacts do on Mailchimp

The extra statuses aren't dead weight for everyone. In the table above, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts can still receive ads and transactional email through Mailchimp. When Mailchimp moved to this way of counting, it told MediaPost: "That means someone who unsubscribed from email marketing, but may still be eligible for social marketing, postcards, or advertising, will remain in a customer's audience." If you run Mailchimp ads to your contacts, the unsubscribed column is doing work there, and archiving it removes those people from that use too.

Moosend's plan table doesn't price the same jobs. Its comparison table puts a cross against transactional emails for Pro and lists them as an add-on for Moosend+, its custom plan. The "When someone browses any page" and "When someone views any product" triggers are Moosend+ too. Pro does include automation workflows, landing pages and subscription forms, and Moosend's plan table lists email campaigns and sends as "Unlimited" on every plan; Mailchimp caps monthly sends at 10, 12 and 15 times the contact limit on Essentials, Standard and Premium, and limits Essentials to "Up to 4 flow steps."

So I wouldn't move a store that sends order notifications to non-subscribed customers through Mailchimp onto Moosend Pro. Those customers are the reason the non-subscribed column exists on that account, and Pro has no transactional email to receive them. That store either stays, prices Moosend+ with Moosend directly, or keeps receipts somewhere else.

A 2019 rule in a 2026 post

The counting rule gets passed around as news. An April post on X by @heynavtoor, an account that posts AI guides, seen more than 22,000 times by X's count, said that after Mailchimp's January 2026 free-plan cut, "Then they did something worse. They started charging for unsubscribed contacts." Mailchimp's free plan does stop at 250 contacts today. The counting rule is older. MediaPost reported on May 20, 2019 that Mailchimp's new plans would charge for unsubscribed contacts, and Mailchimp's own help still says accounts on "a legacy paid plan created before May 15, 2019" may have different rules around contact limits.

Mailchimp's support account restated the rule on Reddit in November 2025, in a post on how billing works: "your Mailchimp plan is based on your total number of billable contacts, not just the people you can email." One customer replied that they were having the account audited to "see why we are hit for almost 200k audience, when we only have 6-10k openers in any one month." Openers aren't subscribers, so that gap isn't all unsubscribes and non-subscribed contacts. It's the same mismatch this page prices, though, seen from the invoice.

A September post by @zentricod put the opposite preference in one line: "Email tools should charge for people you can email, not every address you store." That's Moosend's model. It's also a description of what a Mailchimp account looks like after archiving, as long as the archive holds.

What I couldn't confirm

• How Moosend's Mailchimp import treats statuses. Moosend's comparison page says its Mailchimp Synchronizer imports "audiences, and members." I didn't find a help page saying whether unsubscribed and non-subscribed members arrive as active, unsubscribed or something else. Check the first import before you pay for a step.
• Mailchimp's overage block prices. Mailchimp's help says the add-on block's price "depends on your plan and pricing tier" and is shown after login. I priced tiers, not overages.
• Accounts on Mailchimp's pre-2019 plans. Those may count differently, per the help line above.
• I didn't open an account on either platform for this page. Every figure is from the public pricing pages and help centers on October 9, 2026.

The order I'd price a switch in

1. Write down three numbers from Mailchimp: subscribed contacts; subscribed plus unsubscribed plus non-subscribed; and, if you have more than one audience, the unique addresses across them.
2. Archive and merge inside Mailchimp first, keeping any contacts you use for ads or receipts. Your new Mailchimp price is the tier your remaining count falls in.
3. Price Moosend on the subscribed count, rounded up to its next step.
4. Compare step 2 with step 3. If Moosend is still at least $10 a month lower, and you don't send transactional email to non-subscribed customers, the price case for switching holds. Under $10 a month, my call is to stay: the cleanup was the saving, and a migration costs more attention than $120 a year buys back.
5. Between 25,001 and 30,000 subscribed contacts on monthly billing, Essentials is the cheaper tool; take Moosend's annual rate or stay.

If the numbers say Moosend, sign up for Moosend's 30-day, card-free trial here and check the subscriber count it shows after your first import against the subscribed number from step 1. If they say Mailchimp, the cleaned audience is the plan; Mailchimp's pricing page shows your tier once you enter the count.

For Moosend's prices alone, including credits and the yearly terms, see the Moosend pricing breakdown.

FAQ

Does Mailchimp charge for unsubscribed contacts? Yes. Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts both count toward the monthly contact limit until you archive or delete them. Cleaned, pending, archived and deleted contacts don't count.

Does Moosend charge for unsubscribed contacts? No. Moosend bills unique active subscribers. Unsubscribed, bounced and archived recipients sit in their own categories.

Is Moosend cheaper than Mailchimp? On the same contact count, Moosend Pro is cheaper than Essentials at every size except 25,001 to 30,000 contacts on monthly billing, and cheaper than Standard at every count through 100,000. Priced on your subscribed count, the gap can only stay the same or widen, because Mailchimp's count includes contacts Moosend doesn't bill.

If I archive contacts in Mailchimp, will my bill drop right away? Not this month. Mailchimp bills the highest contact total stored during the billing period, so archiving lowers the next bill. Archived contacts can also return if they sign up again, interact with your connected store, or are re-imported.

Does Mailchimp count the same person twice? Yes, if they're in two audiences. Moosend counts an address once across all its lists.

Can I keep sending order confirmations if I move to Moosend? Not on Pro. Moosend's comparison table has no transactional email on Pro; on Moosend+ it's an add-on.