Brevo vs Mailchimp for Solo Developers

Comparing Brevo and Mailchimp for solo developers. Modern affordable email vs the legacy default. Features, pricing, and the honest verdict.

Quick Comparison

Feature	Brevo	Mailchimp
Type	Email + SMS + transactional + CRM	Email marketing platform with automations
Free tier	300 emails/day forever, up to 100,000 stored contacts	250 contacts, 500 emails/mo (250/day cap), cut in Jan 2026
Entry paid plan	Starter $9/mo (5,000 emails/mo)	Essentials $13/mo (500 contacts)
Pricing model	Per email sent	Per stored contact
Cost at 5,000 contacts	Still on the $9 Starter if sends stay under 5,000/mo	Essentials $75/mo, Standard $100/mo
Cost at 50,000 contacts	Volume tier, not contact-gated	Essentials $385/mo, Standard $450/mo
Transactional email	Included on every plan (free tier too) via API + SMTP	Mandrill add-on, $20 per 25,000 sends, Standard plan or higher only
Learning Curve	Easy	Easy
Best For	Devs who want predictable email volume pricing	Devs who want the most-templates-and-tutorials option
Solo Dev Rating	9/10	6/10

Brevo Overview

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the European email marketing platform that has quietly become the favored Mailchimp alternative for indie creators and solo developers. The pricing is based on emails sent per month, not contacts on your list, which is a friendlier model for anyone with a large but lightly-emailed audience.

Beyond marketing email, Brevo includes transactional email via SMTP and API, SMS marketing, a simple CRM, landing pages, and basic automations. For a solo dev who needs both newsletter and transactional sending, getting both under one account at one bill is genuinely convenient.

The free tier allows 300 emails per day forever, which is enough for early-stage projects to run their full email stack without paying anything. Paid plans start at $9/mo for 5,000 emails. Compared to Mailchimp's contact-based pricing, Brevo gets dramatically cheaper as your list grows.

Mailchimp Overview

Mailchimp is the legacy default that most non-technical users still think of when they hear "email marketing". The UI is polished, the template library is enormous, and there are tutorials for everything. For non-technical small business owners, Mailchimp is the obvious starting point and that ecosystem of familiarity has real value.

Mailchimp charges based on contact count rather than emails sent. The free tier was quietly cut in January 2026 and now covers just 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, with a 250-per-day send cap, down from the 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly sends it allowed before. The Essentials plan starts at $13/mo for 500 contacts and scales up as your list grows. By 5,000 contacts you're paying $75/mo on Essentials, and by 50,000 you're at $385/mo on Essentials or $450/mo on Standard.

The product itself is fine. Automations, landing pages, signup forms, basic CRM features, segmentation, and A/B testing all exist. Nothing is exceptional, but nothing is broken. The brand recognition and template library are the real moat.

Key Differences

The pricing models reward different usage patterns. Mailchimp charges by contact, so a 50,000-person list costs the same whether you email it daily or once a quarter. Brevo charges by email sent, so a large list you email rarely is cheap, while a small list you email constantly might cost more. For most solo dev newsletters, Brevo ends up much cheaper because send frequency stays moderate.

Brevo includes transactional email as a first-class feature. If you need to send password resets, order confirmations, and welcome emails from your app, Brevo handles both transactional and marketing email under one account, and the transactional API plus SMTP relay are available on every plan including the free 300-emails-per-day tier. Mailchimp offers Mandrill as a paid add-on for transactional, but it sits outside the marketing plans, costs $20 per block of 25,000 sends, and is only available if you are already on the Standard plan or higher. The integration feels bolted on because, structurally, it is. For solo devs who want one provider for everything, Brevo wins clearly.

Mailchimp's template ecosystem is much larger. If you're not a designer and you want pre-built newsletter templates that look professional, Mailchimp has more options and they're more polished. Brevo's templates are good but fewer. For non-design-savvy solo devs, this matters more than it sounds.

Deliverability is solid on both. Both platforms maintain good sender reputations and offer proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup. There's no meaningful deliverability gap for normal use cases. Anyone telling you otherwise is usually selling the other platform.

API and developer integration favor Brevo. Brevo's API is more developer-friendly and the transactional email integration is straightforward. Mailchimp's API works but feels like it was built for marketers consuming developer tools rather than developers consuming marketing tools. For a solo dev wiring up their stack, Brevo gets out of the way faster.

By the Numbers (2026)

Here is the verified state of both platforms as of late May 2026. Prices are list prices for monthly billing in USD.

Brevo

Free plan: 300 emails per day, forever, with no credit card. Stored contacts on the free plan go up to 100,000, which is unusually generous because Brevo bills on send volume, not list size.
Starter plan: $9 per month for 5,000 emails per month, or $8.08 per month on annual billing. Higher Starter tiers scale with volume, roughly $29 per month at 20,000 emails per month and around $69 per month at 100,000 emails per month.
Business plan (sometimes shown as Standard): $18 per month, adding marketing automation, A/B testing, and a landing page builder.
Transactional email (API and SMTP) is included on every plan, free tier included.
Logo removal on Starter is a $10.80 per month add-on, worth noting if a clean footer matters to you.

Mailchimp

Free plan: 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, with a 250-per-day send cap. This was cut down in January 2026 from the previous 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly sends.
Essentials plan: from $13 per month at 500 contacts, scaling to $75 per month at 5,000 contacts and $385 per month at 50,000 contacts. Send limit is 10 times your contact count.
Standard plan: from $20 per month at 500 contacts, scaling to $100 per month at 5,000 contacts and $450 per month at 50,000 contacts. Send limit is 12 times your contact count, and this is the tier where multi-step automation unlocks.
Premium plan: from $350 per month.
Transactional (Mandrill) is $20 per block of 25,000 emails, only available on Standard or higher.

One billing trap worth knowing on Mailchimp: subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your plan limit until you manually archive them, so the effective bill can sit above the list price.

Real Cost at Solo-Dev Scale

Numbers in isolation do not decide anything, so here is a concrete worked example for a realistic solo-dev newsletter.

Assumptions. You have 10,000 subscribers. You send one newsletter per week, so 4 sends per month, which is 40,000 emails per month. You are not running daily blasts. This is a normal cadence for an indie product or developer blog.

Brevo. Billing is on emails sent, and 40,000 emails per month lands in the Starter range at roughly $29 per month at the 20,000-email tier or a step above it for the full 40,000, call it somewhere between $29 and $35 per month depending on the exact tier you select. Your 10,000 contacts sit in storage for free because contacts are not what you pay for.

Mailchimp. Billing is on the 10,000 contacts, regardless of how often you mail them. Essentials at 10,000 contacts is $110 per month. If you want real automation, Standard at 10,000 contacts is $135 per month. Your weekly cadence is irrelevant to the price.

The gap. At this exact workload, Brevo costs roughly $29 to $35 per month and Mailchimp costs $110 to $135 per month. That is a three-to-four-times difference for the same 10,000-person list mailed weekly, and the gap only widens as the list grows because Mailchimp's curve is tied to contacts while Brevo's is tied to send volume. If you ever needed transactional email on top, Brevo includes it and Mailchimp would push you to Standard and then charge $20 per 25,000 Mandrill sends on top of that.

The one scenario that flips this is high frequency on a small list. If you have 1,000 contacts but you mail them daily, that is roughly 30,000 emails per month on Brevo's volume meter against a cheap Mailchimp Essentials contact tier, and Mailchimp can come out ahead. For the typical weekly solo-dev newsletter, Brevo wins on cost by a wide margin.

When to Choose Brevo

You need both marketing and transactional email under one account
Your list is large but you email it moderately, not daily
You want pricing that grows slowly as your list grows
You're a developer wiring email into your app via API
SMS or CRM features might be useful to you down the line

When to Choose Mailchimp

You want the absolute largest template library available
Non-technical collaborators will be using the tool with you
Your audience is small but you email them very frequently
You're already invested in the Mailchimp ecosystem
Brand familiarity matters for explaining the tool to clients

The Verdict

For most solo developers in 2026, Brevo is the clear winner. The pricing is friendlier as you grow, transactional email is included, and the API is genuinely pleasant to integrate. A solo dev who picks Brevo at the start and grows to 20,000 subscribers will pay something like a tenth of what the same growth costs on Mailchimp.

Mailchimp still has its place. If you're handing the tool off to a non-technical co-founder, or you genuinely need the largest possible template library, or your audience is small but you mail them daily, Mailchimp's pricing model might work out fine. The product is competent and the ecosystem is huge.

The honest answer is that for any solo dev building something that might grow, Brevo is the safer long-term bet. The pricing trajectory is gentler, the feature bundle is wider, and the developer experience is better. Mailchimp is what you choose when familiarity matters more than economics. Brevo is what you choose when economics matter at all.