Sequenzy vs Mailchimp: Which Email Automation Service is Better?
By Marcus Hale · Updated Oct 2026
Sequenzy vs Mailchimp for newsletters, welcome series and subscription products: prices at 500, 5,000 and 10,000 contacts and who fits.
TL;DR
If you send a newsletter and a welcome series and want the simplest setup, Mailchimp is the safer choice, and for most coaches and course creators it is the right one. Its weak spot is the bill: Standard lists $100 a month at 2,501 to 5,000 contacts, with a 50%-off promotion for the first 12 months only, so year two costs double. Sequenzy wins only if you run a SaaS or subscription product billed through Stripe, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy and need billing-triggered emails; it is priced by emails sent, free at 2,500 a month, with $29 covering 30,000.
The question that picks the tool
Most people comparing these two are really asking whether their list is an audience or a customer base. An audience is people who joined to read you: a newsletter, a free guide, a challenge. Mailchimp was built for exactly that, with audiences, tags, segments, templates and automations that start when someone signs up. A customer base is people who pay you every month, and what matters about them is the state of their subscription.
Sequenzy is built for the second group. It connects to Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Creem and Dodo Payments, and it starts flows from payment events. Many coaches and course creators are the first group on Monday and the second on the day they launch a membership, which is why the price comparison below matters more than any feature list.
The plans in one view
| Feature | Sequenzy | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| What the price follows | Emails sent per month; contacts and sending domains unlimited | The contact band you pick, with sends capped at a multiple of it |
| Free plan | 2,500 emails a month, every feature included | Up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, 250 a day at most |
| Entry paid plan | $19 a month for 15,000 emails | Essentials from $13 a month; Standard from $20 at 500 contacts |
| Standard at 5,000 contacts | $29 for 30,000 emails (or $49 for 60,000) | $100 a month; $50 for the first 12 months under the promotion |
| Standard at 10,000 contacts | $49 for 60,000 emails (or $99 for 120,000) | $135 a month; $67.50 for the first 12 months |
| Top plans | $99 for 120,000 emails | Premium from $350 a month, unlimited seats |
| Automation limits | Visual builder on every plan, no feature gates | Essentials up to 4 flow steps; Standard and Premium up to 200 flows |
| Seats | Unlimited team members, as the pricing page lists them | Essentials 3, Standard 5, Premium unlimited |
| Integrations named | Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, PostHog, Zapier, webhooks, Shopify | Shopify, WooCommerce, Canva, Zapier, Square, Wix, Salesforce, WordPress |
| Best for | Subscription products billed through Stripe, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy | Newsletters and welcome series for a list that is an audience |
Sources: sequenzy.com/pricing and mailchimp.com/pricing, read on 2026-10-07. The Mailchimp captures also show that overages apply if a contact or email send limit is exceeded, and that sending pauses on the Free plan at its limit.
Mailchimp's year-two jump
Mailchimp's pricing page shows every Standard band with a "Save 50%" badge for 12 months and then a list price. The bands we read are 0 to 500 contacts at half of the $20 list price, 2,501 to 5,000 at $50 then $100, 5,001 to 10,000 at $67.50 then $135, and 10,001 to 15,000 at $115 then $230. The price is not a trap, since the page says plainly that it lasts 12 months, but it changes how you should budget. A list of 5,000 contacts costs 12 x $50 = $600 in year one and 12 x $100 = $1,200 in year two, which is $1,800 over two years.
Set that beside Sequenzy at the same list size and a four-newsletter month. Four sends to 5,000 people is 20,000 emails, which fits the $29 plan, so the two-year cost is 24 x $29 = $696 on monthly billing. The gap is $1,800 against $696, and it comes entirely from how each company counts: Mailchimp counts people, Sequenzy counts emails. A list that grows faster than it mails will favour Sequenzy, and one that mails daily will not.
Cost at 500, 5,000 and 10,000 contacts
Take a month with four newsletters and a three-email launch week, which is seven sends to everyone on the list, and a quiet month with only the four. Sequenzy's volume is the list size multiplied by the sends, rounded up to the plan that covers it. Mailchimp's Standard send cap is 12 times your contacts, so these volumes fit under it at every size.
| List size | Emails sent (quiet / launch) | Sequenzy (quiet) | Sequenzy (launch) | Mailchimp Standard, year one | Mailchimp Standard, year two |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | 4 x 500 = 2,000 / 7 x 500 = 3,500 | $0 (free covers 2,500) | $19 (15,000-email plan) | Half of $20 | $20 |
| 5,000 | 4 x 5,000 = 20,000 / 7 x 5,000 = 35,000 | $29 (30,000-email plan) | $49 (60,000-email plan) | $50 | $100 |
| 10,000 | 4 x 10,000 = 40,000 / 7 x 10,000 = 70,000 | $49 (60,000-email plan) | $99 (120,000-email plan) | $67.50 | $135 |
Read across a row and the pattern is plain. At 500 contacts the cheapest choice is Sequenzy's free plan for a four-newsletter month, and Mailchimp's own Free plan does not apply because it stops at 250 contacts. At 5,000 and 10,000 contacts Sequenzy undercuts even Mailchimp's discounted first year in a quiet month, and it does so by a wider margin once the promotion lapses. The promotion does flip two launch-month cells in Mailchimp's favour: at 10,000 contacts Sequenzy's $99 is above Mailchimp's $67.50 first-year price and below its $135 list price, and at 500 contacts Sequenzy's $19 is above Mailchimp's half-price first year. In both cases the lead lasts only until the promotion ends.
Band edges matter on the Mailchimp side. Standard moves from $135 to $230 a month between 10,000 and 10,001 contacts, a jump of $95 for one subscriber. A 12,000-person list mailed four times is 48,000 emails, which still fits Sequenzy's $49 plan, whereas Mailchimp lists $230 for that band, or $115 under the promotion.
What each Mailchimp plan lets you build
The plan name decides whether a welcome series fits at all. Mailchimp's feature table lists Essentials with up to 4 flow steps, 3 seats and sends capped at 10 times your contacts, Standard with up to 200 flows, 5 seats and 12 times, and Premium with up to 200 flows, unlimited seats and 15 times. Essentials starts at $13 a month, Standard at $20 and Premium at $350. A welcome series of five emails with waits between them runs past four steps, so a course creator who wants one is buying Standard, not Essentials.
Sequenzy has no equivalent ladder. Its pricing page says all features are included on Free and describes the visual automation builder, A/B testing and send-time optimization as part of every plan, so the only decision is volume. That simplicity is a fair point in its favour, and it is the main reason a technical founder who is comfortable wiring up billing events prefers it.
Scenario 1: a course creator with a newsletter and one launch a quarter
Take a creator with 5,000 subscribers who writes a weekly newsletter, sells a self-paced course twice a year and wants three things: a welcome series for new signups, a launch sequence with a cart-close reminder, and a tag that marks buyers so they stop getting the pitch. This is Mailchimp's home ground. A signup form adds the contact, a tag marks the segment, and an automation sends the series; buyers are tagged through a connector such as Zapier, which appears among the integrations Mailchimp names. Templates, including custom-coded ones, are available on Standard.
The budget is the weak point. Standard at 5,001 to 10,000 contacts is the band if the list grows, but at 5,000 exactly it is $50 a month for the first 12 months and $100 after that. Plan for the $100 from the beginning. If the cost matters more than the familiarity, Kit (formerly ConvertKit) lists a free plan for up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, though its visual automations and sequences start on the paid Creator plan. The Kit versus Mailchimp comparison works through that trade.
Sequenzy could run this creator for $29 in quiet months and $49 in launch months, and its A/B testing and send-time optimization come with every plan. What it would not give is the same sort of template library and form tools that this creator's team already knows, and the sales page and checkout are still elsewhere.
Verdict for this reader: Mailchimp, on Standard, if setup speed and a familiar editor matter and you accept the year-two price. Sequenzy is a fair second look only if cost per year is the deciding number, since it is the cheaper of the two in every row of the table above in a quiet month.
Scenario 2: a founder whose product is billed through Stripe
Now take a founder with the same 5,000-person list, of whom some are on a free trial and some pay monthly through Stripe. For this founder the newsletter is the minor job, and the emails that protect revenue are the reminder three days before a trial ends, the notice when a card fails, the win-back after a cancellation and the nudge when someone nears a plan limit.
Per sequenzy.com, these are the events Sequenzy is built around: an invoice.payment_failed event from Stripe starts a dunning email flow with a card-update page, a deleted subscription starts a win-back, and a usage limit can start an upsell. It also segments by MRR and LTV through the Stripe integration, which lets the monthly newsletter skip people who have already upgraded. The dunning is email only. Stripe or Paddle decides when to retry the card, and nothing on the page quantifies how much revenue the emails bring back, so do not budget for a recovery figure.
Mailchimp can send every one of those emails, but the pricing page names no payment-failure trigger, so the event would have to reach it through a connector you build and maintain. That is workable for a trial reminder and fragile for a failed-payment sequence that should fire within minutes. Cost points the same way: roughly 20,000 emails a month is $29 on Sequenzy against $100 on Mailchimp Standard once the promotion ends.
Verdict for this reader: Sequenzy. A SaaS or subscription seller gets both the lower price and the right triggers, which is the only profile in this comparison where it comes out ahead on both counts.
Moving between the two
From Mailchimp to Sequenzy, export the full audience including unsubscribed and cleaned addresses, because those two groups must be loaded as suppressed or you will email people who left. Carry tags across as segments or tags in the new tool and decide which of Mailchimp's three or five audiences really are separate lists, since a person in two of them is one human with two records. Rebuild each automation by hand, newest and most profitable first. Authenticate the sending domain before the first send; Sequenzy's pricing page lists SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup. Mailchimp's own page says you can downgrade to its Free plan, but that plan stops at 250 contacts, so a larger list should be deleted or archived before you cancel.
From Sequenzy to Mailchimp, the question is which billing-driven flows you keep. Mailchimp will hold the subscribers and tags, but the payment-event flows need a connector, so many people retire the dunning sequence and let Stripe's own customer emails cover it. Choose your band deliberately, because the promotion shows against the band you enter on.
Pitfalls to avoid
- Budgeting from the promotional price. It is a 12-month offer and the list price is the real second-year bill.
- Picking Mailchimp Essentials for a welcome series that has more than four steps.
- Thinking in people when you move to Sequenzy. Its meter is emails, so an extra promotional send to the whole list adds its full headcount to that month and can carry you across the 15,000, 30,000 or 60,000 email lines. Price the busiest month, not the average one.
- Ignoring Mailchimp's limits. Its page states that overages apply when a contact or send limit is passed, and that sending pauses on the Free plan.
- Assuming Sequenzy's dunning flow recovers the payment on its own. The flow emails the customer a card-update page; whether and when the charge is retried is a setting in Stripe or Paddle.
- Judging by price alone. A tool that costs $29 and needs a weekend of wiring can cost more than one at $100 that works on day one.
The verdict, both ways
Mailchimp wins for a coach, consultant or course creator whose list is an audience: a newsletter, a welcome series, a launch every few months. It is the simplest to set up, the most widely documented and the safest default. Choose Standard rather than Essentials if the welcome series has more than four steps, and budget for the price doubling in year two.
Sequenzy wins for a SaaS or subscription seller billed through Stripe, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy, because the triggers match the business and the email-based pricing is lower at every size shown here. It also suits anyone with a large list that is mailed rarely. It loses for a reader who values a polished template library, a familiar interface and a form-and-landing-page ecosystem over price.
Keep reading
- Mailchimp alternatives if the year-two price is the problem.
- Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign for the step up in automation depth.
- Email automation for small business and for newsletters.
- Kit (formerly ConvertKit) alternatives for the creator-first option.
Frequently asked questions
Does Mailchimp have a free plan, and does Sequenzy?
Both do, and they are limited in different ways. Mailchimp Free allows up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with a daily cap of 250. Sequenzy Free allows 2,500 emails a month with unlimited contacts and every feature switched on. A 2,000-person list that mails once a month fits Sequenzy Free but is far past Mailchimp Free's contact limit.
Which is cheaper at 10,000 contacts?
Sequenzy, on the sending pattern used here. Mailchimp Standard lists $135 a month for 5,001 to 10,000 contacts, or $67.50 under the first-year promotion. Sequenzy charges $49 for a list mailed four times a month (40,000 emails) and $99 in a month with a launch week (70,000 emails). The promotion ends after 12 months, and the $135 then applies.
Can Sequenzy send a normal newsletter, or only billing emails?
It sends both. Its pricing page lists broadcast tools such as A/B testing and send-time optimization alongside the visual automation builder, and unlimited lists and segments. What sets it apart is the billing connection, not a restriction on ordinary campaigns, but each newsletter counts against your monthly email volume.
What happens to Mailchimp's 50% discount after a year?
It ends. The pricing page words it as a saving for 12 months, then the standard rate: $50 becomes $100 at 2,501 to 5,000 contacts, $67.50 becomes $135 at 5,001 to 10,000, and $115 becomes $230 at 10,001 to 15,000. Put the second-year number in your budget on day one.