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Postrider vs Mailchimp

Mailchimp is built around audiences — separate contact pools, each billed on its own. That model works well for a single mailing list. It breaks down for an organisation where one person legitimately belongs to several lists at once: a branch announcement list, a committee list, a regional list. Postrider is built around the person, not the audience.

The core difference: one person, one bill

In Mailchimp, a contact who sits in three audiences is billed three times — the same person counted three separate times against your plan limit. Postrider tracks one global subscriber record per person, with independent subscribe state per list layered on top. However many lists someone is on, they're counted once.

Opting out of one list doesn't mean opting out of everything

Global suppression (a bounce or a spam complaint) applies account-wide, exactly as it should. But a member choosing to leave one list — say, a social-events list — stays subscribed to every other list they're on. That distinction between global suppression and per-list subscription isn't something Mailchimp's audience model represents natively.

Reflector lists — something Mailchimp doesn't do at all

Mailchimp is a one-way broadcast tool: an admin composes, members receive. Postrider also supports reflector (discussion) lists — a member emails the list's own address, and it's redistributed to every other subscriber, with moderation, reply-threading, attachment forwarding, and a choice of real-time delivery or a daily/weekly digest per subscriber. If your organisation runs a secretaries@- or committee@-style discussion list today through a separate tool, Postrider replaces it without a second subscription.

Where Mailchimp is still the right call

If you run a single audience — one newsletter, no overlapping sub-groups, no discussion lists — Mailchimp's campaign builder, template gallery, and third-party integrations are more mature than Postrider's. Postrider exists specifically for the case Mailchimp's pricing model handles badly: membership organisations where people belong to several lists at once and administrators need those lists to sync automatically from a real membership system rather than a manually maintained spreadsheet.

See it against your own numbers

Postrider's pricing is based on how many people you actually email, not how many times a shared contact appears across lists. Register your organisation to try it against your real membership data.