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Here’s a confession from behind the scenes at EzyLearn. We’ve been a long-time Mailchimp user, but Intuit (yes the owners of QuickBooks Online) have ramped up the pricing (just like Xero are doing with their monthly subscription costs) and stripped out features.

We’re now seriously considering moving our email marketing over to AWeber and the reason is a frustrating one that a lot of small business owners might recognise:

A big US software company changed the rules, removed a feature we relied on, and broke something we’d spent a long time building.

Let me explain what happened — because there’s a genuine business lesson in it, not just a gripe.

What Email Marketing Is Actually For

First, the why. Email marketing isn’t about spamming people with “buy now” messages. Done properly, it’s about a simple, powerful sequence: you help people get to know you, then like you, then trust you.

That’s the whole game. Someone finds your business, signs up for something useful, and over a series of thoughtful, well-timed emails they come to see you as helpful, credible and worth buying from.

The engine that makes this work at scale is automation — a “string” of emails that goes out automatically in the right order, at the right intervals, triggered by what a subscriber does.

Sign up today,
get a welcome email now,
a helpful tip in three days,
a case study next week,
a gentle offer after that.

Set it up once, and it works for every new subscriber forever. It’s one of the most valuable things a small business can build.

And that’s exactly what got broken.

What Mailchimp Did

Mailchimp retired its Classic Automation Builder on 1 June 2025. If your classic automations were actively running before that date, they stopped!

New contacts no longer entered those workflows, and contacts already in a sequence didn’t complete it. To keep automations running at all, you had to be on a paid plan and rebuild everything from scratch in Mailchimp’s newer “Customer Journeys” system.

If you’d spent hours — days, really — carefully building a long string of automated emails designed to take a subscriber on that know-you, like-you, trust-you journey, you logged in one day to find the thing you’d built no longer worked the way it used to.

That’s not a minor tweak. That’s a core feature you once wanted, set up, and in many cases paid for, being pulled out from under you.

To be fair to Mailchimp, the new Customer Journeys system is more powerful in some ways, with branching logic and more advanced options. But “we’ve replaced the thing you relied on with something different that you now have to rebuild” is cold comfort when you’re the one who has to do the rebuilding — and when the change was made on the company’s timetable, not yours.

Oh, and bye the way, if you really want that feature you’ve been using for years you’ll now have to upgrade to a more expensive monthly plan!

Why It Leaves a Bad Taste

Here’s the deeper point, and it’s one we’ve written about before in the context of Xero’s price rises and the general tech playbook. When you build your business on someone else’s software, you’re at the mercy of their decisions.

A massive US software company can decide, from an office on the other side of the world, to remove a feature you built your marketing around — and there’s nothing you can do about it except comply.

There’s a real irony here too. The entire purpose of email marketing is to build trust with your own customers. So when the platform you use to build that trust breaks your trust in them — by removing features you relied on — it rather undermines the whole exercise.

It’s hard to feel warmly about a tool that just made your working week harder to serve its own roadmap.

That feeling — “I paid for this, I relied on this, and you took it away” — is exactly what sends long-time customers looking at the alternatives.

Enter AWeber

Which brings us to AWeber. It’s one of the oldest and most established email marketing platforms, and it’s built a strong reputation precisely among small businesses that want reliable automation without nasty surprises.

The things drawing us to it are practical.

AWeber includes automation on all its paid tiers rather than gating and reshuffling it.
Its pricing structure is straightforward, with unlimited subscribers on paid plans and no hidden per-contact billing games.

And — a detail that matters enormously when something breaks — AWeber is known for genuine human support, including phone and live chat with real people, whereas Mailchimp has moved much of its support to chatbots and help articles.

For a business whose whole email strategy depends on a long, reliable string of automations, “automation included, priced simply, humans answer the phone” is a compelling pitch.

We’re Not Rushing — And Neither Should You

Now, we’re being honest that we’re still thinking about this, not diving in blindly. Switching email platforms isn’t free of pain: your subscriber list transfers cleanly enough (AWeber offers migration help and CSV import), but email templates and automations generally need rebuilding in the new system.

Mailchimp also still has genuine strengths, particularly the sheer number of apps that integrate with it.

Switching costs are real, and any business should weigh them carefully rather than storming off in frustration.

This is exactly the kind of decision we help our students think through. Choosing, using and getting value from business software — email marketing, accounting, CRM — and understanding the true cost of switching versus staying is a core modern business skill.

It’s the same clear-eyed thinking we teach around choosing between MYOB, Xero and QuickBooks.

The Takeaway

The know-you, like-you, trust-you journey is the heart of good marketing, and automation is how you deliver it at scale. But building that engine on a platform that can change the rules whenever it likes is a genuine risk — as we’ve learned the hard way.

Whether we end up moving to AWeber or staying put, the lesson stands: understand your tools, don’t over-rely on any single vendor’s goodwill, and always know what your alternatives are.

We’ll let you know which way we jump.

Oh, by the way, another interesting thought for you to consider is that you can decide yourself which “subscribers” are no longer worth having in your MailChimp Database.

Use the Mailchimp mobile app to review subscribers regularly and be active in removing those people you’ve already spoken to and don’t think would add value to your business.

Learn how to use Email Marketing in your business with the MailChimp Course

See our MailChimp Automation System in use for our FREE MYOB and Xero Course Samples.

And if you want to learn the marketing thinking behind all of this — building an audience, nurturing it, and turning it into customers — that’s exactly the kind of practical skill we build into our training. Explore our courses at https://bookkeepercourse.com.au

This article is general commentary based on our own experience and publicly reported platform changes. Assess any software against your own needs before switching.

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