About Additional Charges

Depending on your plan type, you may sometimes see additional charges on your monthly Mailchimp bill. If you have a Marketing plan, this is based on your contact storage and email sends per pricing tier. If your total contact count or send count ever exceeds the limit of your plan, we won’t interrupt your service. Instead, you’ll see an additional charge on your monthly bill.

Our monthly Websites & Commerce plans include access to Stores. If you create and publish a store, you’ll see a transaction fee on a per-transaction basis.

In this article, you’ll learn about additional charges.

For your Marketing plan

When you choose a paid monthly plan, you’ll decide how many contacts you want to store in Mailchimp. The number you choose determines your pricing tier, and your monthly send limit. Archived and cleaned contacts don’t count toward your contact limit. You can change your maximum contact count anytime.

Sometimes, your audience might grow more than you expected, or you might send more emails than usual in a month. If you go over the contact or send limit for your tier, we’ll charge you for an extra, smaller set of contacts, called an add-on contact block. If you exceed your limit by more contacts or emails than what is included in one add-on block, the additional charge will include multiple add-on blocks. This charge is assessed month-by-month, based on your billing cycle.

The price of the add-on contact block, and the number of contacts and email sends it includes, depends on your plan and pricing tier. If you’re logged into Mailchimp and you set the maximum contact count for your plan, we’ll tell you how many contacts and email sends are included, as well as the price and size of add-on contact blocks (with additional email sends).

For example, if you have the Standard plan, the email send limit is 12 times your contact limit. This formula also applies to add-on contact blocks, so one block of 1,000 additional contacts includes 12,000 additional email sends.

Charges by plan type

Here's a breakdown of charges depending on the number of contacts and email sends.

*Quoted price applies when staying within the plan’s maximum contacts, email sends, and other limits. We don’t stop campaigns if limits are exceeded, but you will be charged for overages. Additional charges for add-ons will also apply.

About peak contact amount

We calculate your monthly bill based on your feature plan and contact tier, as well as the peak contact amount during the billing period. This means that even if your contact count decreases, your bill will reflect the highest number of contacts stored in your account that month.

For your Websites & Commerce plan

When you choose a monthly Websites & Commerce plan and publish a store, you will be charged a transaction fee on a per-transaction basis. This fee will vary depending on the plan you choose.

For example, if you’re on a Websites & Commerce Free plan and a customer buys a $10 product from you, chooses Standard shipping for $1, and the total taxes assessed are $2, the total transaction amount is $13. Mailchimp's transaction fee is 2% of that total, which in this example totals 26 cents.

Stripe fees can differ based on your business's location. To learn more about their services and pricing for your country, visit their website.

Next steps

For Marketing plans, if you see additional charges on your bill, you may want to increase your maximum contact count to the appropriate pricing tier to avoid additional charges in the future.

If you don't want to increase your contact limit, here are a couple of alternative options.

• Archive unengaged contacts Use segmentation to identify which contacts aren't interacting with your campaigns or making purchases in your store. Then, archive those contacts to reduce your number of chargeable contacts.

• Send more targeted campaigns Instead of sending every email to all of the subscribed contacts in your audience, send targeted content to smaller segments.

For Websites & Commerce plans, if you anticipate a larger number of orders for your store per month, you can upgrade to the Core or Plus plan to pay a lower transaction fee.