Mailchimp attracted extreme criticism this week when it became clear how its new marketing services would impact its core email offering — particularly in terms of pricing — leading many long-time users to start explore alternatives (including this one).

I have been a loyal and happy Mailchimp customer for over eight years. I have also recommended Mailchimp to thousands of other authors. There have always been cheaper services, or those with more bells-and-whistles when it comes to advanced automation options and the like, but — for me at least — Mailchimp was always the perfect combination of price, user friendliness, and reliability.

Until
yesterday.

FYI: this is a long and comprehensive post going over the changes to Mailchimp's Terms of Use and Pricing Plans. If you want the short version, if you had a (paid) Monthly plan before May 15, you are protected from the worst of the changes for now, but might still want to scoot down to Alternatives to Mailchimp at the bottom of this post as I still think bad things are on the horizon for you. For everyone else — i.e. Free, Pay As You Go, or New users — the negative implications are much more immediate.

What Happened With Mailchimp?

Mailchimp announced its pivot towards a full-service marketing platform on Monday. But it wasn't until Wednesday that Mailchimp Legal began emailing existing users about changes to the Terms of Use that were kicking in immediately that day.

These
changes included entirely new pricing tiers and policies, and a revamping of
associated feature sets, with some pretty radical differences. Mailchimp's emails
weren't clear on what was changing or who was affected, Help pages weren't
updated properly, and Support was giving out conflicting information.

When
the dust settled, it wasn't pretty.

The
biggest change of all is that Mailchimp no
longer determines monthly charges based on total subscriber count — as has
historically been the case, and as is standard among email services. Instead, Mailchimp
now bases monthly charges on a new metric which it calls Audiences, which some
users may have noticed appearing in their accounts recently.

Key here is that Audiences also includes unsubscribed emails, meaning that users will be charged for unsubscribed emails as well as subscribed ones. Naturally, this announcement was received very negatively by Mailchimp users, as some would be facing increases of over 100% in their monthly charges (myself included). The situation was compounded with a lot of confusion, as the Help pages at Mailchimp weren't yet fully updated to account for these changes, and Support seemed confused about whether existing users would be grandfathered in under the old terms.

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