Free Mailchimp vs Klaviyo Pricing Calculator

Last updated: October 24, 2026

Quick answer: Mailchimp and Klaviyo bill different things, and that is the whole comparison: Mailchimp bills every contact in your audience, including unsubscribed ones you cannot email, while Klaviyo bills only active profiles that can actually receive marketing. A list with real churn therefore costs different amounts on the two platforms even at the same list size. This free Mailchimp vs Klaviyo pricing calculator prices both on your contacts, your unsubscribed share and your Mailchimp plan, and shows the cost per reachable contact alongside the monthly bill. On the defaults (6,000 contacts, 20% unsubscribed, Mailchimp Standard), Mailchimp costs $135 a month while Klaviyo costs $100 a month — Klaviyo saves $35 a month, $420 a year, because it bills 4,800 active profiles and drops to the 5,000-contact tier. Everything runs in your browser; your list size stays private.

Contacts in your audience

Unsubscribed / unreachable share (%)

Mailchimp plan

Klaviyo bills its Email plan on active profiles only. Mailchimp bills on all contacts in the audience, including unsubscribed ones — archive them or keep paying for them.

Monthly prices, checked September 2026, by contact tier (500 / 1,000 / 2,500 / 5,000 / 10,000 / 25,000 / 50,000 / 100,000): Klaviyo Email $20 / $30 / $60 / $100 / $150 / $375 / $720 / $1,380. Mailchimp Essentials $13 / $27 / $45 / $75 / $110 / $230 / $385 / $650. Mailchimp Standard $20 / $40 / $60 / $100 / $135 / $280 / $450 / $800. Both vendors price by the smallest tier that covers the billed count, so a count one contact over a tier boundary jumps a full tier — the calculator prices by tier, never by interpolation. Email only: SMS is extra on both (Klaviyo moved to dollar-based mobile pricing in July 2026; Mailchimp SMS is a paid add-on). Worked check: 6,000 contacts, 20% unsubscribed, Standard — Mailchimp bills 6,000 at the 10,000 tier ($135); Klaviyo bills 4,800 at the 5,000 tier ($100). Verify against each vendor's current pricing page before committing; both reprice tiers periodically.

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How to Use the Mailchimp vs Klaviyo Pricing Calculator

Enter your contacts in your audience — the total in the system, not just the engaged segment. Mailchimp bills this number; Klaviyo bills a smaller one, and the gap between the two numbers is the entire comparison.
Set your unsubscribed / unreachable share — the percentage of the audience that cannot receive marketing (unsubscribed, bounced, archived-but-still-counted). Mailchimp counts these toward billing on most plans; Klaviyo does not count them at all. A list that has aged without archiving can easily carry 20–30% dead weight.
Pick your Mailchimp plan. Essentials is the cheaper tier but locks automation; Standard is the tier most growing stores actually buy, with advanced automation, behavioural targeting and send-time optimisation. Premium (from $350 a month, including 10,000 contacts) is excluded here because its pricing is quote-shaped at larger lists — if you are on Premium, compare its quote against Klaviyo's tier price directly.
Press Compare email pricing. Read the billed-contacts line first: it shows Mailchimp billing the full audience while Klaviyo bills only the reachable remainder. Then read the monthly gap and the cost per reachable contact — the second number is the honest efficiency metric, because a platform that bills dead contacts looks cheap per billed contact and expensive per email actually delivered.
Watch for the tier-drop note. When Klaviyo's billed count falls into a lower tier than Mailchimp's, the calculator flags it: that tier drop — not a per-contact discount — is usually the whole saving. Nudge your unsubscribed share up or down a few points and watch the tier boundary move; lists sitting just over a boundary are the ones where archiving pays for itself.
If you send SMS, budget it separately. Klaviyo's mobile messaging moved to dollar-based pricing in July 2026 (about $15 buys roughly 1,000 US toll-free texts at the entry level, plus a small included allowance); Mailchimp SMS is a paid add-on. Neither is in this email-only comparison, and a heavy SMS program can outweigh the email gap on either side.

Why Use Our Mailchimp vs Klaviyo Pricing Calculator?

Billed contacts, not list size, compared — the comparison most guides skip. Mailchimp bills the audience; Klaviyo bills active profiles. Showing both billed counts side by side is what turns a price table into a decision.
Tier pricing, never interpolation — both vendors charge by tier, so a count one contact over a boundary jumps a full tier. The calculator prices by the smallest tier covering the billed count, exactly as the vendors bill, instead of smoothing the steps away with a per-contact average that neither vendor charges.
Cost per reachable contact — the efficiency number that matters. A platform billing dead contacts can look cheap per billed contact while costing more per email that actually reaches an inbox. This line divides each bill by the reachable audience, not the billed one.
The tier-drop flag — when Klaviyo's active-profile count falls a tier below Mailchimp's billed count, the calculator says so explicitly. That boundary effect is where most of the real-world saving lives, and it is invisible in any comparison that uses list size alone.
Email-only, honestly labelled — SMS pricing is excluded and the exclusion is stated, with the current SMS shape summarised, instead of silently bundling one vendor's SMS and omitting the other's.
Exportable for the decision — download the comparison as CSV or print it to PDF for a marketing budget review. Your list size never leaves your browser.

Common Use Cases

A store with a 6,000-contact list that has never been cleaned: 20% unsubscribed is typical for an uncleaned list: Mailchimp Standard bills 6,000 at the 10,000 tier ($135); Klaviyo bills 4,800 at the 5,000 tier ($100). The $35 monthly saving ($420 a year) is entirely a billing-model effect — same list, different billed count. Archiving the dead contacts in Mailchimp would cut its bill to the 5,000 tier ($100) and erase the gap, which is the cheapest fix of all.
A clean 10,000-contact list choosing on headline rates: No dead weight: Mailchimp Standard bills 10,000 ($135) against Klaviyo's 10,000 ($150). Mailchimp wins by $15 a month on price — and the store should then decide on features (Klaviyo's predictive analytics and Shopify depth vs Mailchimp's broader marketing suite) rather than pretending the price gap is larger than it is.
A growing list approaching a tier boundary: A list at 4,900 contacts with 10% unsubscribed: Mailchimp bills 4,900 at the 5,000 tier ($100 Standard); Klaviyo bills 4,410 at the same tier ($100). No gap — until the list crosses 5,000, when Mailchimp jumps to the 10,000 tier ($135) while Klaviyo (4,500 billed) stays at $100. The calculator shows exactly where that boundary flips, so the store can archive before crossing it.
A marketer pitching a platform switch on cost per reachable contact: The pitch number is not the monthly bill but the per-reachable cost: on the defaults, Mailchimp costs $0.028 per reachable contact against Klaviyo's $0.021. That 25% efficiency gap is the finance-friendly framing of a billing-model difference, and it survives even when the monthly bills tie — because the reachable audience is what the business actually bought.

Mailchimp vs Klaviyo Pricing Calculator vs Alternatives

Vendor pricing pages (Mailchimp, Klaviyo): The authoritative rate source, and the place to verify any tier price before committing. What a pricing page cannot do is apply Mailchimp's bill-everything rule and Klaviyo's bill-active-only rule to your unsubscribed share at once, or show the tier drop that follows. That is the calculator's job.
Independent comparison guides: Most guides publish the tier tables side by side and stop there — which is exactly the comparison that misleads, because the tables assume both vendors bill the same count. They do not. A guide that never asks about your unsubscribed share has not compared the prices you will actually pay.
ToolNest's Slack vs Teams cost calculator: The same billing-model method applied to chat: Slack bills active users, Teams bills all users (or $0 marginal inside a suite). Here the billing-model gap is contacts vs active profiles instead of users vs active users — same lesson, different vendors.
Doing the comparison in a spreadsheet: Works, but the spreadsheet has to encode both vendors' tier tables and the billed-count rules by hand, and it goes stale every time either vendor reprices tiers. This page keeps the tier tables and the billing rules in one place, current to the September 2026 checks.

Bottom line: clean lists favour Mailchimp's headline rates; dirty lists favour Klaviyo's active-profile billing. Clean the list first, then compare — and the calculator will tell you which side of the tier boundary you land on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Mailchimp or Klaviyo cheaper?

It depends on your unsubscribed share. At 500 contacts with no dead weight, Essentials ($13) undercuts Klaviyo ($20) and Standard ties it ($20). At 6,000 contacts with 20% unsubscribed, Klaviyo wins ($100 vs Standard $135) because it bills 4,800 profiles and drops a tier. At 10,000 clean contacts, Standard ($135) undercuts Klaviyo ($150). The rule: the dirtier the list, the better Klaviyo looks; the cleaner the list, the better Mailchimp's headline rates look.

Why does Mailchimp bill unsubscribed contacts?

Mailchimp bills on audience size, and unsubscribed contacts remain in the audience unless archived. A 10,000-contact list with 20% unsubscribes bills at 10,000 while only 8,000 are reachable — you pay for 2,000 contacts you cannot email. Archiving the unsubscribed regularly is the cheapest Mailchimp optimisation there is, and it is free.

What is an active profile on Klaviyo?

A profile that can receive marketing — subscribed and not suppressed. Klaviyo does not bill for unsubscribed, bounced or otherwise unreachable profiles. That is why Klaviyo's effective cost per reachable contact is often lower than its headline tier price suggests, and why a churn-heavy list migrates to Klaviyo for cost reasons even when the tier tables look similar.

Which plan should a small Shopify store pick?

At 500 contacts, Mailchimp Essentials ($13) is the cheapest entry, but its automation is limited; Standard ($20) ties Klaviyo ($20) and unlocks the automations a store actually needs. For a Shopify store planning flows (welcome, abandon, post-purchase), Klaviyo's ecommerce-native segmentation and predictive analytics usually justify the tie — and its free plan covers 250 profiles while you validate.

Does this calculator include SMS?

No, email only, stated plainly. Klaviyo's mobile messaging moved to dollar-based pricing in July 2026; Mailchimp SMS is a paid add-on in selected countries. If SMS is a meaningful share of your program, price it separately on both sides before deciding — a heavy SMS program can reverse an email-only verdict.

What happens above 100,000 contacts?

Both vendors move toward negotiated pricing at that scale, and the tier tables here stop at 100,000. The calculator caps its slider there for the same reason: past 100,000, get quotes from both vendors and negotiate on the annual totals, not the published tiers.