Their bill is a function of how many contacts you hold. Ours is a function of which plan you picked. That single difference decides most of this comparison — and it gets louder every quarter your list gets bigger.
This is not a criticism of Mailchimp — it is simply how their commercial model works, and they are open about it. You are billed on the size of your audience. Add contacts, pay more. It is the one line of the pricing page that follows you around forever.
A signup form does its job. Ten thousand people join. Your marketing worked — and your software bill went up before a single one of them opened anything.
The charge is on stored contacts, not engaged ones. The part of your list that has not opened an email in a year is still on the meter. So you end up pruning a list to manage an invoice rather than to improve deliverability. Those are different decisions and they should never be confused.
On CleverlyBox the plan is the plan. Starter is $20/mo for 5,000 contacts. Business is $50/mo for 100,000. Cross a threshold, move plan. In between, growth is free.
This is a model, not a quotation. It is calculated at $0.60–$0.95 per 100 contacts per month — the published band across mainstream per-contact providers at these volumes. It is not Mailchimp's quoted price, and we make no claim about what they will charge you today. Take your own invoice, divide by your contact count, and see where you land. CleverlyBox figures are our actual list prices.
Those are Mailchimp's own words, published on their pricing page, describing what happens when the introductory rate ends. It is honest of them to print it. It is also the most important sentence on the page — and the one most people skim.
Then standard pricing applies— Mailchimp's pricing page, on the introductory rate
Introductory pricing is a perfectly normal way to sell software. We have no quarrel with it. But it means the number that persuaded you to sign up is not the number you will be paying in month four — and by month four you have your templates in there, your automations in there and your list in there. The switching cost is exactly what the discount was designed to buy.
CleverlyBox has no introductory rate to expire. $0, $20, $50, $150. Month one and month forty are the same number.
Sending is included on every paid plan. No AWS console, no separate SMTP vendor, no setup fee.
Look at what is actually on the company card. There is the sending platform — and then there is everything bolted around it to make the sending platform work properly. Four tools, four logins, four renewal dates, four support queues.
Campaigns, templates, the drag-and-drop builder, the reports. Regular sends, plain-text sends, and A/B tests with up to five subject variants — winner picked automatically on open rate or click rate.
The separate SaaS you upload a CSV to before a big send, priced per check. CleverlyBox has 16 verification providers built in — verification status is a segment operator, not a spreadsheet you re-import.
A genuine node graph with 12 triggers — welcome, goodbye, birthday, date-offset, specific date, weekly, monthly, tag added, tag removed, attribute changed, abandoned cart, API — branching on open and click, with wait, tag, list copy/move, field update and mid-flow webhook nodes.
The other subscription, in another tab, that you paste subject lines out of. Ours writes subjects and bodies inside the composer, next to the campaign it is for. One login. One invoice.
We will not print Mailchimp's feature list or their prices as fact — their rate card is theirs to publish and it changes. So the right-hand column is a checklist. Open your account in another tab and go down it.
| Dimension | CleverlyBox | Check on your Mailchimp plan |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing basis | Software. Flat: $0 / $20 / $50 / $150 a month. Growth inside the plan is free. | Per contact — the invoice moves with list size. Divide last month's total by your contact count for your true rate. |
| Sending | Included on every paid plan. No AWS console, no setup, no separate SMTP bill. | Your send allowance, the overage rate above it, and — if you are on an introductory rate — the date it ends. |
| Bring your own sender | 9 optional providers from Business: Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, SparkPost, Elastic Email, Blastengine, Gmail OAuth, Sendmail, any SMTP. | Mainstream platforms send on shared infrastructure and do not let you attach your own SES account. Decide whether that matters. |
| List verification | Native. 16 providers. Verification status is a segment operator you can filter and automate on. | Any separate verification SaaS — add its monthly cost to the total. |
| Automation | Graph builder. 12 triggers. Branch on open or click. Wait, tag, list copy/move, field update and mid-flow webhook nodes. | Which triggers are gated behind a higher tier, and whether webhooks run mid-flow. |
| Deliverability | SPF, DKIM, DMARC verified in-app. IP warm-up. Automatic pause on bounce or complaint spikes. RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe. Blacklist and banned-word checks. | Whether your domain is authenticated end-to-end, and what happens automatically if a send starts bouncing at 3am. |
| Agencies & reporting | Client sub-accounts, switch-into-client, audit log, seats with per-section permissions (20 on Agency). Reports carry a public URL needing no login. | Per-seat cost, whether each client needs their own paid account, and whether they can read a report without one. |
There are real reasons to stay, and pretending otherwise would insult you. If any of these is your situation, stay where you are — you will be happier, and we would rather tell you now than churn you in six weeks.
Mailchimp has spent well over a decade being the default. Almost every ecommerce plugin, CRM, form builder and analytics tool ships a first-party Mailchimp connector. We have a REST API and webhooks, which will connect to anything — but if your stack leans on eight off-the-shelf connectors you did not have to build, that is genuine, bankable value.
Hand marketing to a contractor or a freelancer and they have almost certainly used Mailchimp. There is a tutorial for every question and a video for every screen. Zero onboarding is a real saving, and not one we can match on brand recognition alone.
Per-contact billing only bites when the contact count climbs. If you hold 800 contacts, send monthly and have no plans to grow, the growth penalty is theoretical and the switch is not worth your Saturday. Take our free plan for the 1,000 contacts if you like — but do not migrate out of spite.
We are an email platform, not a CRM. We do not do sales pipelines, deal stages or lead scoring. We have no SMS, no ads module and no store builder. Our automation conditions branch on open and click — the two things that actually predict engagement — not on arbitrary field logic. If you need a CRM or a multi-channel suite, we are the wrong shop and we would rather you knew that from this page than from a trial.
Nothing here requires a developer, and nothing requires you to cancel anything until you are satisfied it works.
Export from Mailchimp and bring in the CSV or XLSX. Map fields as you go; we dedupe on the way in, and anything that fails lands in a downloadable error log so you can see exactly what did not import and why. The REST API takes contacts too if you would rather script it.
We generate the DKIM, SPF and DMARC records for you. Paste them into DNS, hit verify, and the app confirms each one is live. Do it before you send anything real — this is the step that decides whether your mail reaches the inbox.
Lay your automations out as a graph in the flow builder: pick from the 12 triggers, drop in sends, waits, conditions, tag and list operations and any webhooks you need. Run them alongside your existing ones for a week if you want the reassurance — nothing stops you.
Not just Mailchimp. The verification tool, the AI writer, and whatever else is quietly renewing on the company card. That is usually the moment the maths lands.
Below a few thousand contacts, probably not by much — a small list on a per-contact plan is cheap, and we will not pretend otherwise. The gap opens as the list grows, because our price does not move with it and theirs does. The other half of the answer is the stack: if you also pay for verification and an AI writing tool, put those on the invoice too, because on CleverlyBox they are included. Run the numbers against your own bill, not against our model.
Because we have not audited their current rate card, and publishing a wrong price would be both unfair to them and a good reason for you to distrust everything else here. We describe their model — per-contact billing — which is verifiable in ten seconds on their own site. The cost figures we show are a clearly-labelled model with the assumptions printed next to them. Your invoice is the only authoritative number.
No. Sending is included on every paid plan and works out of the box — that is the whole point. The nine optional providers exist from the Business tier for teams who deliberately want to send under their own reputation and pay their own SES bill. It is a choice, not a chore.
They do not transfer automatically — no honest platform will tell you otherwise. You rebuild them in the drag-and-drop builder or start from our template library. Most people take the migration as a chance to bin the six templates they stopped using two years ago and rebuild the two they actually send.
Yes. Every campaign report has a shareable public URL that requires no account. Send the link. No seat, no invite, no password reset email on a Friday.
One platform. One login. One invoice that does not move when you grow.