Hrm. This is an ad, but is nonetheless news to me. I do have over 500 Mailchimp contacts for my community theater.

I haven't seen that email from Mailchimp, but it might have escaped my attention. I'll have to go looking for it. They certainly didn't call my attention to it when I visited the site a few days ago.

My case is kind of on the bubble. I know that with ~800 users and sending ~1 email/month, I'm using actual resources... but also that I'm not costing very much. Any paid price tier is almost certainly aimed at people using much more resources than me, and is priced accordingly.

I don't mind paying for services that I use, but in a case like mine the overhead of paying is going to be more than the actual service cost.

I think the basic tier at about $10/month is probably worth it. But I will look into switching to somebody willing to be more generous.