It’s definitely much more manageable for a business, but as one person running a small hobby project, paying hundreds per month is nowhere near worth it. Mailchimp is probably (understandably) focusing on enterprise customers that can pay much more and for whom convenience is a bigger plus.
If your list is large enough to cost hundreds per month, is it still a hobby project? Shouldn't you be able to recoup the hosting cost with all those subscribers?
This is the real issue. If you have 10k email newsletter subscribers and are completely unable to monetize them such that they pay for your email sending, that's the real problem. What's the point of having the list at this point?
Sure non-profits can probably put hundreds of dollars a month towards mailchimp. But don't you think that some non-profits would rather put that money towards whatever their non-profit is about? I don't get what's so hard to believe about that.
