It’s a dangerous oversimplification designed to protect SaaS margins, not yours.
If you’ve just crossed the 100,000-contact threshold and your Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or HubSpot invoice has multiplied without your email revenue keeping pace, you don’t have a marketing problem. You have a financial diagnostic problem. You’re paying a comfort premium that, at a certain scale, becomes hard to justify in any board meeting.
Let me be clear: if you’re paying more than $12,000 a year simply to host a mailing list, it’s worth questioning whether that spend is working hard enough for you.
The “Infrastructure Rental” Fallacy
The comfortable assumption is that you’re paying for the quality of the tool. The reality is that the pricing models of major ESPs have a built-in scaling trap: they charge you for potential (storage), not for value (sending).
A contact sitting in your database costs the provider virtually nothing if you never email them. It’s a row in a SQL table. The marginal cost is near zero. Yet Mailchimp charges you the same for that dormant contact as for your highest-value customer. It’s a bit like the electric company billing you for every appliance in your home — even the ones that are unplugged.
At Data Innovation, after managing over a billion emails per month and auditing hundreds of accounts, the pattern is consistent: mid-market companies tend to overpay by 60% to 80%, largely because managing your own infrastructure feels daunting.
The Alternative: Stop Renting, Start Building
The fix isn’t negotiating a 10% discount with your account manager. It’s an architectural shift.
The real alternative is decoupling the intelligence (your software and automation) from the delivery (the sending pipe). Larger players don’t rely solely on all-in-one platforms sold to the mass market. They use robust engines connected to pure-play delivery services (SMTP relays).
For a company in the $2M to $10M range, this often means migrating to environments like Mautic or lean solutions connected to KumoMTA, qMail, SparkPost, or Amazon SES.
Real-World Impact
We recently migrated an e-commerce brand with 140,000 contacts. Their annual sending costs dropped by around 40%. That freed up budget they redirected into better tooling and more content. After factoring everything in, they saved roughly 30% — money that went straight to their bottom line.
And perhaps more importantly, they regained sovereignty over their data. No more “data retention policies” blocking better segmentation, and no speed limits when they wanted to connect their BI tools.
The Uncomfortable Moment
Here’s where I need to temper your enthusiasm. If I told you this was easy, I’d be doing exactly what the rest of the industry does — oversimplifying.
Owned infrastructure requires operational maturity. It is not plug-and-play. We once attempted a rushed migration for a fashion retailer right before Black Friday. We configured the servers and launched. The result: Gmail blocked our sends. We lost 40% visibility during the most critical sales week of the year.
Why? Because we underestimated IP warming. When you leave the umbrella of a shared-IP provider like Mailchimp, you leave behind a collective reputation. When you step out with your own dedicated IP, you’re a stranger. If you start broadcasting at full volume without introducing yourself first, ISPs will shut the door.
The economic savings come at the cost of operational discipline. If you’re not ready to monitor your sending reputation closely, staying with Mailchimp is a perfectly valid choice. That premium is the price of peace of mind.
Your New Diagnostic
Stop viewing your ESP invoice as an inevitable fixed cost. It’s a variable you can manage.
1. Calculate your ratio: If your ESP costs more than 20-30% of the revenue your email channel generates, the split is worth examining.
2. Volume check: If you have over 75,000 contacts and send frequently, owned infrastructure typically pays for itself in less than a quarter.
3. Capacity check: If you have access to a technical profile (internal or external partner), continuing to pay premium SaaS prices for basic storage deserves a second look.
The all-in-one model is excellent for getting started. But it can become inefficient at scale. You have the data points and you have the alternative. Continuing to pay significantly more is now a choice, not a necessity.
If your numbers look like what we’ve described above and you’re ready for the operational responsibility that comes with the savings, at Data Innovation we know how to make this transition without the scars. → datainnovation.io/contact