Hyvor Post
MailchimpHyvor Post: A Privacy-First Alternative to Mailchimp (2026)
Hyvor Post is a privacy-first alternative to Mailchimp: no open or click tracking, pricing based on emails sent instead of contacts stored, and a simpler tool built just for newsletters.
Two products built for two different jobs
Mailchimp has grown, since Intuit acquired it in 2021, into a broad marketing platform: email, SMS, ecommerce automation, retargeting ads, and an AI assistant layered on top. Hyvor Post, launched in December 2025, does one thing. It sends newsletters, with no open or click tracking, ever.
Mailchimp started as a straightforward email tool. Its shift toward becoming an all-in-one small-business marketing suite shows up clearly in what happened to TinyLetter, the simple free newsletter tool Mailchimp had owned since 2011. Mailchimp shut it down in February 2024, telling users its focus had moved to marketers and small businesses [1], and pointed TinyLetter's users toward its paid platform. That single decision matches a broader pattern: Mailchimp's current product line now spans automation, SMS, ecommerce tools, and predictive segmentation, features aimed at growing marketing operations, not simple newsletter senders.
Hyvor Post takes the opposite bet. It is intentionally not a full marketing automation platform: newsletters, subscribers, and the tools needed to publish them, without the automation builders and marketing channels layered on top. It is built for businesses and organizations that want a straightforward way to keep customers updated, not a customer-journey builder.
Feature Comparison: Hyvor Post vs Mailchimp
Hyvor Post MailchimpKey Advantages
Pricing: what you'll actually pay
The two platforms bill on fundamentally different mechanics, and the difference matters more than the sticker price. Mailchimp's recurring Marketing plans are tiered by how many contacts you store, with each tier including a set number of monthly sends [5]. According to Mailchimp's own pricing documentation, subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts all count toward that contact limit. The only way to stop paying for someone is to manually archive or delete them, and the same address in two separate audiences is billed twice.
Mailchimp also offers a Pay As You Go option: instead of a recurring plan, you buy email credits and pay only for what you send, aimed at infrequent senders rather than a steady newsletter schedule [6]. Most contact-heavy senders, though, are on the recurring, contact-tiered plans this article compares against.
Mailchimp's free plan was cut in January 2026, effective February 17: it now caps out at 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends, confirmed directly in Mailchimp's own notice to subscribers at the time [7]. Automation is not available on the free tier.
This billing model is not new or hidden. In 2019, Mailchimp's own billing team told a longtime customer, David Gaughran, that pricing would now be based on the whole "audience," which Mailchimp defined as including subscribed, unsubscribed, and transactional contacts, not just active subscribers, as reported at the time by the marketing trade press [8]. Mailchimp's current documentation confirms the same rule still applies today.
None of this makes Mailchimp's pricing dishonest: it is documented in their own help pages. But it is a genuinely different mental model than paying for what you send, and it catches businesses off guard when a list has more churn than they realized.
Pricing as of September 2026.
Contacts include subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed addresses unless manually archived. Figures are for recurring Marketing plans, not Pay As You Go. See live pricing →
Billed on emails sent, not contacts stored. Unlimited team members, custom email domain, and branding removal included from the first paid tier. VAT included. See full pricing →
How we calculated this: Figures for Mailchimp are pulled directly from its own live pricing calculator on the Essentials plan (its cheapest tier), converted to EUR. Essentials does not extend to 1,000,000 contacts, so that row uses the Standard plan at 1,200,000 contacts instead, the closest tier the calculator offers; treat it as a close stand-in rather than an exact figure.
Tracking: the core philosophical difference
Mailchimp tracks opens and clicks by default. Open tracking is enabled on every campaign except plain-text emails [9], and click tracking is on by default across the board. If a paying user manually turns click tracking off, Mailchimp continues redirecting links through its own servers for a period afterward while it monitors for abuse [10]. The setting does not take effect instantly.
Hyvor Post removed tracking entirely rather than making it optional. There is no pixel, no click redirect, and no hidden switch to turn tracking back on.
Open tracking is already an imperfect measurement industry-wide, and not only because of Mailchimp. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads a message's remote content, including tracking pixels, in the background whether or not a person actually opens it, which Litmus data reported via EmailToolTester put at roughly 49% of all opens as of January 2025 [11]. For that share, an ESP like Mailchimp cannot distinguish a genuine read from an automatic prefetch. Hyvor Post avoids the question entirely by not collecting open or click data in the first place.
Read: How to Run a Newsletter Without Tracking Opens and Clicks →
Data location and legal standing
Mailchimp is a US company based in Atlanta, currently certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the UK extension, and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, a presently valid mechanism for transferring EU data to the US.
In March 2021, before the current framework existed, the EDPB reported that a German publishing business's use of Mailchimp was unlawful under the post-Schrems II standard, because the company had not assessed whether extra safeguards beyond standard contractual clauses were needed [12]. No fine was issued, and the ruling predates the 2023 Data Privacy Framework by more than two years, so it should be read as historical context, not Mailchimp's current legal status.
Mailchimp has also had publicized security incidents in recent years: an April 2022 breach in which attackers accessed 319 accounts and exported data from 102 of them [13], and a January 2023 breach affecting 133 accounts, including WooCommerce, exposing customer names, store URLs, and emails [14]. Both were attributed to social engineering against Mailchimp staff.
Hyvor Post runs on HYVOR's shared infrastructure, which lists Hetzner (Germany) as its hosting provider across all products, and Hyvor Post adds no product-specific subprocessors of its own on top of that. Email delivery runs through Hyvor's own Hyvor Relay rather than a third-party ESP [15]. HYVOR also offers a Data Processing Agreement [16].
Why some long-time users say the interface gets in the way
Mailchimp isn't only a newsletter tool. It's a broader marketing platform that newsletters happen to run on top of. Hyvor Post is built around a single job: managing and sending your newsletter. That difference is visible from the moment you open each dashboard.
This is not universal. Plenty of long-time customers describe Mailchimp positively, especially for straightforward campaigns. But a recurring complaint, even from technical users, is that the interface has grown well past what a simple newsletter needs.
A marketing agency that used Mailchimp for its own client campaigns published a detailed account of recurring editor friction: difficulty judging how text would actually look against certain background colors, inconsistent font sizing, and links that behaved unpredictably when copied between messages. The team described the experience as frustrating on a near-daily basis, not as an occasional bug [17].
Suspensions can also arrive without much explanation. One developer wrote a detailed account of Mailchimp instantly blocking their company's account with no notification, email, or warning beforehand, and giving inconsistent, slow-changing explanations, at one point implying their own API key had leaked, across roughly 30 emails and 6 phone calls. Sending was restored after more than a day, once the cause was finally identified: a hacked account belonging to one of their own customers had sent a handful of spam messages [18]. This runs against what Mailchimp's own documentation says should happen: it states that most of the time it will warn an account before suspending it, and reserves suspension without a prior warning for more severe cases, such as an abuse complaint rate far above its threshold. Account reviews only take place during business hours, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Eastern [19].
Where Mailchimp is genuinely the better choice
To be clear about it: abandoned-cart flows, product recommendations, and predictive segmentation are mature and well integrated with Shopify and WooCommerce [20], and Hyvor Post has none of this. If you need a customer journey that reacts to behavior across many steps, Mailchimp (Standard plan and above) can build it, while Hyvor Post is intentionally simple and does not attempt branching automation. Mailchimp also connects to hundreds of tools and offers retargeting ads, an integration catalog that a newer product like Hyvor Post has not built up yet.
If any of that is central to your business, this is not really a Hyvor Post vs Mailchimp decision. It is Mailchimp vs another ecommerce-capable platform.
Choose Hyvor Post if...
- Your business wants to keep customers updated, not run a full marketing operation.
- You want your readers' behavior to stay unwatched, with no open or click tracking.
- You'd rather pay for what you send than a rising fee for a list you're managing.
- You'd rather your newsletter infrastructure be hosted in the EU than the US.
- You're already using Hyvor Blogs and want a newsletter tool from the same team.
- You value open-source software over a closed platform.
Migrating from Mailchimp to Hyvor Post
Moving a newsletter to a new platform carries real risk, and the biggest one is deliverability. A brand-new sending domain has no reputation with mailbox providers, so a sudden volume spike right after switching can trigger spam filters. Even Mailchimp's own migration guidance warns new senders to build up volume gradually rather than send to a full list on day one [21]. There is also a consent question: importing every Mailchimp contact, including people who unsubscribed years ago, as a fresh subscriber elsewhere risks higher complaint rates and a shakier compliance position.
One more detail worth knowing: Mailchimp's own Migration Services are built to bring your data in from another platform, not to help you take it elsewhere [22]. Leaving is entirely self-service. Exporting your audience is straightforward, but nobody at Mailchimp is going to help you set it up somewhere else.
Hyvor Post handles the import from your Mailchimp CSV export, and our team can help with the technical setup so your first sends from the new domain don't trip spam filters. Where your export includes subscription timestamps and signup IP addresses, Hyvor Post's importer can map those fields too, though it's worth confirming exactly what your own Mailchimp export contains before a large migration. If you're ready to move, the transition is more straightforward than most people expect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. According to Mailchimp’s own pricing documentation, subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts all count toward your plan’s contact limit unless you manually archive or delete them.
No. There is no tracking pixel and no setting to enable one. Tracking is removed at the product level, not just turned off by default.
Mailchimp is currently certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and also relies on standard contractual clauses. Whether that’s sufficient for your specific use case depends on your own risk assessment. This is an area where the legal landscape has shifted before.
Hyvor Post’s CSV importer can map subscription timestamp and signup IP address where your export includes them, so your consent record does not have to start from zero. Confirm the exact fields your account exports before you migrate a large list.
Choose Hyvor Post, a privacy-first alternative to Mailchimp, if your business sends a newsletter and wants no reader tracking with predictable, volume-based pricing. Choose Mailchimp if you need multi-step automation, ecommerce triggers, or retargeting ads.
References
- Spam Resource, on the TinyLetter shutdown ↩
- Hyvor Post on Github ↩
- About Email Campaign Archives and Pages, Mailchimp ↩
- Mailchimp Support Options, Mailchimp ↩
- About Mailchimp Pricing Tiers, Mailchimp ↩
- Pay As You Go Plan, Mailchimp ↩
- Mailchimp's update email, via PriceTimeline ↩
- Email Insider, MediaPost, on Mailchimp's 2019 pricing change ↩
- Use Open Tracking in Emails, Mailchimp ↩
- Use Click Tracking in Emails, Mailchimp ↩
- EmailToolTester, on Apple Mail Privacy Protection ↩
- Bavarian DPA (BayLDA) calls for German company to cease the use of 'Mailchimp' tool, EDPB ↩
- MailChimp discloses new breach after employees got hacked, BleepingComputer ↩
- Cybersecurity Dive, on the January 2023 breach ↩
- Sub-Processors of HYVOR ↩
- Compliance, HYVOR ↩
- UX of your daily frustrations: Mailchimp, icapps ↩
- On How Mailchimp Suspended Our Account, radekmie.dev ↩
- About Suspension, Mailchimp ↩
- Do more with your WooCommerce data, Mailchimp ↩
- Email Migration Checklist, Mailchimp ↩
- ESP Migration for Beginners, EmailToolTester ↩
A quick note about HYVOR
We're an independent, bootstrapped company building software for people who actually care about the web. No venture capital. No growth-at-all-costs mindset. No enshittification. Just a small team shipping tools we're proud of, at a pace that lets us do it right.
We're big believers in open-source and the open web, and most of what we build is released openly. If you value privacy, transparency, and software that respects you as a user rather than treating you as a product - you're exactly who we're building for.