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Probably worth relinking their excellent blog post "Going Freemium: One Year Later" http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

Their 'reverse freemium' approach is really interesting -- rather than de-emphasising the free and focusing on the [pre]mium side of their biz, they've been slowly expanding their free options and growing rapidly -- in terms of profit -- because of it.

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I think the major difference here is that it's easy to have to migrate from free to paid. If your site/newsletter starts doing well, you hit a point where you HAVE to start paying them.

Yeah, and you're usually glad to as well :-) I have 8500 subscribers on my account so far and it's $75/mo well spent.

(But boy, do they ratchet the tiers up fast. Once I tip over 10k subscribers, it leaps up to $150/mo! A few more intermediate tiers please, MailChimp.. otherwise my 10,000th subscriber will cost me $75/mo alone ;-))

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