Kit vs Mailchimp: Selling to an Audience or to Shoppers

The short answer: if you sell courses, digital products or paid content to an audience and want each buyer's purchases to decide which emails they get, Kit is built around that job: its API records purchases against subscribers and can drive purchase-based automations, and its MCP server gives Claude or ChatGPT access to the account on either paid plan, Creator or Creator Pro (purchase API, Kit MCP docs). If you sell physical products from a Shopify or WooCommerce store, Mailchimp connects the store for free, from $13 a month for 500 contacts on Essentials (Mailchimp pricing, checked on 26 October 2026). Kit's prices are not on this page: its pricing page returned a bot check to automated reading that day.

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Kit, the former ConvertKit, whose API moved from api.convertkit.com to api.kit.com (upgrade guide), treats a subscriber as a person with tags, custom fields, sequences and a purchase history, and gives developers a full v4 API to work on all of it. Mailchimp treats a contact as a member of an audience fed by a store, a form or an import, and sells the tools around it in three tiers. The first fits a creator business; the second fits a shop.

Settle these first:

1. Price both at your list size, yourself. Mailchimp's page gives $75 a month on Essentials and $100 on Standard for 2,501 to 5,000 contacts (Mailchimp pricing). Open the Kit pricing page in your browser and write its figure for the same count beside them. Multiply the gap by 12.
2. Find where your sales are recorded today. Kit's purchase endpoint takes an order by email address from your e-commerce platform, creates the subscriber if none exists, and adds products it has not seen (purchase API). If your checkout can call it, purchase history arrives with no manual export.
3. Plan one list, not several. Mailchimp's contact total counts contacts stored across all of your audiences (plans article). Kit sorts people with tags and segments (Kit API reference). In either tool, one list with tags is cheaper and easier to report on than copies of people.
4. Choose the number that proves it. Buyers per sequence: of the people who entered a sales sequence, how many bought within 30 days. Kit's purchases endpoint and Mailchimp's store data both make that countable.

Capabilities, from each vendor's documentation

Kit rows from its developer documentation, MCP docs and API overview; Mailchimp rows from its pricing page, store guide and Intuit AI article.

What decides it

Who is buying, and what

A creator who sells a course, a template pack and a membership needs to know who bought which, so the next launch skips existing buyers and the upsell finds them. Kit's purchases endpoint puts that on the subscriber's profile and lets it drive automations (purchase API). A shop with a catalogue needs cart and order emails that follow inventory and checkout, and Mailchimp's store guide covers that for most platforms, except abandoned cart and product retargeting emails on BigCommerce.

How the API and the plan interact

Kit's API overview says broadcasts, tags, custom fields and purchase imports work as long as the account's plan is eligible for the API, apps and legacy integrations, and points to the pricing page for which plans are (API overview). Check that line on the pricing page before you plan any integration, because the cheapest tier is not always the one that connects.

Where AI can act

Kit's MCP maps the whole v4 API to tools for Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, at 120 requests a minute per token (Kit MCP docs). On Mailchimp, generative AI comes free with Standard and Premium, while the generator that writes flow emails also wants a connected store and an account registered to a United States address, which rules it out for most European businesses (Intuit AI article).

Prices, and the gap in them

Mailchimp, monthly billing in USD after the 14-day trial, checked on 26 October 2026 on its pricing page. Kit's figures could not be read the same day; its pricing page answered automated requests with a bot check, so fill the last column in yourself.

A gap is better than a guess. If a figure on this page cannot be traced to the vendor, it is not here.

The comparison you can run for free

Fill in that table, then take one sequence you run today and write it out step by step: trigger, emails, delays, tags added. Mailchimp's free plan and 14-day trial, and whatever trial or entry plan Kit's pricing page offers, are enough to rebuild that one sequence in each and see which takes fewer steps. Export your contacts with their tags before any trial ends.

Mailchimp's pricing page invites you to try Standard for 14 days, not Essentials (pricing). A trial is set on the tier the vendor would like you to stay on, so note which features you used during it and check whether the cheaper plan has them.

An agent drafts the broadcast; you confirm the send

The Kit MCP lets an assistant read subscribers, sequences, broadcasts, tags and segments, manage subscribers, and draft or schedule broadcasts; per Kit's docs, a send or a deletion never happens without your explicit go-ahead (Kit MCP docs). One step of a launch: the agent lists everyone tagged as a buyer of last year's course, excludes them from the launch segment and drafts the broadcast, which the API saves as a draft when no send time is set (broadcast API). You read the draft and the segment count, then confirm the send yourself.

Choose Kit if

• You sell digital products, courses or paid content to an audience you built.
• Tags and purchase history should decide who receives which email.
• You want an AI assistant or your own code working through a documented v4 API.

Choose Mailchimp if

• A Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento store is where people buy.
• You want published prices you can compare today, from $13 a month.
• Your team wants Mailchimp's campaign reports and seats without building an integration.

FAQ

How much does Kit cost?

Its prices were not readable to automated requests on 26 October 2026, so this page does not state them; open the Kit pricing page. Kit's MCP docs name its paid plans Creator and Creator Pro.

Can Kit record sales from my checkout?

Yes, through its API. The create a purchase endpoint records an order against a subscriber by email address, matches repeats on the transaction ID, and creates the subscriber if needed.

Can Mailchimp's AI write my flow emails from Europe?

No, not the flow templates that use Intuit AI. Mailchimp restricts them to Standard and above, to accounts with a store connected, and to accounts whose main address is in the United States, per its Intuit AI article.