Mailchimp vs Resend

Pricing

Mailchimp: Free tier (250 contacts), Standard from $20/mo

Resend: Free up to 3,000 emails/mo, then from $20/mo

Description

Mailchimp: Email marketing platform with campaigns, automation flows, landing pages and sign-up forms, owned by Intuit

Resend: Modern email API that developers actually enjoy using

Pros

  • Landing pages, pop-up forms and social posting are included on every plan, Free too
  • Automation flows on Standard can run up to 200 steps with branching
  • 14-day free trial of the Standard plan
  • 3,000 free emails/month, enough for most early-stage products
  • Clean, simple API that takes minutes to integrate, not hours
  • Built by the creator of React Email: the DX is noticeably better than SendGrid or SES

Cons

  • The Free plan is small: 250 contacts, 500 sends a month (250 a day), one user and Mailchimp branding
  • Going over your contact or send limit adds overage charges automatically
  • Automations on Free are a preview only, and Essentials caps each flow at 4 steps
  • Younger service: smaller ecosystem and fewer battle-tested edge cases
  • No visual email template builder: you design emails in code (React Email)
  • Deliverability is good but has not been tested at the same scale as Postmark or SendGrid

Details

Mailchimp covers newsletters, automated email flows, landing pages, sign-up forms and basic social posting, with 100+ email templates. It is owned by Intuit, which also makes QuickBooks.

It suits founders who want one marketing tool for email, forms and simple landing pages, and who expect to use automations.

Pricing grows with your contact list. Free stops at 250 contacts. Standard starts at $20/month for 500 contacts and lets you send 12 emails per contact a month. Outside the US the site shows prices as estimates based on exchange rates, and taxes come on top.

Resend is what happens when someone who hated the existing email APIs built a new one. Created by Zeno Rocha (who also built React Email), it focuses on developer experience above everything else. The API is clean, the docs are clear, and you can have transactional emails working in your app in about 15 minutes.

The free tier of 3,000 emails per month covers most solo founders for months. When you outgrow it, $20/month gets you 50,000 emails. If you value developer experience and clean code over the battle-tested reliability of Postmark or the scale of SendGrid, Resend is the pick.

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