Mailchimp costs $20+/mo (grows with your list) — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $720 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
~$20/mo @ 1k contacts, $100+/mo @ 10k is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Postbird: the pay-once alternative
Postbird does the same core job for $59, once. Lists, segments, a drag-block builder, throttled sending & open/click tracking — no per-contact pricing.
| Postbird | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $59 once | ~$20/mo @ 1k contacts, $100+/mo @ 10k |
| Contact limits | None | Priced per contact |
| SMTP | Any provider — BYO (SES, Postmark, Mailgun...) | Theirs only |
| Your data | Your SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Compliance | Hard send-block until compliant | Soft warnings |
| RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe | Yes, every campaign | Yes |
| Runs as a desktop app | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
At 1,000 contacts, Mailchimp Standard costs more than Postbird every three months, forever. Break-even is ~2 months — and the bigger your list gets, the more you save.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Mailchimp's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Postbird is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Postbird — $59, once
Lists, segments, a drag-block builder, throttled sending & open/click tracking — no per-contact pricing.