Klaviyo offers three pricing tiers: Free, Email, and Email + SMS. With the Free plan, Klaviyo caps your total contact/subscriber list at 250 and your email send limit at 500. This tier also features Klaviyo’s branding on all emails and newsletters you send; you can remove it by upgrading to a paid plan. The Free plan offers email support for the first 60 days of service, but no live chat.
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Paid subscription plans are priced based on the size of your active profile list, and they increase your monthly emails to 10x your total contacts. In other words, if you have 1,000 contacts, you can send 10,000 emails per month, which includes automated emails and newsletters. The basic Email tier starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts and includes live chat and email support. From there, pricing scales depending on your contacts. For example, 50,000 contacts bumps the Email tier subscription to $720 per month.
In addition to email, many businesses also want to reach people via SMS. Klaviyo’s Free and Email plans each include 150 free SMS credits per month, which are renewed at the start of each billing cycle. However, that low number is suitable only for highly targeted marketing. If you need more credits, you must purchase more as a separate add-on.
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Klaviyo’s SMS pricing differs from its email pricing because it runs entirely on an independent credit system. Klaviyo’s pricing page can muddy the waters by listing SMS, MMS, RCS, and WhatsApp credits separately. The message calculator is misleading, too: purchased credits are shared between all mobile communications. For example, 1,200 SMS credits cost $15 (equivalent to 400 MMS or 10 WhatsApp marketing credits). The number of credits consumed per message depends on the message type (SMS or MMS) and the destination phone number. A standard domestic SMS to a US number costs one credit, while an image-heavy MMS costs three credits. International messages are more expensive, costing anywhere from 3 to 12 credits per text, depending on the country.
The service also has numerous add-ons and upgrades, making subscribing considerably more confusing than it was when I last reviewed it. Features such as product reviews, advanced data handling, predictive analytics, and premium strategy support packages are paid add-ons not included in standard packages. What’s more, Klaviyo transitioned to a strict, “active profile” billing model. This means you are automatically pushed into a higher, more expensive pricing tier for every single contact in your database that hasn’t actively unsubscribed, even if you never send them a single email. Because this is automatic, maintaining list hygiene is of the utmost importance once your list exceeds a tier limit. Unengaged contact suppression is mandatory to keep your bill from spiking.
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Klaviyo charges a premium for its deep data architecture, so its scaling costs are higher than traditional newsletter platforms like Mailchimp. However, Klaviyo’s active-profile model can potentially deliver a better ROI for e-commerce brands reliant on automated workflows due to a key billing difference. While Mailchimp charges you a monthly fee to store dead weight (like people who have officially unsubscribed), Klaviyo drops those accounts from your bill. The catch is that Klaviyo still charges you for ghost contacts who ignore your emails without unsubscribing.
Klaviyo lacks annual discounts, so you don’t save money over the long haul. That said, Brevo’s rates, which are based on monthly email sends rather than contact count alone, remain a cheaper alternative for high-volume, low-segmentation senders.
