A creator I follow recently shared their Mailchimp bill: $308/month for 7,000 subscribers — on an old plan whose price quietly rises 11–13% a year. The number stuck with me, because the reason it's so high isn't usage. It's how the pricing works.
You pay for your peak, not for what you send
Mailchimp bills by your peak contact count, not by your send volume. Every contact you've ever collected — including the ones who never open anything — counts toward the tier you pay for, every month. Send two campaigns or twenty, the bill is the same. That's a reasonable model when your list is growing fast and every contact is active. It's an expensive one when your list is old, quiet, and mostly dormant.
So people leave. And that's where the second problem starts.
What actually migrates — and what doesn't
When you move off Mailchimp, the import into a new platform is usually the easy part:
- ✅ Contacts, tags, and segments import fine
- ❌ Templates don't transfer
- ❌ Automations don't transfer
Everything you built in the automation builder — welcome series, abandoned-cart flows, re-engagement sequences, all the conditional branches you tuned over months — has to be rebuilt by hand in the new tool. Two tabs open, clicking back and forth, for hours. The contacts are data, so they move. The automations are logic locked inside Mailchimp's builder, so they don't.
I've heard versions of this story a few times now, and the pattern is always the same: the decision to leave takes an afternoon, the rebuild takes days, and the flows that don't get rebuilt quietly never come back.
Why I'm asking
Full disclosure: I'm an indie developer researching whether this is worth building a tool for — one that would move everything, including automations and templates, and show you an honest send-volume-based cost comparison before you switch. It doesn't exist yet. I'm not selling anything; I'm checking whether the pain is real enough, and specific enough, to build for.
So instead of guessing, I'd rather ask the people who've actually done the migration:
Three questions:
- If you've migrated off Mailchimp, what took the longest — or what broke?
- Would you have paid a one-time fee (around $99) for a done-for-you full migration, automations included?
- Free offer, no strings: tell me your list size and roughly how many automations you run, and I'll send back an honest audit — what you'd save elsewhere and what migration would actually involve. No pitch attached.
Even a one-line answer to question 1 helps. War stories especially welcome — the worse the rebuild, the more I need to hear it.
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