Email marketing without the per-contact tax

Mailchimp earned its position. For a small-business marketer, it's still the easiest way to send a good-looking campaign. This comparison isn't about whether Mailchimp works — it's about whether its pricing model still fits you. It's most useful for three kinds of teams:

• teams whose Mailchimp bill climbs with every signup — including unsubscribed and inactive contacts
• technical founders who want email as code — templates in git, segments and workflows in reviewable DSLs
• Mandrill users paying block pricing for transactional email that raw SES delivers for a fraction of the cost

Domain-wide visibility

The missing layer: who else is sending as your domain?

Mailchimp's reports tell you what happened to the campaigns you sent from Mailchimp. They do not cover the invoicing system, the CRM, or the help desk that also puts your domain in the visible From address. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) aggregate reports are the one feed that covers all of them.

Two jobs often get merged here, and they are worth separating. Authenticating your sender domain is setup: you publish SPF and DKIM records so mail from a given platform aligns. Domain-wide monitoring is continuous: it tells you which other platforms are sending as that same domain.

The second job is the one SendOps adds. DMARC monitoring collects the aggregate reports receivers send about your domain and groups them by sending source. Because SendOps also knows your SES identities and DKIM selectors, it can prove which of that traffic is your own first-party sending.

That proof is what makes the rest useful. A misconfigured service you own reads very differently from traffic you have not identified yet, and SendOps separates the two instead of lumping them together. Each source is presented for review with a diagnosis and, where one exists, a next action.

An unidentified source is not automatically an attacker. It is often a forgotten SaaS subscription, a shared sending pool, or ordinary forwarding. SendOps asks you to record a decision on each one.

Rejecting a source records that it is not yours. It does not block the source or silence future alerts. A stricter DMARC policy is what asks receiving providers to act on unauthenticated mail.

So SendOps stops at a recommendation. It previews what a move to quarantine or reject would have affected, in messages per day, and generates the exact record with a field-level diff. You publish the change at your own DNS provider, and you can roll it back there.

One scope note: this covers the exact domain in your visible From address. It will not find lookalike registrations such as example-payments.com. SendOps also accepts aggregate reports only — forensic reports can carry recipient addresses and message content, and major mailbox providers generally do not send them.

Pricing model

The per-contact tax

Mailchimp prices by list size. At list prices as of July 2026, Essentials starts at $13/mo for 500 contacts and reaches about $385/mo at 50,000; Standard runs $20/mo to about $450/mo over the same range; Premium starts at $350/mo. Send allowances scale with the plan too — 10× your contact count on Essentials, 12× on Standard, 15× on Premium — and if you exceed a contact or send limit, overages bill automatically.

The part that stings: contacts count toward your bill whether or not you can email them. Unsubscribed and inactive contacts sit on the meter until you archive or delete them — so growing a list means paying for its history, not just its reachable audience.

SendOps has no contact meter at all. Free, Team ($29/mo), and Business ($149/mo) are flat platform fees with no contact limits — store a million contacts on the Free plan if you like. Delivery isn't metered by SendOps either: AWS bills you directly at SES rates, $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent.

Cost as your list grows

What 50,000 contacts actually costs

Take a concrete case: 50,000 contacts, four campaigns a month to the full list. On Mailchimp Standard, that's about $450/mo at list prices as of July 2026 — $5,400 a year — and the number climbs again at the next contact tier, whether or not you send more email.

On SendOps, the same setup is $29/mo (Team) plus SES delivery. Four sends to 50,000 contacts is 200,000 emails — about $20 at $0.10 per 1,000. Call it $49 a month, and the platform fee doesn't move when the list hits 60,000, or 100,000, or a million.

The structural point matters more than any single snapshot: Mailchimp's cost scales with how many people you know. SendOps' cost scales with how much you actually send — at SES rates, which are the cheapest delivery pricing in the industry.

And notice what per-contact pricing does to your behavior. The right way to run email is a big, well-maintained list with targeted, occasional sends — most contacts shouldn't hear from you most weeks. But when every stored lead bills monthly whether you email it or not, you're pushed toward two bad options: prune leads you paid to acquire, or blast everyone to get your money's worth. Flat pricing removes the perverse incentive — keep every lead, email each one only when it's relevant.

The free tier

Mailchimp Free caps at 250 contacts. Ours has no caps.

Mailchimp's free plan, once famously generous, now allows 250 contacts and 500 sends a month (capped at 250 a day) as of July 2026. It's a trial in practice — most real lists outgrow it in weeks.

SendOps Free costs $0 with no contact limits and no metered volume. That's possible because of the architecture: SendOps doesn't resell delivery, so there's no per-email or per-contact cost for us to recover. You pay AWS directly for what you send — about $0.10 per 1,000 emails through SES — and the platform layer is free until you need team features.

A free plan built on your own infrastructure also can't be quietly shrunk the way hosted free tiers have been. If SendOps changed its pricing tomorrow, your SES account, your domains, and your reputation would still be yours.

If you're on Mandrill (Mailchimp Transactional)

Mailchimp transactional email vs Amazon SES

Mailchimp Transactional — Mandrill — is sold as an add-on to a Standard or Premium marketing plan, priced in blocks of 25,000 emails. At list prices as of July 2026, blocks start at $20 each and step down with volume ($18 per block past 500k emails, $16 past 1M, bottoming out at $10 above 4M), with a dedicated IP available for $29.95/mo. A million transactional emails a month runs roughly $720 in blocks — before the marketing plan underneath it.

The same million emails through Amazon SES costs about $100, full stop. That gap is why "Mandrill to SES" is a well-worn migration path — the catch has always been that raw SES is just an API: no template management, no activity dashboard, no deliverability analytics, no marketing side at all.

SendOps closes that gap. Transactional email goes through the same pipeline as broadcasts and SendFlow workflows — your own SES, $0.10 per 1,000, on every plan including Free — with templates, activity history, and deliverability analytics on top. You get the SES cost curve without giving up the platform layer, and without carrying a Mailchimp marketing plan just to keep the add-on alive.

Ownership and reputation

Your account, your reputation, your data

On Mailchimp, your audience, sending history, and deliverability reputation live inside Mailchimp's platform, on shared sending infrastructure. With SendOps, the platform comes to your infrastructure instead:

This also changes what leaving looks like. Migrating off Mailchimp means exporting your audience and rebuilding automations somewhere else. Leaving SendOps means turning off a control plane — your SES account, domains, contacts, and history stay exactly where they were, in AWS infrastructure you own.

Everything as code

Built for git workflows — and for agents

Credit where due: Mailchimp's drag-and-drop editor and template gallery are the best in the business for non-technical users, and its segments and customer journeys are mature and capable. But everything lives in the dashboard — templates aren't in version control, segments aren't reviewable queries, and automations can't go through a pull request. In 2026 that's no longer a style preference: drag-and-drop output is an opaque blob, and opaque blobs are exactly what AI can't work with. A coding agent can't read a Mailchimp template, diff a journey, or propose a segment change — there's nothing there for it to operate.

SendOps treats email as code without abandoning visual tools. Template source is React Email TSX in your repository, compiled by SendOps to SES-native Handlebars on deploy — and edits made in the visual editor come back as pull requests. Segments are SendQL queries. Drip workflows are SendFlow definitions with both a DSL and a visual canvas, so engineers and marketers edit the same artifact. A workflow run also renders its email for review before that email goes out, and assets ship through a CDN.

That text is what makes the platform legible to coding agents. An agent can author a SendQL segment, a SendFlow workflow, or a template as reviewable text and open a pull request; a human merges it, and the default branch is what deploys.

Live state is a separate surface. SendOps ships a native MCP server whose scoped tools let an authorized agent inspect reporting, maintain contacts, prepare broadcasts, and review DMARC posture. Sending a broadcast and activating a workflow each require an explicit confirmation after the impact is shown, and no agent can publish DNS.

For backend integrations, the Public API now supports OAuth 2.1, so browser and third-party clients can authorize without copied long-lived keys. Dashboard-first platforms can't offer that surface.