Klaviyo Pricing 2026: Klaviyo Cost by Active Profile Tier, SMS Pricing and Free Plan Limits

How does Klaviyo billing work?

Klaviyo prices on one number: how many active profiles sit in your account. You pick an email plan sized for that count, and the monthly price follows. Your send allowance is derived from the same number at roughly ten times the profile tier, so a plan sized for 10,000 profiles includes in the region of 100,000 emails a month. Features do not change as you climb the ladder. Segmentation, flows, predictive analytics and the integration library are the same on the $20 plan and the $720 plan. You are paying for volume, not capability.

That is the whole model, and it is also where the surprises live. Two rules turn a published price into a different invoice, and both are documented by Klaviyo rather than inferred from complaints.

What counts as an active profile in Klaviyo?

This is the definition worth reading twice, because it is the billing unit. Klaviyo help documentation states that any profile, regardless of consent status, that can be emailed through Klaviyo is considered an active profile. Consent status does not matter. Whether you have ever emailed the person does not matter. If the record holds a valid email address and is not suppressed or deleted, you are paying to store it.

In a real ecommerce account that includes every guest checkout, every imported spreadsheet, every abandoned signup and every record pushed in by an integration. Stores are routinely surprised to find that a third or more of their billable profiles are people who never opted into anything and will never receive a campaign.

The exception is the useful one. Suppressed and unsubscribed profiles are not included in your billable count. Klaviyo documentation is explicit that profiles you have marked as no longer marketable do not count, though the change takes up to 72 hours to show. Suppressing is therefore the lever, not deleting, because suppressing keeps the historical data while removing the record from the bill.

The upgrade is automatic and the downgrade is not

When your active profile count passes your plan limit, Klaviyo moves you up. Its billing documentation says you will be automatically upgraded to a profile-compliant plan at the end of the billing cycle if you exceed your level of profile usage. Nothing needs to be approved.

Coming back down is a different story. Since the February 2025 billing changes, auto-downgrade exists as a billing preference under Settings, Billing, Preferences, and Klaviyo states plainly that customers need to proactively select the new billing preferences. It is off unless you turn it on. So an account that spikes to 11,000 profiles for a Black Friday import, then cleans back to 8,500 in January, can sit on the higher tier indefinitely while nobody notices.

There is a timing detail worth knowing too: the downgrade runs 24 hours before the end of the billing cycle. Cleaning your list on the last afternoon of the month is too late for that month.

How much does Klaviyo SMS cost?

Text messaging is priced on credits, not on profiles. The entry point is the Email plus Mobile plan, which adds roughly $15 a month to whatever email tier you are on and includes 1,250 mobile messaging credits. In the United States, one standard SMS consumes one credit, so 1,250 credits is about 1,250 domestic texts. MMS and international destinations consume more: a single message to a UK number costs five credits, which is why the same bundle covers only around 250 UK sends.

Two things make SMS budgeting harder than email budgeting here. Credit rates improve as you buy in bulk, so the effective cost per message is a moving target rather than a rate card. And mobile credits can auto-upgrade during heavy sending periods unless you switch that behavior off, which is the SMS version of the same ratchet described above.

The add-ons that are not in the plan price

The email tier is the floor. Klaviyo has expanded well beyond email since 2025, and the newer products are separately priced. These figures come from independent 2026 pricing guides rather than a published vendor rate card, so treat them as reported ranges and confirm inside your own account before budgeting.

None of this is concealed. It is simply not in the number on the pricing page, which is why a store that budgeted $150 a month for 10,000 profiles and then switched on reviews, analytics and SMS finds itself closer to $300.

Is Klaviyo free?

There is a genuine free plan, and it is small. It caps at 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, with a small monthly mobile messaging credit and Klaviyo branding on what you send. For a store with any real customer list that is a trial rather than a plan, which is the honest reason most searches for Klaviyo pricing start with somebody being pushed off the free tier. At 251 profiles you are on the ladder.

Why is Klaviyo so expensive?

Two things compound. The billing unit is stored profiles rather than activity, so cost tracks the size of your database and not the amount of marketing you actually do. A store sending one campaign a month to 40,000 profiles pays around $600, while a store sending twelve campaigns a month to 3,000 profiles pays around $70, even though the second one is doing twelve times the work.

The other is accumulation with no counterweight. Profile counts only move up on their own, consent status does not protect you, the plan upgrades itself, the downgrade does not, and nothing in the product nags you to clean up. The bill drifts upward without any decision being made, which is why the jump usually gets noticed at renewal.

To be fair to Klaviyo, the reason stores tolerate it is that the revenue attribution is good enough to justify the line item. If your flows are demonstrably producing several times their cost, an expensive tool is still the right tool.

How to lower a Klaviyo bill without switching

If you are staying, three moves are worth an hour and often drop a tier straight away.

Suppress, do not delete. Filter for profiles with no engagement in 12 months and no orders, then bulk suppress them. Suppressed profiles leave the billable count while their history stays intact, and deleting achieves the same billing result while destroying data you may want later. Allow up to 72 hours for the count to refresh. Our guide to cleaning an email list walks through the segment definitions.

Turn auto-downgrade on. Settings, Billing, Preferences. Without it, every cleanup you do is charitable work. Do the cleanup more than 24 hours before your cycle closes so the downgrade has time to run.

Stop writing billable profiles you do not want. If guest checkout is pushing every one-time buyer into Klaviyo as an emailable record, decide whether that is worth paying for indefinitely, and put a suppression rule on the ones who never engage.

Klaviyo pricing compared to Mailchimp and Omnisend

All three bill on stored contacts, and they diverge on where the ladder bites. At 10,000 contacts Klaviyo runs about $150 a month on email, Mailchimp Standard about $135, and Omnisend Standard about $132. At 50,000 the gap widens and Klaviyo is the most expensive of the three. Where Klaviyo earns the premium is ecommerce depth: revenue attribution per flow, product catalog sync and predictive metrics that the other two do not match. Where it loses is on lists that are large but lightly emailed, because you are paying to store people rather than to reach them. Full numbers sit on our Mailchimp pricing page and in Omnisend versus Klaviyo.

When a flat plan costs less than a profile ladder

The honest comparison, including where Klaviyo wins.

The arithmetic is simple enough. Klaviyo email is cheaper than $149 a month until roughly 10,000 profiles and more expensive above it. But the two are not like for like at any list size, because $149 buys email plus SEO, social and Google Ads, and a Klaviyo plan buys email. If you run a store where flows drive a measurable share of revenue, stay on Klaviyo, and spend the hour on suppression instead. If you run a service business with a modest list and three channels sitting idle, the profile ladder is charging you for the wrong thing.

If you are weighing a move rather than a budget, our Klaviyo alternative comparison covers the switch, email marketing software covers how the whole category prices, and HubSpot pricing covers the other vendor cost question buyers ask most.