Automations and customer journeys
Mailchimp retired Classic Automations and pushed everyone onto a Customer Journey Builder that's gated, partially API-covered, and gone from the free tier.
What people actually say
✕Classic Automations were retired on June 1, 2025 — existing flows were archived, no new contacts could enter, and active queues stopped completing.
Source: Chimp Essentials, Classic Automation retirement ↗✕Automated emails now require a paid marketing plan running Customer Journey Builder — free-tier users lost automation entirely except a single welcome email.
Source: Chimp Essentials, Classic Automation retirement ↗✕Customer Journeys are only partially exposed in the Marketing API and live entirely separately from Classic Automations, so existing integrations don't carry over cleanly.
Source: Mailchimp developer, Customer Journeys API ↗
Automations run on Inngest, BullMQ or Vercel Workflows where each step is a typed function with retries, backoff and no per-month action meter. Triggers are real database events — a row insert, a Stripe webhook, a tag change — and a dry-run replays last month's contacts against the new flow before you ship it. No forced sunset of your old logic, no UI rewrite forcing a migration weekend.