A Mailchimp alternative built for nonprofits

Most "Mailchimp alternative" pages are written to convince you the alternative wins on everything. This one isn't. Mailchimp is a genuinely capable product, CTG Mail is a young one, and you deserve the comparison a colleague would give you — including the parts where the incumbent is the right answer.

What nonprofits love about Mailchimp

Credit where it's due. If your organization is happy on Mailchimp, these are probably why:

• A mature, battle-tested product. Mailchimp has been sending email at enormous scale for many years. The editor is polished, the platform is stable, and edge cases have long since been sanded down.
• A deep integration ecosystem. Donation platforms, CRMs, form builders, e-commerce tools — if you use it, there's likely a Mailchimp integration for it.
• Brand recognition and resources. Your board knows the name, new staff have probably used it before, and there's a tutorial for everything.
• A historically generous free tier. Many nonprofits got their start on Mailchimp precisely because the free plan once covered a small list comfortably.

Why nonprofits go looking for alternatives

The complaints we hear from nonprofit teams are consistent, and they're mostly about the economics and the fit:

• Costs climb with your list. Contact-based pricing means the reward for growing your supporter base is a bigger software bill. Your 2,000-contact list shouldn't cost $50/mo — but on mainstream platforms, that's roughly where the tiers land.
• You pay for contacts you can't email. Pricing is based on the contacts stored in your audience, which can include people who unsubscribed or never opted in — so part of your bill covers people you're not allowed to send to.
• Nonprofit discounts still track enterprise pricing. A percentage off a tier that scales like an enterprise product is still enterprise pricing — just slightly delayed.
• The product outgrew your needs. You need to send a newsletter and manage a donor list. You don't need a 400-feature CRM with a 40-page onboarding guide.

What CTG Mail does differently

CTG Mail is built by Close The Gap Foundation — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — for nonprofits, and the design choices follow from that:

• No per-email fees, nonprofit-friendly pricing. The commitment is that the price of reaching your supporters doesn't punish you for growing. Access is free during the beta.
• Consent-first by default. Contact records are consent-aware, and suppression handling is built in — the compliance bookkeeping happens automatically, not in a spreadsheet.
• The essentials, done simply. A step-by-step campaign builder, reusable templates, lists and tags for segmentation, and analytics that track sends, opens, and clicks over time. Designed for program coordinators, not engineers.
• Painless migration. CSV import with deduplication and consent status, so an audience exported from Mailchimp comes over cleanly — unsubscribes included.
• Aligned incentives. Your subscription doesn't fund a publicly traded company; it supports a nonprofit building tools for other nonprofits.

How to decide

Stay on Mailchimp if you rely on its integrations, need advanced automation right now, or can't tolerate the small waits of a wave-based beta. Join the CTG Mail waitlist if your bill has outgrown your usage, you want consent handling built in rather than bolted on, and you'd rather grow with a tool built by people who run a nonprofit themselves. Applying is free, and you can keep your current tool running until you're onboarded.

Mailchimp is a trademark of Intuit Inc. CTG Mail is a product of Close The Gap Foundation and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Intuit Inc. or Mailchimp. Comparisons reflect publicly available information and commonly reported nonprofit experience as of July 2026; check current Mailchimp plans and pricing before making a decision.