Somebody has told you to use Mailchimp. Before you pay for anything, here is the short answer for a Singapore business of three to thirty staff. You are not buying a sending tool because your mailbox will stop you. A paid Google Workspace account can put a message in front of 2,000 recipients a day, and a list of a few hundred people sits well inside that. You are buying one because a marketing list has to live somewhere other than a spreadsheet, because unsubscribes have to be handled properly and on a deadline, and because mail sent from a domain that is not set up to prove it is yours tends to land in spam. So judge the tools on five things, in this order: how the bill moves as the list grows, how deep the automation goes, whether you can cut the list by what people actually did, whether the mail arrives, and whether it sends as your own domain. The last one is where first campaigns fail, and it is the one a feature chart cannot settle for you.
One thing to declare, because it shapes what this page does and does not do. We do not run email campaigns and we do not resell any of the platforms named below. We set up the domain, the DNS records and the mailboxes these tools send through, and we build the website that holds the signup form. So we have no side to sell you on the platform choice, and we are not going to hand you a ranked list with a winner on it.
We checked both vendor pricing pages on 22 September 2026. Google’s sending limits are the ones on its admin help page on 5 September 2026. The Spam Control Act wording below is the version Singapore Statutes Online showed as current on 22 September 2026.
Do you need an email marketing tool at all?
Probably not for the volume, and probably yes for the list. Two different questions get confused here. One is whether your mailbox can physically send the volume. The other is whether you should be running a marketing list out of a mailbox at all.
Take the volume first. It is not the wall people assume, at least not at the size you are at. Google’s admin help page sets a paid Google Workspace account’s daily sending limit at 2,000 messages, with a separate cap of 3,000 external recipients a day, and a ceiling of 2,000 addresses across the To, Cc and Bcc fields of any one message, of which at most 500 may be outside your own domain. If you use Gmail’s mail merge feature the daily limit drops to 1,500 recipients. Google also says plainly that these limits “can change without notice” and that they run over a rolling 24 hour period rather than resetting at midnight. A list of four hundred customers fits inside every one of those numbers.
The honest reasons to buy a tool are these three, and they all arrive at once with your first real campaign.
The list has to be a list, not a spreadsheet. Somebody has to add the people who sign up on your website, remove the ones who bounce, and make sure a person who unsubscribed in March is not in the file you paste in come June. A mailbox will not do any of that for you, and the moment two people in the office keep their own copy of the file, the mistake is already made.
Unsubscribes come with a clock attached. Singapore’s Spam Control Act 2007 gives a sender ten business days from an unsubscribe request, and “business day” in the Act means any day that is not a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday. Handling that by hand, across a list and a shared mailbox, is how a business ends up emailing somebody who asked it twice to stop. The full set of rules is further down this page.
Bulk mail is judged differently from ordinary mail. Once a sender is pushing real volume at Gmail, Google asks it for things it does not ask of an ordinary office. We set those requirements out, in Google’s own wording, along with the daily message count at which they begin, in our guide to what to do when your business email lands in spam. A sending tool is built around them. Your mailbox is not.
If none of those three is true yet, you do not have an email marketing problem. You have a mailbox, and our page on email hosting in Singapore is the more useful read.
The five things worth judging a tool on
You can lose a week reading product pages and still not have a decision, because each one hands you a different set of criteria to judge it by. Fix your own first, in this order, and the shortlist writes itself.
1. How the bill moves as the list grows. This is first because it is the only one that gets worse over time without you doing anything. Two tools that cost the same today can cost double each other in two years, purely because of how they count. The next section takes this apart.
2. How deep the automation goes. There is a large gap between a single welcome email that fires when somebody signs up and a real sequence that waits, checks whether the person opened the last one, and sends something different depending on the answer. Decide which of the two you are actually going to build, then check whether the tier in front of you includes it. Paying for the second and building the first is the most common way to overspend here.
3. Whether you can cut the list by what people did. Segmentation is the plain word for splitting a list into groups so that different people get different emails. The useful test is whether it can split by behaviour: who bought in the last ninety days, who opened the last three campaigns, who clicked but did not buy. Splitting by name or by city will not tell you much. A list of four hundred that you can cut three ways is worth more than a list of four thousand you can only mail as one block.
4. Whether the mail arrives. Deliverability is the industry’s word for the share of your mail that reaches an inbox rather than a spam folder or nothing at all. It is the hardest of the five to judge from a product page, because the checks that decide it run against your own domain’s authentication records and against the complaint rate your sending earns. What you can check is what the tool gives you to work with: whether it reports bounces and complaints back to you in a form you can act on, and whether it forces you to authenticate your domain before it will send.
5. Whether it sends as your own domain. The mail should arrive from your own business address, and the receiving mail server should be able to prove that you authorised it. Those are three records in your DNS, which is the setting file that tells the internet where your domain’s mail and website live. This is the criterion we actually work on, and it gets its own section below.
The bill counts your list, or it counts your sending
There are two ways to count what you owe, and they behave in opposite directions. Work out which way round your own business is before you compare a single price, because the cheaper tool at four hundred contacts can be the dearer one at four thousand.
Counting the list is the common model. You pay for the contacts you hold, in bands, and sending more often costs nothing extra. Mailchimp’s pricing page works this way: before it will show you a figure it makes you pick a band, starting at 0 to 500 contacts, then 501 to 1,500, then 1,501 to 2,500, and upward from there. Its own discount is counted in contacts too, rather than in emails: 15 per cent off for businesses holding 10,000 or more of them. Moosend’s subscription plans ask the same question, and its pricing page adds a detail worth knowing if you keep several lists: “Moosend counts unique email addresses. If the same subscriber appears in multiple lists or segments, you’re only billed once.”
Counting the sending is the other model. You buy a quantity of emails and the size of the list is not the question. Moosend’s page sells this alongside its subscriptions, in blocks of email credits that start at 350,000 and run to a million, under a heading that reads “Unlimited Subscribers” and names seasonal senders as the people it suits.
| Billed on the list you hold | Billed on the emails you send | |
|---|---|---|
| What it counts | Contacts stored, in bands | Emails sent, bought in blocks |
| Sending more often | Costs nothing extra | Costs more, in direct proportion |
| Sending twice a year | You pay all year for a list you barely mail | You pay for what you used, and the rest keeps |
| The list grows past a band | The bill steps up whether or not you send more | Nothing happens until you mail them |
| Dead weight on the list | Costs you money every month it stays | Costs you money only when you mail it |
| It suits a business that | Mails a modest list often: a monthly newsletter, a weekly offer | Mails a large list rarely: a seasonal sale, an annual notice |
Two practical things follow. First, the money question to answer before you shop is not “what does it cost” but “how many people will be on this list in two years, and how often will I mail them”. Second, on the list model, cleaning out addresses that have never once opened anything cuts the monthly bill directly.
Free plans sit on top of both models. Two things to set before you read a figure on either page. Mailchimp makes you pick a contact band before it will show you a price at all, and Moosend asks for your list size the same way, so work out the band you will be in first. Then check the currency: Mailchimp’s page carries a selector listing sixteen currencies, SGD among them, so the figure you are looking at is whichever one that selector is set to. We will not print a figure here that we cannot attach a currency to, and we will not print a free tier’s limits either, because the one that binds you is the one on the vendor’s page on the day you sign up. What we can tell you is what each page offered on 22 September 2026 as the way in: Mailchimp was advertising a 14 day free trial of its Standard plan, and Moosend a 30 day trial with unlimited sends for up to 1,000 contacts and no credit card required to start it.
How much automation and segmentation do you actually need?
Less automation than the feature chart will sell you, and more segmentation than you have set up. Start on the plan that covers a welcome email and a broadcast. This is the easiest place on the list to overbuy, and the pattern is familiar. The middle tier gets bought for the automation list on the feature chart, and eighteen months later the account is still sending one newsletter a month to one undivided list.
Our advice to our own clients on this is deliberately unexciting. On that entry plan, write down the one automation you are convinced you need and then leave it alone for a while. If it is still unbuilt after two months, you did not need the tier. If you build it and it works, the upgrade is an easy decision to make with evidence in hand.
Segmentation deserves the opposite advice, because it is cheap to start and it compounds. The tool does not need to be clever. What it needs is for the data to be there at all, which means the signup form on your website should capture the one thing you will later want to split on. For a clinic that is the service they came for. For a shop it is what they bought. For a studio like ours it is what the enquiry was about. Nobody can retrofit that field onto four hundred people who signed up without it, and this is the single decision on this page that costs nothing today and is expensive to fix later.
Will it send from your own domain?
Only if you add the tool to three records in your own DNS first. This is the criterion we work on, so read the next two paragraphs before you blame a platform for where your campaign ended up.
When a tool sends on your behalf, the message says it is from you, but it leaves from the tool’s servers rather than yours. The receiving mail server has to decide whether to believe that. It decides using three records that live in your domain’s DNS. SPF lists who is allowed to send as your domain. DKIM signs each message so it cannot be quietly altered in transit. DMARC tells the receiving server what to do when the first two do not line up, and asks it to report back to you.
Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency describes DMARC as a protocol that “builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols” and gives a domain’s legitimate owner “a way to request that illegitimate messages such as spam, spoofing or phishing to be put directly in the spam folder or rejected outright”. Its own page sets out the three answers a DMARC policy can give a receiving server: none, quarantine, or reject. Quarantine means the junk folder. Reject means the message is blocked outright.
Here is the one that catches people out, and the records are usually already in place. It is a business that already has SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up correctly for its Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, signs up for a sending tool, does not add the tool to those records, and then sends its first campaign. Mail from staff keeps arriving. The campaign does not. From the inside it looks like the platform is broken.
So the question to put to a tool before you pay is a specific one: does it require you to authenticate your own domain before it will send, and does it give you the exact records to add? A tool that lets you send from its own shared domain by default gets you out of the door faster, and it means the mail is not proving it came from you. Our guide to business email landing in spam covers the three records and how to read a bounce message that names the one you are missing. If your domain does not yet send properly at all, start one step earlier with setting up Gmail for a business with its own domain.
What Singapore law puts inside a marketing email
This layer is specific to Singapore, and it is the one most likely to catch a business out. Two separate sets of rules apply, they are enforced by two different agencies, and they cover two different things. What follows is what the published law and the regulator’s own pages say. It is not legal advice, and a business with any doubt about its own list should take proper advice on it.
The Personal Data Protection Act, the PDPA, governs how you got the address. The Personal Data Protection Commission puts it plainly on its own guidance for organisations: “The PDPA governs how organisations collect, use, and disclose personal data.” An email address attached to a person is personal data, so the consent behind your list sits here.
The Spam Control Act 2007 governs what the email itself must contain. It is a separate statute, and the authority named in it is the Info-communications Media Development Authority rather than the PDPC.
Before either bites, clear up one that comes up often. The Do Not Call Registry is not about email. The PDPC’s own page for organisations says the register lets individuals opt out of unwanted messages “sent to their Singapore telephone number”, and lists exactly three kinds: voice calls, text messages and fax messages. The same page repeats it: “This applies to voice calls, text messages, and faxes sent to Singapore telephone numbers.” Checking a number against the registry, which organisations must do in the 21 days before they send a marketing call or text, does nothing at all for an email campaign. If somebody has told you your email list needs a DNC check, they have the wrong statute.
When the Spam Control Act applies to your campaign
Two conditions have to be met together. The message has to be unsolicited, and it has to be sent in bulk.
“In bulk” is a smaller number than people expect. The Act treats messages as sent in bulk when a sender sends “more than 100 electronic messages containing the same or similar subject matter during a 24-hour period”, or more than 1,000 in 30 days, or more than 10,000 in a year. A campaign to four hundred customers clears the first of those on the day it goes out. Whatever else is true, your business is not too small for this Act.
“Unsolicited” is where most legitimate lists get out. A message is unsolicited when the recipient neither requested it nor consented to it. If the people on your list ticked a box on your website to hear from you, the campaign is not unsolicited, and the requirements in the next section do not apply to it. The Act closes one obvious loophole though: a recipient is not treated as having consented “merely because the electronic address of the recipient was given or published by or on behalf of the recipient”. Somebody handing you a business card is not consent. Neither is an address printed on a company’s contact page.
And consent expires when somebody withdraws it. The Act says that once a recipient submits an unsubscribe request, they are not to be treated as having consented to any message sent after ten business days from the day the request went in. So a clean, consented list becomes an unsolicited one the moment you keep mailing a person who asked you to stop. “Business day” in the Act means any day that is not a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday.
What the Act then requires in the message
Where both conditions are met, the sender has to comply with the Act’s Second Schedule. For an email, that means four things.
- An email address the recipient can use to unsubscribe, and a statement telling them they can use it. The statement has to be presented “in a clear and conspicuous manner” and in English, and where it appears in two or more languages, English must be one of them.
- That unsubscribe address has to stay valid and able to receive requests, from that recipient and from a reasonable number of others, for at least 30 days after the message was sent.
- The subject line has to carry the letters “<ADV>” with a space before the title, and the title itself must not be false or misleading about what is in the message. The header information, meaning the routing and sender details behind the message, must not be false or misleading either.
- An accurate and working email address or telephone number by which the sender can be readily contacted.
Now read that list against a sending tool. Numbers 1, 2 and 4 are the parts you are paying a tool to handle: the working unsubscribe link in the footer, the record of who has already opted out, and your sender details. Number 3 is yours. The tool will not judge whether your list consented, and it will not write your subject line for you. That is the split worth remembering when a platform’s page tells you it is compliant.
So which kind of tool fits you?
The one whose billing model matches how often you send. Here is our own answer, and it will not sell anybody a subscription.
If you mail a list of a few hundred once or twice a month, you want the model that bills on the list, on the smallest band that holds your contacts, and you want to stay on it until the list itself outgrows the band. If you mail a big list twice a year, for a sale or a notice, you want the model that bills on sending, because the list-based model charges you for eleven months of storing people you are not talking to. That is the whole of the pricing decision at this size.
On the other three criteria, our honest position is that a tool at this end of the market either clears your bar or it does not, and the bar is low: one welcome email, one useful way to split the list, and a setup step that makes you authenticate your own domain. Check those three on the vendor’s own page in ten minutes each. Ranking the survivors against each other on a feature tick is a way of spending a week on the decision that matters least.
The decision that does matter is the one we started with. A business that gets its domain authentication right and its signup form capturing the one useful field will do well on a tool from this class. A business that gets both wrong will blame the platform, switch, and get the same result. If you have half a day to spend on this, spend it on the domain and the form, not on the shortlist.
Questions we get asked
We were comparing two named platforms. Which one wins?
Neither, and the question is the wrong shape. Which one is cheaper for you depends entirely on the two numbers in the pricing section above: how many contacts you will hold, and how often you will mail them. Work those out first and the comparison answers itself in about ten minutes on each vendor’s own pricing page. A ranking written by somebody who does not know your list size is not telling you much about your business.
We bought a list of Singapore business email addresses. Can we mail it?
A bought list is not a list that consented to hear from you, so a campaign to it is unsolicited under the Spam Control Act, and a campaign to more than 100 addresses in a day is also sent in bulk. Both conditions are met, so the Second Schedule requirements in the section above apply in full, including the “<ADV>” label in the subject line. Separately, the PDPA governs how personal data is collected, used and disclosed, and that applies to how the list was assembled in the first place. This is the situation to take proper advice on rather than to work out from a web page, including ours.
Do we have to put our office address at the bottom of the email?
The Spam Control Act’s Second Schedule does not ask for one. What it asks for is an accurate and working email address or telephone number by which the sender can be readily contacted, plus an email address for unsubscribe requests that stays live for at least 30 days. A postal address is one of the options the Act allows for the unsubscribe facility, but for a message received by email the Act requires an email address for that. If your tool puts a postal address in the footer by default, that is the tool’s own setting rather than something this Act asks of you.
Does a government grant help pay for this?
Not for a sending tool subscription, on the one listing we checked on 22 September 2026. The Productivity Solutions Grant’s digital marketing category is real, and that listing is supported at 50 per cent for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but what it funds is an agency package of three to six months of search and social media work priced between S$7,400 and S$10,800, not a monthly subscription to an email platform. The directory holds many listings and they change, so check the current PSG solutions directory yourself before you assume either way.
Where to start
Pick the billing model that matches your sending habit, take the free trial, and put the first campaign together. Then, before you press send, check that the tool is actually allowed to send as your domain, because that is the step that quietly decides whether any of the rest of it was worth doing.
If you would rather have that checked properly, book a short call with us. We will look at your domain’s SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, tell you what the sending tool needs added to them, and set it up if you want us to. We also build the website and the signup form the list comes from. What we will not do is run your campaigns or pick your platform for a fee, because we do not sell either, and the platform choice is genuinely yours to make with the five criteria above.
Sources
- Spam Control Act 2007, Singapore Statutes Online
- Spam Control Act 2007, Second Schedule: requirements for unsolicited commercial electronic messages
- Personal Data Protection Commission, Organisation’s Guide to Singapore’s Do Not Call Provisions
- Personal Data Protection Commission, Advisory Guidelines on Requiring Consent for Marketing Purposes
- Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, Internet Hygiene Portal: DMARC
- Google Workspace Admin Help, Gmail sending limits
- Mailchimp, marketing pricing
- Moosend, pricing
- GoBusiness, Productivity Solutions Grant solutions directory