Mailchimp Cut Its Free Plan in Half. Here's What Musicians Should Use Instead.

On February 17, 2026, Mailchimp cut its free plan in half. Contacts went from 500 to 250. Monthly sends went from unlimited to 500. Daily sends got capped at 250. If you're an independent musician with a few hundred fans on your list, you woke up one morning with a tool that no longer fits.

I want to walk through what Mailchimp actually gives you now, what Dispatch gives you, and where Mailchimp is still the better call. Because for some people it is.

What Mailchimp's Free Plan Actually Gives You in 2026

Here's what's in the free Marketing plan today, straight off their pricing page: 250 contacts. 500 email sends per month. 250 sends per day. One audience. Email support for the first 30 days, then you're on your own. And this line, which is the one that matters — go over either limit and your sending gets paused. Live campaigns and test emails both.

Let's do that math like a working musician actually works.

You've got 240 fans. You announce a run of shows — that's 240 emails. Say 40% of them open it, which is a conservative number for a musician newsletter; the industry average runs closer to 44%. So 96 people opened, 144 didn't. You follow up with the 144 who missed it. Total: 384. Week of the first show, you send a reminder to everybody. Another 240. Total: 624.

You just blew past the cap on your third email of the run. And that's before the thank-you note to everyone who came out. Before the welcome email to the eleven people who scanned your QR code at the merch table. Before the "we added a second night" announcement.

The daily cap bites too. With 240 fans, one send eats 96% of your daily allowance — you physically cannot send two things on the same day. And if your list crosses 250 people, which is a good problem and the whole point of doing this, your sending stops until you pay or start deleting fans.

About That "1 Audience"

When a musician hears "audience" we picture the room. Mailchimp means something completely different, and it's worth ninety seconds of your time.

In Mailchimp, an audience is an entirely separate database of contacts. Not a group, not a label — a separate list, with its own signup forms and its own settings. On the free plan you get one. Essentials gets you three, Standard gets you five.

Here's why that matters to us specifically. Say you're a side guy. You tour with a national act, and you also play your own local dates under your own name. Or you front a band, gig solo, and teach a handful of students. Those are three different sets of people who want three different emails from you, and sending the wrong one to the wrong group is how you lose them.

Mailchimp's answer is: buy more audiences. And their own help documentation says this out loud — if the same address is in two of your audiences, they count it as two contacts. So every superfan who follows both the band and the solo project gets billed to you twice. You are paying twice to email one person.

Dispatch's answer is Groups. One fan list, and a fan can sit in as many groups as makes sense — at no extra cost, because they're one person and we count them as one person. Send to the local list, or the national run, or everybody. On top of that you can keep separate tour calendars, so the dates with the national act and your own local gigs live on their own calendars instead of one pile you have to untangle every time you build an email.

Same exact problem. One version charges you for having range. The other one assumes you have range, because most working musicians do.

And it's not just the double-count. Mailchimp's contact total includes subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed people. Somebody unsubscribed in 2022 and you're still paying to store them in 2026. That's not a scandal — it's how a database company prices a database. But it's worth knowing before you build your fan list on top of it.

What Changed on February 17

The free plan used to hold 500 contacts and send as much as you wanted. Before the Intuit acquisition it held 2,000. The features didn't change in February — they left everything in place and just turned the volume down.

I understand the business logic. Free tiers cost money and Mailchimp is a big company with a big P&L. But the effect on independent artists is that the plan you signed up for isn't the plan you have anymore, and nobody asked you.

Mailchimp vs Dispatch — Side by Side

Read that sends row again. Dispatch's free plan sends as much per month as Mailchimp's $13 plan. And Pro 500 is roughly half of Essentials for twice the sends.

I didn't set out to undercut anybody. That's just what the numbers came out to when I built pricing around what an independent artist actually has in their account, instead of around a revenue target.

"Contacts" and "Fans" Aren't the Same Thing

This is the part that used to make me crazy.

On most email platforms, a contact is a row in a database. It costs you money whether that person opens anything or not — whether they're even still subscribed. Every dead address you imported from a spreadsheet in 2019, every typo signup, every person who left in 2022. They all count against your number and your bill.

I don't think about the people on my list that way, and I don't think you do either. They're the person who came up after the set. The one who bought the record on Bandcamp at full price when they could have streamed it. The one who's been at every show in the same city for six years.

We call them fans in Dispatch because that's what they are. Small thing. But it shaped every decision underneath it.

What Mailchimp Doesn't Build for Musicians

Mailchimp is genuinely good software. It's just good software for a different person. Their template gallery is built around abandoned carts and product launches and quarterly newsletters. There is no block for "here's a run of tour dates." There's no block for "the record's out Friday, here's the pre-save."

Dispatch is built the other way around. The blocks speak musician — show announcements, releases, tour dates, merch, YouTube, socials. It runs from your phone, because that's where you actually are, between the load-in and the downbeat. There's a QR code you can print for the merch table, and a scan feature for when someone hands you a paper sign-up sheet at midnight and you don't want to type in forty addresses.

And then there's Voice to Email, which is the thing I'm most proud of. You talk into your phone — describe the email, mention your logo, a flyer, a tour date, a song link — and have Dispatch build it. Not just write it. Design it. I built that feature because I know exactly how many emails I never sent because I didn't have forty-five minutes to sit down and lay one out.

Where Mailchimp Still Wins — For Now

I'd rather tell you this straight than have you find out three months in.

If your email is really a storefront, use Mailchimp. Deep e-commerce integrations and abandoned-cart flows are their home turf, and they're better at it than we are.

If you're a manager running several artists, Mailchimp can do that today and we can't. Fully separate lists, separate branding, separate reporting per artist — that's what their multiple-audience feature is for. Just go in knowing it bills you twice for anyone who's on two of those lists.

If you need branching, multi-step automation — the kind with conditional logic three levels deep — they have it. We have welcome sequences, and they're good, but they're not that.

If your list is in the tens of thousands and mostly transactional, their infrastructure and reporting go further than ours right now.

Now here's where I'm actually taking this. The manager use case is coming. Multiple artists under one login, bigger fan lists, deeper automation flows — that's the direction Dispatch grows, and it's the request I hear most from the people already using it. I'm building it in the order that serves the artist first, which means today the platform is sharpened for the 10,000-fans-and-under crowd. That's a deliberate choice, not an accident. Build the thing that works beautifully for one person before you build the thing that works okay for everyone.

So if you're a manager with a roster and a 40,000-fan list, we're not your tool yet. Keep an eye on us.

Dispatch is for the independent artist with somewhere between 50 and 10,000 fans who wants to send something that looks like it came from a musician, from their phone, without paying a software company $13 a month for the privilege of emailing 500 people. If that's not you, use the other thing. Genuinely.

Which One Should You Use?

Here's the honest version. If you have under 300 fans, Dispatch is free and gives you 5,000 sends a month. Mailchimp is free and gives you 500. There's not much to weigh. If you have 500 fans, it's $6.99 with us and $13 with them, and you get double the sends on our side.

And if you're sitting there with no list at all because the tools always felt like they were built for somebody else — that was the whole reason I built this. I had 128 fans and a $20 bill that made no sense, and I couldn't find a tool made for the way musicians actually work. So I made one. You can read that whole story here, and if you're still deciding whether an email list is worth the trouble at all, start here.

Your fan list is the only part of your audience nobody can take from you. Don't let a send cap be the reason you don't start.