Klaviyo Pricing in 2026: What Active-Profile Billing Actually Costs
Klaviyo’s paid Email plan starts at about $20/month for up to 500 active profiles and scales with your contact count: roughly $60/month at 2,500 profiles, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, and $720 at 50,000. There’s a free plan for up to 250 profiles. The catch is the meter itself: since February 2025 Klaviyo bills on active profiles — every contact who could be emailed, whether you email them or not. Prices change, so confirm the current numbers on Klaviyo’s pricing page before you commit, but the structure below is what stores are actually paying in 2026.
Klaviyo plans at a glance
All self-serve plans are billed monthly — Klaviyo does not offer an annual-prepay discount on these tiers. Included email sends run roughly 10x your profile limit (so the 500-profile tier includes about 5,000 sends/month).
| Active profiles | Email plan (monthly) | Email + SMS (monthly) |
|---|---|---|
| 250 (Free) | $0 | $0 |
| 500 | ~$20 | ~$35 |
| 1,000 | ~$30 | ~$45 |
| 2,500 | ~$60 | ~$75 |
| 5,000 | ~$100 | ~$115 |
| 10,000 | ~$150 | ~$165 |
| 25,000 | ~$400 | ~$415 |
| 50,000 | ~$720 | ~$735 |
The Email + SMS column assumes the minimum $15/month SMS add-on (about 1,250 message credits) layered on top of the Email tier. SMS scales separately — more on that below.
How active-profile billing works
This is the part that surprises people. An active profile is any contact in your account who can receive marketing — anyone who hasn’t unsubscribed, been suppressed, or been deleted, per Klaviyo’s own help docs. That means you pay for:
- Checkout contacts who never opted into marketing
- Lapsed customers who haven’t opened an email in a year
- Historical contacts you imported from a list
If they’re in your account and not suppressed, they’re billable. A store with 3,000 usable subscribers but 8,000 total profiles pays for the 8,000.
Two mechanics make this bite:
- Auto-upgrade. When your active-profile count crosses a tier threshold, Klaviyo automatically moves you to the next plan on your following billing cycle. Run a popup that pulls in 600 new emails and you can jump a band without touching a setting. This is why stores reported bills leaping from $39 to $200, and in one widely shared case from $625 to $2,765, in a single cycle after the 2025 change with no new subscribers.
- Suppression, with a lock. Suppressed, unsubscribed, and deleted profiles do not count toward your total, so cleaning your list genuinely lowers the bill. But Klaviyo applies a roughly 90-day suppression window, so you can’t churn profiles in and out of billability month to month to game the tiers.
The practical takeaway: your Klaviyo bill tracks total list size, not send volume or revenue. Prune aggressively before each cycle.
The tiers and SKUs
Email plan. The core product: flows, campaigns, segmentation, Shopify/BigCommerce sync, revenue attribution. This is what most stores mean by “Klaviyo.”
Email + SMS. SMS is credit-metered, not flat. The $15/month entry buys ~1,250 credits (about 1.2 cents each); a $135/month tier gives 15,000 credits at ~0.9 cents; the largest published tier runs $3,825/month for 450,000 credits. A US text over 160 characters costs 2 credits, and adding an emoji drops the single-credit ceiling to 70 characters — so message length quietly changes your cost per send.
The B2C CRM suite. Klaviyo now markets itself as the B2C CRM rather than an email tool, and several capabilities are now separate paid SKUs on top of your Email plan:
- Marketing Analytics — roughly $100/month (at ~13,500 profiles) for advanced reporting and attribution.
- Reviews — around $25/month for ~250 orders.
- Customer Data Platform (Advanced KDP) — from $500/month for up to 100,000 profiles, adding real-time segmentation, data-warehouse sync, and no-code transformations.
- Customer Agent (AI service) — a hybrid model: a $140/month introductory base (regular $200) plus $0.70 per conversation beyond the first 50 each month.
Klaviyo is running a 30% introductory discount on the newer service SKUs, so those numbers will rise as the promo periods end. The point for budgeting: the sticker price you see is the marketing email base, and the CRM story is designed to add line items over time.
Hidden costs to budget for
- Auto-upgrades you didn’t approve. The biggest one. A successful lead-gen month can bump your tier automatically next cycle.
- Dead weight in your profile count. Unengaged and never-opted-in contacts cost the same as buyers. If you never clean your list, you pay a tax on it forever.
- SMS credit variability. Emojis, images (MMS), long messages, and international sends all consume more credits than a plain US text, so a “1,250-credit” plan may cover far fewer than 1,250 sends.
- Add-on creep. Analytics, Reviews, KDP, and Customer Agent are each priced on their own, so a “full” Klaviyo stack can be several multiples of your email line.
Is Klaviyo free?
Yes, indefinitely — with hard caps. The free plan covers up to 250 active profiles, 500 email sends per month, and a small monthly SMS/MMS credit, and email support only for your first 60 days. You stay free as long as you’re at or below both the 250-profile and 500-send limits. Cross either and you’re moved to paid. For a brand-new store validating flows it’s genuinely usable; for anything with real list growth, the 250-profile ceiling arrives fast.
When Klaviyo isn’t worth it
Klaviyo is still one of the strongest ecommerce platforms — the Shopify data model and flow builder are hard to beat. But the active-profile meter punishes exactly the stores that grow fastest, and if you’re not using the deep revenue attribution or the new CRM stack, you’re paying enterprise pricing for a send button.
Reconsider if your list is full of unengaged or non-buying contacts, if SMS credit math is eating your margin, or if a simpler tool covers your flows for a fraction of the cost. We break down cheaper picks in our Klaviyo alternatives guide, and if you’re weighing the two biggest names head-to-head, see Mailchimp vs Klaviyo — Mailchimp bills on contacts too, so also check Mailchimp alternatives before assuming it’s cheaper.
FAQ
How much does Klaviyo cost per month? The Email plan is about $20/month at 500 active profiles and scales up — roughly $60 at 2,500, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, and $720 at 50,000 profiles, billed monthly.
Does Klaviyo count unsubscribed contacts? No. Suppressed, unsubscribed, and deleted profiles don’t count toward billing. But any contact who can be emailed — including checkout-only and imported contacts — does, even if you never message them.
Does Klaviyo offer an annual discount? Not on its self-serve plans as of 2026. Those are billed monthly with no annual-prepay discount. Custom enterprise contracts are negotiated separately.
Will Klaviyo automatically raise my price? Yes. When your active-profile count crosses a tier threshold, Klaviyo auto-upgrades you to the next plan on your following billing cycle, so a spike in signups can raise your bill without any action on your part.
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