If you, like myself, develop a lot of your key domain names you most probably use aweber.com, getresponse.com or some other list manager to manage your email lists / newsletter subscribers and send out mail campaigns.

Both aweber and getresponse (and many others) cost money per month – affordable, but adds to the overhead of maintaining the site before it turns profitable. Self hosted list managers on the other hand are not as reliable because your own servers can never compare to a large company’s servers in terms of reliability and performance. There is also the CANSPAM issue.

I always thought there was room there for another candidate, someone that could provide the startups with an affordable or free option while they are in their infancy while still catering for the big guns via a different-leveled price structure.

Introducing: MailChimp.com

I actually clicked an ad for this on a page and I can’t for the world of me remember where I saw the ad.

First impression – I loved the design.

I followed through and read what they offer and I have to honestly say that I am impressed.

They offer two plans – the free lifetime plan AND the opportunity to upgrade to a paid plan if you outgrow the free plan.

The free lifetime plan lets you store up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 times a month which is pretty damn good to start off with.

As you progress and get more subscribers you can easily move onto the bigger plans.

Another cool feature that they offer is the ability to pay as you go ie. pay only for the mails you send.

In addition, all the plans (including the free one) allow you to send html mails, track actions including opens and clicks, get various stats and reports, import existing lists from excel and other resources, and a heck of a lot more.

All in all, I have signed up and I am more than impressed. I recommend you try it.