Audience and contacts
Mailchimp counts the same person twice if they sit in two audiences, and keeps charging for unsubscribes until you remember to archive them.
Ce que les utilisateurs disent vraiment
✕Mailchimp doesn't deduplicate across audiences, so the same email address in two lists counts as two billable contacts.
Source : Mailchimp KB, duplicate contacts ↗✕Subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your plan total — only archived, cleaned or deleted records stop billing, and archiving is manual.
Source : Mailchimp KB, about pricing plans ↗✕Pricing bumps at every step — 500, 1,500, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 contacts — so adding one record above your tier can push your bill up by tens of dollars overnight.
Source : Retainful, Mailchimp pricing 2026 ↗✕Between inactive-contact billing, duplicates, overage charges and paid add-ons, actual monthly spend commonly runs 20-40% above the listed plan price.
Source : Retainful, Mailchimp pricing 2026 ↗
Your contacts live in a single Postgres table you own — dedupe is a unique index on email, not a paid feature, and unsubscribed records flip a boolean instead of inflating the bill. Audiences become tags, so the same person in three campaigns is still one row. Hosting 5,000 or 500,000 contacts costs the same to run; you pay for the box, not the headcount.