Mailchimp bills your database. We bill the software.
Mailchimp's price rises with the number of contacts you store, whether or not you ever email them, and every send leaves on infrastructure shared with thousands of other tenants. AeroCampaign inverts both: a flat platform fee, and delivery through a provider account you own.
The comparison, without the asterisks
| Capability | AeroCampaign | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing basis Their bill grows with your list whether or not you mail it. | Flat platform fee | Per contact, tiered |
| Cost per 1,000 emails | ~$0.10 at SES cost | Bundled, marked up |
| Sends through your own provider Your domain reputation is not pooled with other tenants. | Yes — SendGrid or SES | No |
| Own your sender reputation | Yes | Shared IP pools |
| AI copy per cohort | Yes | Templates + basic assist |
| AI copy per individual contact | Yes | No |
| Industry-trend grounding | Yes | No |
| Billed for unsubscribed / dead contacts The single largest line of waste on a per-contact plan. | No — cleaning bundled | Yes, counted in tier |
| List cleaning and dedupe included | Yes, every tier | Third-party add-on |
| Autonomous outbound SDR | Yes | No |
| Managed campaign delivery | Yes, via services partner | Agency marketplace only |
| Cross-provider suppression | Unified, two-way sync | Platform-internal only |
| Bounce / complaint health thresholds | Surfaced at SES review levels | Partial |
| RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe | Every send | Yes |
| Export your event stream | Full, normalized | Limited by plan |
| Contact list is portable | CSV in, CSV out, always | Export available |
Three reasons people leave Mailchimp
The bill stops tracking your list
Mailchimp's tiers step up as contacts accumulate, which quietly penalises the thing every marketer is told to do — grow the list. A flat fee plus provider list price means a 40,000-contact list and a 400,000-contact list cost nearly the same to operate.
Your reputation stops being communal
On a shared platform your inbox placement is affected by senders you will never meet. With your own SES or SendGrid account, your domain and your IP warmth are yours — and they leave with you if you ever go.
Copy generated per cohort, not per campaign
Mailchimp's assistive AI helps you write one message faster. AeroCampaign's engine reads each contact's signal history and produces a different message per behavioural cohort, down to the individual where the signal justifies it.
Where Mailchimp is still the better choice
Mailchimp has been shipping for two decades. Pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours.
Template gallery and drag-drop builder
Mailchimp's visual editor and template library are excellent and deep. AeroCampaign's composer is deliberately plain — HTML and text, no drag-drop canvas.
Integration breadth
Hundreds of native integrations across e-commerce, CRM, and ads. If your stack depends on a long tail of one-click connectors, that gap is real.
Journeys and automation
Multi-step customer journeys, cart abandonment, and behavioural automations are mature there. AeroCampaign ships broadcasts, not sequences.
- Your Mailchimp bill has grown faster than your sending volume
- You already run Amazon SES or SendGrid, or would be comfortable setting one up
- You send broadcasts and newsletters rather than multi-step journeys
- You want copy that differs by segment without writing every variant yourself
- Deliverability and sender reputation are things you actively manage
- You run campaigns for multiple clients and want each on its own provider account
- Your team relies on the drag-drop builder and template gallery day to day
- Multi-step automated journeys are core to how you sell
- You depend on Mailchimp's native e-commerce or ads integrations
- Nobody on the team wants to touch an AWS console or an API key
Try it alongside Mailchimp.
Connect a provider, import one list, and run a single campaign through the engine before you move anything else.
No credit card. Bring your own SendGrid or Amazon SES account.