Looking to switch to brevo from Mailchimp, but I'm confused regarding contact limits

The main thing that pissed me off on Mailchimp was the contact limit being 500 and absolutely everything counting towards it and upgrading my plan.

Now I noticed Brevo has a limit of 100.000 contacts on the free plan but a limit of 500 on the paid plan, what does that mean exactly? I have around 3k contacts on mailchimp all of which are not « subscribers » just emails we gathered.

So if I wanted to switch to Brevo, what plan would I need? and who counts toward those contacts?

Hello @Avra,

Welcome to the Brevo community.

This topic has already been discussed a bit here:

The offer may be hard to read at first glance when compared to the free offer, but in fact, the free offer is pretty much only limited by the number of emails per day (which is already quite a limit), whereas for the paid offers, there’s both the question of the limit on the number of emails per month, as well as the limit on contacts which are more or less correlated.

Unless I’m mistaken (I’m just a simple user), any e-mail address entered in the contact list is considered a contact, whether or not e-mails are sent.
Perhaps someone from Brevo can correct me? Maybe @ahudavert ?

In your case, I think you’ll have to start with a 20,000 mails/month solution or more if you want to have at least 3,000 contacts, unless you don’t need to send more than 300 mails/day.

I hope this helps

Hi @Avra and @Tourisme ,

Absolutely.

Overall, the general philosophy at Brevo is to not charge based on the number of contacts, but based on the number of emails sent per day (if you have a free plan) or per month (for paid plans). There is as well a contact limit, placed quite high, to avoid having customers with plans not adapted to their contact base size:

In your case: if you have 3k contacts and are sending less than 300 emails / day, you can go for a free plan. If you need more, you better go for a paid plan. Does this make more sense?