Mailchimp is a strong product. And too heavy for your venue.
- Price
- Free up to 10 staff · Pro €19/month · Ultra €39/month (excl. VAT)
- Start
- Every new venue gets 30 days of Ultra, no card
- Contract
- None — cancel any month, no setup fee
- Dimona
- Export to your payroll office (no direct declaration)
- Who it’s for
- Cafés, restaurants, bars, hotels — and any team that works in shifts
First the honest part: Mailchimp is not a bad product. It has been building email marketing for over twenty years, the Customer Journey Builder is one of the best of its kind, the AI tools that draft subject lines actually work, and there are more than 300 integrations available. For an online shop with 50,000 contacts and a three-person marketing team, Mailchimp is probably a good fit. The product depth is there.
But Mailchimp is built for bigger than a brasserie or a cocktail bar. The price is per contact, and unsubscribed plus inactive guests count toward that number. Your old reservation list from three years ago inflates the bill without you sending it a single email. In January 2026 the free plan was cut to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. In April 2026 a price increase of 11 to 13 percent lands on top.
What Mailchimp actually costs for one monthly newsletter
Say you have 8,000 guests in your reservation list built over three years. Maybe 2,500 are active. Mailchimp charges for all 8,000. Essentials starts around €11.25 per month for 500 contacts and climbs as your list grows. Standard from €17.30, Premium from €302.80. On top sit onboarding sessions and phone support only on Premium. For one newsletter a month you are paying for an AI stack and an automation suite you never touch.
At SuperHoreca the newsletter sits inside the product. Free up to 10 staff, €19 per month for Pro with unlimited staff, €39 per month for Ultra with multi-venue. You get one branded sending address per venue, double opt-in through the reservation flow or a public widget, and hard bounces are auto-suppressed. No separate newsletter invoice, no bill that grows with your inactive contacts.
What SuperHoreca deliberately leaves out
No Customer Journey Builder with multi-step automation. No AI drafting subject lines. No predictive segmentation. No A/B or multivariate tests. No landing page builder. No drag-and-drop email editor — a rich text editor with your own logo. For a marketer rolling out three campaigns a week, those are real gaps.
What you do get: your guest list comes from your reservations, not from a separate list you maintain on the side. You send from your own mail address (cafecopain@mail.supershift.work for instance). The lack of native POS or reservation hooks into Mailchimp means revenue attribution only works after custom development. At SuperHoreca guest, reservation and newsletter sit in the same tool.
What it looks like
Pricing comparison, no asterisks
Pricing pulled straight from their public pricing page (verified May 2026).
| What you get | Mailchimp | SuperHoreca |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | €11.25/moEssentials from ~€11.25 per month, Standard from ~€17.30, Premium from ~€302.80. Per-contact pricing, with unsubscribed and inactive contacts counted in. | €0 (up to 10 staff) · Pro €19/mo · Ultra €39/mo |
| Free tier | Free plan still exists, but was cut to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month in January 2026. | |
| Setup fee | None | None |
| Contract | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Demo required for pricing | ||
| Built for hospitality | ||
| Requires proprietary WiFi hardware | ||
| Double opt-in by default | ||
| Branded from-address per venue | Custom sending domain works, but SPF/DKIM setup is on you. No per-venue branded address out of the box. | |
| List segmentation | ||
| Bounce handling | ||
| Scheduled sends | ||
| Auto-suppress on hard bounce |
Questions we get a lot
Can I move my Mailchimp list into SuperHoreca?
You export your active subscribers from Mailchimp as CSV and import them into SuperHoreca. Mind Belgian GDPR rules: contacts who never went through double opt-in, re-ask permission. Keep Mailchimp open for a month as reference, then cancel. The inactive contacts you leave behind — they were costing you anyway.
How does the April 2026 price increase work?
Mailchimp announced an 11 to 13 percent increase on all paid plans starting April 2026. Existing annual customers see it at the next renewal. Monthly plans adjust immediately. The free plan was already narrowed in January 2026 to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month.
Does SuperHoreca have segmentation and automation?
No. One list per venue, manual sends. No behavioural segmentation, no automatic welcome series, no birthday trigger. Deliberately simple for venues that send one newsletter a month. If you want predictive segmentation or multi-step journeys, Mailchimp is genuinely stronger there.
No demo, no annual contract, no invoice that grows with your inactive contacts. Make a SuperHoreca account, switch on the newsletter from your dashboard, import your active guests and send your first edition this month. If you do need Mailchimp depth afterwards, you will know.
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