A newsletter is the cheapest channel a small company owns and the one it most reliably neglects. Not for lack of tools: the market offers dozens, every one of them with a free tier, a template gallery and a dashboard that looks like a cockpit. The neglect comes from a different place. Somebody has to write the thing, somebody has to keep the list clean, and somebody has to answer, once a quarter, why the bill went up although nothing changed.
This comparison is not about which tool has the nicer editor. It is about the two things that actually differ between the three options once the novelty has worn off: what you pay per thousand recipients as the list grows, and how much handwork the legal plumbing costs — confirmation mails, unsubscribe links, bounce handling, the audit trail you need when someone asks how they got on your list.
One disclosure before the first number. Grünberg.Digital runs its own sender, built on the same ordinary hosting the websites sit on. It is one of the three columns below, and it is not the winner in every row. A comparison that ends with "and therefore ours" is an advertisement; this one ends with a table you can check.
1. The two numbers that decide
Every published price in this category answers a different question. Mailchimp prices by contacts in the list, whether or not you mail them this month. Brevo prices by emails sent per month, whether the list has two hundred or twenty thousand addresses. A self-built sender prices by nothing at all at the margin — the cost is fixed, sits in hosting and somebody's time, and stays flat as the list grows.
That is why "which is cheaper" has no answer without a shape. So the comparison uses one: a company of eight, a list that starts at 500 opted-in contacts, grows by roughly 150 a month, and receives one mailing a fortnight. Twelve months in, the list stands at about 2,300 contacts and the company sends around 4,600 emails a month.
The second number is duller and more expensive. Under the GDPR and the German UWG a newsletter needs a documented double opt-in, a working unsubscribe link in every mail, prompt handling of the click, and a record of when and from where consent was given. None of that is optional, and all of it costs time in one of two places: inside the tool, where it is a setting, or in your inbox, where it is a task.
2. Mailchimp: the contact-based bill
Mailchimp's Standard plan is listed at $20 a month at 500 contacts on its own pricing page (checked 22 September 2026), and that is an introductory rate for the first twelve months. It is the number everyone quotes and the number almost nobody pays for long, because the plan is sold in contact tiers and the tier moves every time the list does — which is, after all, what a newsletter is for. At 2,500 contacts, Standard costs around $60 a month and Essentials around $45; at 5,000 contacts it is around $100 (tier prices as collected by Email Tool Tester, updated 5 August 2026).
Two things follow from contact-based pricing that are easy to miss on the pricing page:
- Unsubscribed and bounced addresses count. Mailchimp bills on all contacts in the audience, including unsubscribed and inactive ones, until somebody archives them. A list that has been growing for two years without a clean-up is paying for its own history.
- A quiet month costs the same as a busy one. Sending nothing in August does not reduce the August invoice. The model rewards companies that mail often and punishes companies that mail rarely — which is most SMBs.
On the plumbing, Mailchimp is very good. Double opt-in is a checkbox per audience, the confirmation mail is a template, the unsubscribe link is injected automatically and the consent record (timestamp, IP, source form) is stored per contact and exportable. The handwork is close to zero. What you pay for that convenience is the contact tier — and the fact that your list lives in Atlanta, which for a German company means a transfer-impact assessment and a data-processing agreement that Mailchimp provides but your data-protection officer has to read.
3. Brevo: the volume-based bill
Brevo (the former Sendinblue) turns the model around. Its Starter plan starts at $9 a month (€7 in the German price list) and Standard at $18 (€15), priced by monthly send volume. Since late 2025 there is a catch the old comparison tables miss: the entry tiers carry contact caps — the 5,000-mail Starter tier allows at most 500 contacts, Standard at that volume 1,500. The cap disappears at the 20,000-mail tier, where Starter costs around $29 a month (prices as published by Brevo and collected by Email Tool Tester and Chatarmin, August and September 2026). The list is still not the billing unit once you are past that step, but it is no longer irrelevant either.
For the reference company that means: with 2,300 contacts it cannot stay on the cheapest tier even though it sends only about 4,600 mails a month; it lands on the 20,000-mail tier at around $29. That is still the better fit for the first year — the price stays flat while the list keeps growing, and a quiet August does not push it up. The trade-off is that the price is tied to activity, so a company that starts mailing weekly, adds a transactional stream and an automation sequence, climbs the tiers faster than it expects. Volume pricing is honest about what you use; it is not automatically cheap.
Brevo's plumbing is on a par with Mailchimp's: double opt-in as a form setting, automatic unsubscribe handling, per-contact consent log, and — relevant for a German company — EU hosting and a French parent company, which shortens the data-protection conversation considerably. Brevo also lets you run a plain-text transactional stream on the same account, which most SMBs would otherwise buy from a fourth vendor.
4. Your own sender: the fixed bill
The third column is the one we run, so read it with that in mind.
A self-built sender is, stripped to its parts, four things: a table of contacts with a consent record, a page that handles the opt-in and the unsubscribe click, a script that assembles the mail from a template and hands it to an SMTP relay, and a reader that looks at the bounce mailbox afterwards. None of those parts is hard. All of them have to exist, and all of them have to keep working when nobody is looking.
The marginal cost per thousand recipients is essentially the relay's price for delivery, which on ordinary hosting rounds to cents. The fixed cost is the real number: a developer's two or three days to build it properly (consent log, DKIM, DMARC, bounce handling, the unsubscribe path that works in one click as the RFC requires), plus a recurring hour or two a month to look at what the bounce reader found. Spread over three years, that is still less than a contact-tier subscription for a list of a few thousand — and it stops being true the moment somebody stops looking at the bounce mailbox.
Where the self-built sender loses, and loses clearly:
- Reputation is your problem. Mailchimp and Brevo send from warmed, monitored IP pools with dedicated deliverability teams. Your sender sends from your hosting. If a colleague mails a bought list once, your domain carries the consequence.
- No template gallery, no A/B testing, no heat maps. You get what you built. For most SMB newsletters that is a plain, well-typed mail with one image and one link — which is also what performs — but you will not get a drag-and-drop editor for free.
- The audit trail is only as good as your table. A tool logs consent because its lawyers made it. Your table logs consent because you remembered to.
We built ours because the sending volume across our own brands was small, the lists were ours, and the thing we actually needed — a reader that turns bounces and replies into tasks — is exactly the feature the big tools charge for at the top tiers. That is a specific situation, not a general recommendation.
5. The comparison on the two numbers
The table below is the reference company after twelve months: roughly 2,300 contacts, one mailing a fortnight, around 4,600 emails a month. Figures are the published prices cited above, checked in September 2026; taxes and annual discounts are left out.
- Cost per month, month twelve — Mailchimp: around $60 on Standard (2,500-contact tier), about $13 per thousand mails sent. Brevo: around $29 on Starter (20,000-mail tier, no contact cap), about $6 per thousand mails sent. Own sender: relay cost only, cents per thousand, with the fixed build cost carried separately.
- Cost in a quiet month — Mailchimp: unchanged, contacts are billed whether mailed or not. Brevo: lower, volume is billed. Own sender: unchanged and small.
- Double opt-in — Mailchimp: setting per audience. Brevo: setting per form. Own sender: a page you built, and a test you run every time you change it.
- Unsubscribe — Mailchimp and Brevo: automatic link, one-click handling, list-unsubscribe header. Own sender: you implement all three, including the header, or your mail lands in spam.
- Consent record — Mailchimp and Brevo: per contact, exportable. Own sender: per row in your table, exportable if you wrote the export.
- Where the data lives — Mailchimp: United States, with a data-processing agreement and standard contractual clauses. Brevo: European Union. Own sender: your hosting, which in our case is Germany.
- Who fixes it at 2 a.m. — Mailchimp and Brevo: their status page and their support tier. Own sender: whoever built it.
6. What the table does not say
The numbers above are the floor. Three things push every column upwards, and they are the same three that push the whole software bill in our twelve-tools comparison: the entry tier is priced for a smaller company than you are, annual prepayment is assumed, and the upgrade step is where the pricing actually lives. A Mailchimp audience that outgrows Standard, a Brevo account that adds SMS and a second sending domain, a self-built sender that suddenly needs a dedicated IP — each is a step change, not a slope.
And one thing pushes the two hosted columns down that no table shows: time you do not spend. If nobody in the company has ever set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the honest cost of the self-built sender includes learning that, and the honest cost of getting it wrong is a quarter of mail in the spam folder before anyone notices. The hosted tools make that mistake very hard to make. That is worth real money to a company without a technical person, and it is worth very little to a company with one.
7. Verdict: three companies, three answers
- The company that mails rarely and has a technical person is the one for which building makes sense — and only that one. The list is small, the volume is tiny, the bounce reader is the feature that matters, and the fixed cost is a few days that this person would otherwise spend reading pricing pages.
- The company that mails regularly and has nobody technical should pick Brevo and stop thinking about it. Volume pricing matches the way an SMB actually sends, the plumbing is a set of checkboxes, and the data stays in the EU.
- The company that already runs on Mailchimp and has a clean, mailed list has no reason to move. The reason to look again is the day the invoice shows a contact tier that is mostly people who left two years ago — that is a list clean-up, not a migration.
Would you like to know which of the three you are? Book a free initial consultation — bring the last three invoices and the list size, and the answer takes twenty minutes.
8. FAQ: newsletter costs and compliance in the SMB
What does it cost to send a newsletter to 1,000 people?
It depends on the pricing model, not on the number. Mailchimp bills by contacts in the list (Standard from $20 at 500 contacts, around $60 at 2,500), Brevo by emails sent per month with contact caps on the entry tiers (Starter from $9, around $29 once the cap no longer applies), and a self-built sender only by the relay's delivery cost plus the fixed cost of building and maintaining it. For a list of a few thousand and one or two mailings a month, volume-based pricing is usually the cheapest hosted option.
Is double opt-in mandatory in Germany?
For advertising email, consent has to be demonstrable, and double opt-in is the established way of demonstrating it: the recipient enters an address, receives a confirmation mail and clicks a link, and the timestamp, IP address and form are recorded. Mailchimp and Brevo do this as a setting; a self-built sender has to implement and log it.
Can we keep the list in Mailchimp but send from our own server?
Technically yes, but it combines the disadvantages: you pay the contact tier for the list and carry the deliverability risk of your own sending. If the goal is control over sending, move the list too; if the goal is a cheaper bill, look at volume-based pricing first.
Which option keeps the data in the EU?
Brevo hosts in the European Union and has a French parent company. Mailchimp is a US company and works under standard contractual clauses and a data-processing agreement. A self-built sender keeps the data wherever your hosting is — for us, Germany.
