MailerLite is the better email marketing platform for most authors. It costs roughly 60% less than Mailchimp at every tier, offers a free plan covering 1,000 subscribers (versus Mailchimp’s 250), and has become the default recommendation in author communities. We analyzed 200 authors across both platforms to find out why.
Key Takeaways
- MailerLite’s free plan covers 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails/month; Mailchimp’s free plan only covers 250 subscribers and 500 emails/month
- At 2,500 subscribers, MailerLite costs roughly $25/month versus Mailchimp’s $69/month
- MailerLite includes automations, landing pages, and signup forms on its free plan; Mailchimp locks automations behind paid plans
- MailerLite offers dedicated IPs at $20/month; Mailchimp charges $350/month for the same feature
- Reddit sentiment across 156 comments: MailerLite scored 44% positive with 2% negative; Mailchimp scored 32% positive with 10% negative
The Real Cost Difference (and Why Authors Are Switching)
Price is the single biggest reason authors switch from Mailchimp to MailerLite. In December 2025, Mailchimp reduced its free plan from 500 subscribers to just 250, and from 1,000 monthly emails to 500. That change pushed a wave of small-list authors to look elsewhere.
Here is what each platform costs at subscriber counts that matter for authors:
| Subscribers | MailerLite (Growing Business) | Mailchimp (Essentials) | Savings with MailerLite |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | $10/mo | $13/mo | 23% |
| 1,000 | $15/mo | $26/mo | 42% |
| 2,500 | $25/mo | $69/mo | 64% |
| 5,000 | $39/mo | $100/mo | 61% |
| 10,000 | $73/mo | $190/mo | 62% |
Prices as of March 2026. Check MailerLite pricing and Mailchimp pricing for current rates.
The gap widens as your list grows. At 2,500 subscribers (a realistic milestone for an author with two or three published books), you save $528 per year with MailerLite. That is real money for an indie author budget.
What Most Authors Actually Pay
MailerLite’s free plan includes automations, landing pages, signup forms, and up to 12,000 monthly emails. Mailchimp’s free plan caps you at 250 contacts and 500 emails with no automations. Authors on Mailchimp who actively email their list will quickly hit the limit of the free plan.
Authors on Reddit agree. One user in r/selfpublish summed up the consensus: “MailerLite is free up to 1,000 subscribers.” That comment earned 47 upvotes, the highest-scored MailerLite mention across the threads we analyzed. And frustration with Mailchimp’s pricing is equally vocal: “It’s getting really expensive.”.
What 200 Authors Taught Us About How Each Platform Gets Used
Using Authormatic, our newsletter intelligence platform, we tracked 567 emails from 200 published authors over 30 days: 78 on MailerLite and 122 on Mailchimp. This is a focused subset of our broader analysis of 575 bestselling author newsletters.
| Metric | MailerLite | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| Authors tracked | 78 | 122 |
| Emails analyzed | 234 | 333 |
| Avg emails per author | 3.0 | 2.7 |
| Reader magnet rate | 14.1% | 23.1% |
| Unique reader magnets | 14 | 55 |
| Emails mentioning a book | 23.5% | 55.9% |
| Monetization signals | 0.4% | 21.6% |
Mailchimp authors promote harder: 55.9% of their emails mention a specific book, compared to 23.5% on MailerLite. They also monetize more aggressively, with 21.6% of emails containing purchase links, affiliate offers, or paid content. MailerLite authors? Just 0.4%.
The Platform Is Not the Differentiator
The monetization gap probably says more about who uses each platform than what each platform can do. Mailchimp has been around since 2001. Authors who have been building their lists for years tend to be on Mailchimp because it was the default for a decade. These are often authors with larger catalogs, established reader bases, and more aggressive marketing strategies.
MailerLite’s author base skews newer. Many arrived after Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur recommended it as the best email service for authors, and they are still building their lists and figuring out their email strategy. The low monetization rate is an opportunity: MailerLite authors could be doing more with the tools they already have.
Our take: platform tenure and author maturity explain the behavioral differences more than features do. We will be publishing dedicated articles on author monetization strategies and reader magnet tactics that go deeper into what we found.
Automation: Features, UX, and What You Are Paying For
Both platforms offer automation builders with visual workflows, triggers, branching logic, and sequences. The difference is access, cost, and reliability.
MailerLite includes a visual workflow builder on every plan, including free. You can map out a sequence visually: trigger (new subscriber), wait one day, send welcome email, wait three days, send reader magnet follow-up, branch based on clicks. The drag-and-drop interface makes it straightforward to build book launch sequences without technical knowledge.
Mailchimp locks automations behind paid plans. On the Essentials plan, you get basic automations (welcome emails, date-based triggers). The more powerful Customer Journeys builder, which allows branching logic similar to MailerLite’s visual builder, requires the Standard plan ($20/month at 500 subscribers).
Furthermore, the product continues to worsen as Intuit pushes itself into Mailchimp. Pages don’t load or take a long time to load. Things break. Forms error without explanation. The email template builder is sketchy at best and at times it’s difficult to find what you’re looking for.
Which Builder Is Easier to Work With
MailerLite’s builder is simpler. Mailchimp’s is more mature, with stronger template options. For authors, simpler wins. Most author newsletters are text-heavy: a personal update, a book announcement, a reader magnet offer, maybe a cover image. You do not need advanced design tools to write a good newsletter. A clean single-column layout with your book cover and a buy link does the job.
The automations most authors need are straightforward:
- Welcome sequence: New subscriber joins, receives reader magnet, gets 3-5 emails introducing you and your books
- Book launch sequence: Announce new book, build anticipation over 5-7 emails, launch day push, follow-up
- Review request drip: Reader buys book, wait 14 days, ask for an honest review
MailerLite handles all three on the free plan. Mailchimp requires a paid plan for anything beyond a single welcome email.
Both platforms integrate with BookFunnel (via Zapier) for reader magnet file delivery, and SendRead offers native integrations with both MailerLite and Mailchimp, so you can connect your reader magnet delivery without relying on Zapier as a middleman.
Will Your Emails Actually Reach Readers?
Deliverability matters more than any feature checklist. If your emails land in spam or the Gmail Promotions tab, nothing else matters. Both platforms have user-reported problems worth knowing about.
Mailchimp’s Promotions tab problem. One Reddit user put it bluntly: “Mailchimp emails will almost never naturally land in the main inbox. There is death by promotion tab in the Google inboxes.” Because Mailchimp sends from shared IP addresses across millions of users (including many low-quality senders), Gmail’s filters are aggressive about routing Mailchimp emails to Promotions.
MailerLite’s spam folder reports. Some users report open rates dropping after switching to MailerLite. “Don’t you find that you get less people opening your emails? I suspect MailerLite emails are going to spam folders a LOT more,” wrote one r/Emailmarketing user. MailerLite has also suspended accounts without warning, which disrupts deliverability for affected users.
Neither platform is bulletproof. Deliverability depends more on your sending practices than your platform. Clean your list regularly. Do not buy subscribers. Write subject lines that humans (not spam filters) respond to. Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Both MailerLite and Mailchimp provide domain authentication tools; use them. We will cover email infrastructure setup for authors in a future dedicated post.
One relevant data point: MailerLite offers a dedicated IP option on its Advanced plan ($20/month), which gives you full control over your sending reputation. Mailchimp reserves dedicated IPs for high-volume senders on Premium plans ($350/month). For authors with growing lists who want to invest in deliverability, MailerLite makes this accessible at a fraction of the cost.
What Authors Say When They Are Not Being Sold To
We crawled 10 Reddit threads across r/Emailmarketing and r/selfpublish, extracting 156 comments that mentioned specific email platforms. The sentiment breakdown:
| Platform | Mentions | Positive | Negative |
|---|---|---|---|
| MailerLite | 57 | 44% | 2% |
| Mailchimp | 72 | 32% | 10% |
Mailchimp gets mentioned more often, but a higher percentage of those mentions are complaints. MailerLite is the quiet favorite: fewer mentions, but almost no one has something bad to say.
Price and Intuit Frustration
The most common Mailchimp complaint is cost, specifically the trajectory since Intuit acquired Mailchimp in 2021. “Mailchimp and Constant Contact just feel outdated. MailerLite or ActiveCampaign are much better options,” wrote one user. Multiple users reported improved inbox placement after leaving Mailchimp, suggesting the platform’s reputation with spam filters has suffered alongside its pricing.
Ease of Use
MailerLite’s simplicity is its most consistent praise point. “I liked MailerLite the most, easy to set up, you have enough emails and enough contacts on the free version,” wrote u/LemonSad5597. MailerLite also offers MailerLite Academy, a free course library that multiple Reddit users praised. “They have MailerLite Academy, where you can learn everything about the software,” wrote one user in r/Emailmarketing. For authors new to email marketing, having structured onboarding built into the platform reduces the learning curve.
Support Quality
“I’ve recently started using MailerLite and was honestly surprised by how responsive and patient their support team is,” wrote u/Excellent_Basil1092. Support quality is hard to evaluate from the outside, but the Reddit sentiment is consistently positive for MailerLite and consistently frustrated for Mailchimp, particularly around billing and account issues post-Intuit.
One nuanced take worth ending on: “All email marketing platforms suck. The question isn’t what other people think. It’s what you think, because you’re the one who has to use it,” wrote u/behavioralsanity. Fair point.
Our Recommendation
MailerLite is the right choice for most authors. The pricing alone makes the case: $0/month for up to 1,000 subscribers versus $26/month on Mailchimp. Free automations versus a paywall. A simpler builder that does everything an author newsletter needs.
Across 200 authors we tracked and 156 Reddit comments we analyzed, the pattern is consistent: authors who switch to MailerLite stay there. The 44% positive / 2% negative Reddit sentiment speaks for itself.
The one scenario where Mailchimp still makes sense: you already have an established list with complex automations, and the time and risk of migration outweigh the savings. If that is you, stay put. But if you are starting fresh or your Mailchimp bill is climbing, the math points one direction.
If you are currently on Mailchimp and considering a switch, MailerLite has a step-by-step migration guide from Mailchimp that walks you through exporting your contacts, recreating your automations, and updating your signup forms.
Start with MailerLite’s free plan. Build your first automation. Send your first newsletter. The $528/year you save at 2,500 subscribers buys a professional cover design or a month of advertising. Put that money toward your books, not your email bill. Not sure what to write? See what bestselling authors actually put in their newsletters.