Can Groundbase replace Mailchimp? For a service business of one, yes, and it adds texting.

Mailchimp's price is set by the size of your audience, not by what you send. Every contact you store counts, including people who unsubscribed, and the free plan now holds 250 of them. For a service business of one that sends a monthly newsletter to a few hundred clients and a drip to new leads, that is $13 to $20 a month for a list that already lives in your CRM.

Groundbase does the newsletter, the drip, the lead form and the audience inside the CRM, and it does text campaigns in the same tool, which Mailchimp does not do at all in most countries. I build Groundbase, so here is the list of what matches, what is missing, and who should keep Mailchimp. Prices were checked October 14, 2026 and are in USD.

What you get in Groundbase

All of it is in the one $19 plan, with no contact tiers. Your audience is your contacts, and there is no cap on how many you have.

• Newsletters. A drag-and-drop editor with text, image and button blocks, your brand colours, layouts for your line of work, and merge tags that fill in the first name, the company or any custom field.
• Drips. Multi-step campaigns with delays between steps. Each step is email or text independently, so a drip can go email, text, email. Later steps are skipped when the person already opened, clicked, replied or booked a meeting.
• An audience by tag. Send to all contacts, to anyone carrying one of the tags you pick, or to specific people you tick. An ongoing campaign re-checks its audience every five minutes, so a workflow that applies a tag is enough to enrol someone.
• Lead forms. A form with its own link. Every submission becomes a tagged contact with a follow-up task, which is what Mailchimp's signup form does, except the person lands in your CRM rather than in a separate audience.
• Text campaigns. One-off blasts and drip steps by SMS, with a segment counter, STOP handling, a throttle for big sends and a cost estimate before you confirm. Through your own Twilio account.
• Tracking. Sent, delivered and bounced come back from Resend within seconds. Opens and clicks are tracked once you turn tracking on in Resend. Replies count when they text back or when a reply lands in a mailbox you have connected. Unsubscribes and STOP replies suppress the contact from future sends.
• A/B tests. Up to four versions of a campaign, split evenly at send time, with results by version. Groundbase does not pick a winner for you.
• A daily send cap and sending windows. A new sending domain can be held to a small number of emails a day while it warms up, and a campaign can be restricted to weekday afternoons. Both wait rather than fail.
• Sent from your own domain through your own Resend account. Resend is free up to 3,000 emails a month on one verified domain and $20 a month for 50,000. Groundbase marks nothing up.
• Templates. A starter set for service businesses: welcome series, reactivation, appointment reminders, post-job follow-up.
• Your AI can draft it. Over MCP, ask your assistant for a welcome drip with a booking link and it builds the draft for you to review.

The feature post is email and text campaigns in your CRM, and the campaigns help article has the detail, including how the daily cap is shared between campaigns.

What Groundbase does not replace

• A landing-page builder and a website builder. Mailchimp has both. Groundbase has a lead form with a link, not a page builder.
• E-commerce. No product blocks, no abandoned-cart emails, no Shopify or WooCommerce sync. If you sell from a store, Mailchimp's store integrations are the point and Groundbase has none.
• A large template gallery. Mailchimp has hundreds of designs. Groundbase has layouts for a service business and a block editor.
• Advanced testing and optimisation. Mailchimp Standard has multivariate testing and send-time optimisation. Groundbase splits up to four versions and shows you the numbers.
• Predictive and behavioural segmentation. Mailchimp segments on purchase behaviour, predicted demographics and engagement scores. Groundbase segments by tag, by list, or by the people you pick.
• A customer journey builder with branches. Mailchimp Standard's journeys branch on conditions. Groundbase drips are linear, with exit conditions, and branching logic lives in workflows rather than in the campaign.
• Hosted signup pages with a Mailchimp-managed audience. Your audience is your CRM. If you want a mailing list that is deliberately separate from your customer records, that is Mailchimp's model, not Groundbase's.
• Opens and clicks out of the box. They are off until you add a tracking subdomain in Resend, which takes a DNS record. Mailchimp tracks both from the first send.
• Transactional email. Receipts, password resets and the like are not what Groundbase campaigns are for.

What Mailchimp costs

Mailchimp prices by the number of contacts in your audience, and sends are capped at a multiple of that number.

• Free. 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with Mailchimp branding on every email. That is the January 2026 limit; it used to be 500 contacts and 2,500 sends.
• Essentials. From $13 a month for 500 contacts. Removes the branding, adds scheduling and A/B testing. $75 a month at 5,000 contacts.
• Standard. From $20 a month for 500 contacts. Adds the journey builder, send-time optimisation and the generative AI tools. $100 a month at 5,000 contacts.
• Premium. From $350 a month, for 10,000 contacts and up.
• SMS. Available as a paid add-on in a handful of countries, with credits bought separately.

The number to notice is that unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward the bill. A list that has grown over five years is mostly people who no longer open anything, and you pay for them.

So for a service business with a few hundred contacts, the comparison is $13 to $20 a month for Mailchimp against $19 a month for Groundbase, with Groundbase's number covering the CRM, texting, bookings and invoicing as well. At 5,000 contacts it is $75 to $100 against $19 plus Resend, where 5,000 contacts emailed twice a month is 10,000 sends, inside Resend's $20 plan. The pricing page has a calculator.

The cost Mailchimp does not have: Resend. Free to 3,000 emails a month, then $20 for 50,000. And for text campaigns, Twilio bills per message at its own rates, plus a one-time carrier registration for US numbers. What sending SMS actually costs and setting up Resend cover both.

Where Mailchimp is the better choice

• You sell products online. Store sync, product recommendations and abandoned-cart emails are Mailchimp's strongest features and Groundbase has none of them.
• You want a landing page builder in the same tool. Groundbase has a form, not pages.
• Your list is separate from your customers on purpose. A newsletter with thousands of readers who are not clients is an audience, not a CRM. Mailchimp is built for that; Groundbase would make every reader a contact.
• You need branching journeys and send-time optimisation. Mailchimp Standard has them. Groundbase's drips are linear, with exits.
• You want opens and clicks without touching DNS. Mailchimp tracks from day one. Groundbase needs a tracking subdomain set up in Resend first.
• You are under 250 contacts and happy with the branding. Mailchimp Free costs nothing, and that is hard to beat.
• You do not want to run your own sending account. With Mailchimp, deliverability is their problem. With Groundbase, you verify a domain at Resend and warm it up yourself. Here is how.

The decision

Keep Mailchimp if you sell products, need landing pages, run a large audience that is not your customer base, or want tracking and deliverability handled for you.

Switch if you are a service business of one whose list is your clients and leads: a monthly newsletter, a welcome drip for new enquiries, a reactivation text to last year's customers, all to people who are already contacts with a phone number, a deal and an invoice on the same page. Then the audience fee goes away, the texting that Mailchimp cannot do is in the same tool, and the campaign history is on the contact instead of in a separate app.

The other two posts in this series cover QuickBooks for invoicing and Calendly.

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Questions about this one? Email me directly: blog-mailchimp@groundbasecrm.com — I read every one.