Klaviyo Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, Real Cost, and What Active Profiles Means for Your Bill

Klaviyo’s pricing page is deceptively short on numbers. Scroll it and you will see a free plan, a note about an Email plan and an Email plus SMS plan, and a “build a plan” calculator that reveals its actual figures only once you start dragging sliders. I pulled every number I could get directly off the live page, cross-checked the plan structure against Klaviyo’s published documentation, and mapped exactly what changed when Klaviyo switched its billing model in 2025. Here is what Klaviyo actually costs in 2026, and where that cost sneaks up on stores that do not plan for it.

Disclosure: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That never changes our verdict.

The 30-second verdict

Klaviyo is not cheap, but it is priced fairly for what it does: the Email plan starts at $20 a month for up to 500 active profiles, and Email plus SMS starts at $35 a month for the same range, with pricing that climbs in tiers as your active profile count grows. The free plan is a genuine testbed, not a crippled trial, covering 250 profiles and 500 monthly sends. For an ecommerce store with real purchase data to act on, the price is usually justified by the revenue attribution alone.

The number that catches people off guard is not the sticker price, it is what “active profiles” means. Klaviyo bills on your entire contact database, not just the people you actively email each month, a change the company made in February 2025. That single detail changes the math for anyone with a large but mostly-dormant list, and it is the reason Klaviyo bills often come in higher than a first glance at the pricing page suggests.

If you are pricing Klaviyo out for a newsletter rather than a store, it is worth a detour before you commit. beehiiv’s free Launch plan runs to 2,500 subscribers with no card required, ten times Klaviyo’s free ceiling, and it is priced for audience growth rather than ecommerce conversion. Twenty minutes in both free accounts will tell you more than this pricing page alone.

Key takeaways

• Klaviyo’s free plan covers up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, plus $5 of mobile message credit, with email support for the first 60 days only.
• The Email plan starts at $20 a month for 251 to 500 active profiles, including 5,000 monthly email sends and 150 SMS/MMS credits.
• The Email plus SMS plan starts at $35 a month for the same profile range, adding 1,250 SMS/MMS credits and mobile push notifications.
• Since February 2025, Klaviyo bills on total active profiles in your database, not just the contacts you actually email, so a large but unengaged list costs you money even if you never send to most of it.
• Add-on products (Service, Composer AI, Customer Agent AI) are priced separately from the core Email/SMS plans and are currently offered at a 30% introductory discount on Klaviyo’s pricing page.

What changed in Klaviyo’s pricing model, and why it matters

Until early 2025, Klaviyo billed primarily on the contacts you emailed in a given period. In February 2025, the company shifted to billing on active profiles, meaning every contact with an active status in your account counts toward your tier, whether or not you sent them anything that month. Klaviyo’s own documentation frames this as aligning with “most other tools” in the category, and structurally it does mirror how competitors like Mailchimp count contacts.

The practical effect is straightforward but easy to miss if you are pricing Klaviyo from an old blog post or a competitor’s comparison page written before the change: your bill is now a function of database size, not sending activity. A store that imported 20,000 customer records from a POS system years ago but only emails the 4,000 who have opted into marketing will still pay for a tier that covers the full 20,000 active profiles, unless that list is cleaned. If you are budgeting for Klaviyo and your CRM has years of accumulated, half-dead contacts sitting in it, clean that list before you calculate your expected monthly cost, not after your first invoice arrives higher than you modeled.

What are Klaviyo’s pricing plans in 2026?

Numbers pulled from Klaviyo’s live pricing page, captured mid-2026, shown at the entry profile tier.

One honest caveat: Klaviyo’s pricing page is built around an interactive calculator, and it does not publish a static table of every price at every profile tier beyond the entry range shown above. Klaviyo does not disclose, for example, the exact monthly cost at 5,000, 10,000, or 50,000 active profiles anywhere on the public page without you dragging the slider yourself inside an active session. If your list sits above 500 profiles, the responsible thing to do is run your real number through Klaviyo’s own calculator before budgeting, rather than trust a third-party estimate, mine included. What I can tell you with confidence, because it is structural rather than a specific number, is that the price curve steepens noticeably past the low thousands of active profiles, which is the single most common complaint in Klaviyo user communities.

How much does the free plan actually get you?

Klaviyo’s free plan is a legitimate way to test the platform, not a stripped demo. You get 250 active profiles, 500 email sends a month, $5 of mobile message credit, 10,000 Composer (AI assistant) credits, and access to the built-in reporting dashboard, basic segmentation, a basic Customer Hub (self-service order tracking and account management for your customers), and a basic Helpdesk with shared inbox and ticket management. Email support is included, but explicitly only for your first 60 days on the platform, after which free-plan users rely on the Help Center, Academy courses, and the Community forum.

The tight number to watch is the 500 monthly email sends. That is a send limit, not a contact limit. If you have 250 profiles and send one campaign to your full list, you have used half your monthly allowance in a single email. Any store running weekly campaigns plus automated flows will hit that ceiling within the first month, which functionally makes free a short evaluation window rather than a plan you run a live business on.

What does the Email plan cost, and when do you outgrow it?

The Email plan starts at $20 a month for 251 to 500 active profiles, including 5,000 monthly email sends (ten times the profile ceiling, similar in spirit to how other platforms scale send allowances with list size) and 150 SMS/MMS credits, plus email and chat support. This is where most small stores land after outgrowing free, and for a store with a genuinely engaged list under 500 active profiles, $20 a month buys real automation depth: welcome flows, cart abandonment, post-purchase sequences, and Klaviyo’s segmentation engine, all fully unlocked, not gated behind a higher tier.

You outgrow this plan the moment your active profile count crosses 500, at which point Klaviyo moves you into the next tier and the price increases accordingly. Because pricing is profile-based rather than feature-based, you do not lose access to anything when you’re on the entry tier, you simply pay more as your contact database grows, tier by tier, whether those additional contacts are actively buying or not.

Is Email plus SMS at $35 a month worth the extra cost?

The jump from Email to Email plus SMS is $15 a month at the entry tier ($35 versus $20), and it buys you 1,250 SMS/MMS credits (up from 150) plus mobile push notification capability. The math here is genuinely use-case dependent in a way the other plan comparisons are not. If SMS is a real channel for your brand, cart-abandonment texts, flash-sale alerts, shipping updates, the credit bump and unified platform are worth it, since running SMS through a separate tool means losing the unified segmentation and attribution Klaviyo’s whole pitch is built around.

If you are considering SMS mainly because it is available, hold off. SMS carries stricter opt-in and compliance requirements than email in most jurisdictions, and a rushed SMS launch without a real subscriber list built through proper consent tends to burn credits and goodwill without moving revenue. Get email flows performing well first, then add SMS deliberately once you have an actual list of people who opted in specifically for texts.

What are the hidden costs in Klaviyo’s pricing?

Beyond the headline plan prices, three things quietly affect what you actually pay.

Active profile billing includes everyone, engaged or not. As covered above, your entire database of active-status contacts counts against your tier, not just the people you send to. Run a list-cleaning pass (removing long-term non-engagers, invalid addresses, and duplicate imports) before you calculate your expected Klaviyo tier, or you will be paying for names that never open an email.

SMS and MMS credits are consumed separately from your plan tier, and pricing varies by message type and destination. A single MMS (image or video message) typically consumes more credits than a plain SMS, and international destinations carry different rates than domestic ones. If your SMS strategy leans on rich media or serves an international list, budget for credit consumption to run faster than a simple “texts sent” count would suggest.

The AI add-ons are priced and sold separately from your core plan. Composer (Klaviyo’s AI campaign and flow generator), Customer Agent (an AI-powered customer service agent), and the advanced Service tier all sit outside the Email/Email+SMS plan structure, currently shown with a 30% introductory discount on the pricing page. Treat that discount as a limited-time rate, not a permanent price, and confirm current terms before building a workflow that depends on one of these add-ons long term.

How can you keep your Klaviyo bill from climbing faster than your revenue?

Since the bill is driven by active profile count, the most effective lever you control is the size and cleanliness of that list, not your feature usage. A few concrete moves, in the order I would actually do them on a real account.

Suppress before you delete. Klaviyo distinguishes between suppressed and deleted profiles, and suppressing a contact (rather than deleting them outright) removes them from your active count while preserving their historical data for later reference, in case you want to reactivate a win-back campaign down the line. Run this pass quarterly on anyone who has not opened or clicked in 90 to 180 days, adjusted for your typical send frequency.

Audit list imports before you upload them, not after. The most common cause of an unexpectedly high Klaviyo tier is a bulk import from a POS system, an old ecommerce platform migration, or a merged customer database that brings in thousands of stale contacts in one move. Deduplicate and filter for engagement eligibility before the import, not after your account has already recalculated its tier and charged your card.

Reconsider the Email plus SMS jump if your SMS credits are consistently underused. If you added SMS anticipating a strategy that never fully launched, the $15-a-month gap over the plain Email plan is easy money to reclaim by downgrading, at least until you have a real SMS list built through proper opt-in.

Treat the AI add-ons as optional, not default. Composer and Customer Agent sit outside your core plan price. Test them on the introductory discount, measure whether the output quality justifies the ongoing cost for your specific catalog and voice, and drop them if they do not. They are genuinely promising tools, but “new and promising” is not the same as “already worth a permanent line item.”

Model your tier a quarter ahead, not just today. Because Klaviyo auto-upgrades your tier and bills the new rate the moment you cross a threshold, a strong sales month or a successful ad campaign that adds hundreds of new profiles can bump your bill mid-cycle with no warning beyond Klaviyo’s proactive notification as you approach the limit. Building your list-growth forecast into your software budget avoids the surprise, even if it does not avoid the charge itself.

How does Klaviyo pricing compare to beehiiv, MailerLite, and Mailchimp?

Comparing Klaviyo’s price in isolation misses the point. It is priced against the revenue it is built to generate for a store, not against what a content creator typically pays for software, so the comparison only makes sense once you know which category you are shopping in.

Klaviyo’s entry price sits between MailerLite’s budget positioning and beehiiv’s growth-focused pricing, but the comparison that actually matters is what each dollar buys. beehiiv’s higher entry price includes a referral program, a paid-recommendation marketplace, and an ad network, tools aimed at growing a list from scratch, none of which exist inside Klaviyo at any price. Klaviyo’s dollar buys predictive segmentation and revenue attribution tied to purchase behavior, tools aimed at converting a list that already exists into revenue, which beehiiv does not attempt to match. I break down beehiiv’s own tier structure in full in beehiiv’s pricing explained, and the wider hands-on comparison of both platforms’ actual product experience lives in beehiiv vs Klaviyo.

Is Klaviyo worth the price for a newsletter, or only for a store?

Almost entirely for a store. Klaviyo’s pricing is calibrated against ecommerce revenue, and the features that price is buying, purchase-triggered flows, predictive lifetime value scoring, RFM segmentation, are invisible value to a newsletter operator with no product catalog. If your monetization is sponsorships, paid subscriptions, or affiliate content rather than direct product sales, you would be paying Klaviyo’s ecommerce-calibrated price for a fraction of what the platform actually does.

I go deeper on what Klaviyo is like to actually use, not just what it costs, in my full Klaviyo review, including where the segmentation engine and flow library genuinely earn their price for the right buyer. For the newsletter-first comparison, my hands-on beehiiv review covers exactly what that $43-a-month Scale plan buys in growth tooling that Klaviyo does not offer at any price. If you have already decided Klaviyo is the wrong tool for your business type regardless of price, my Klaviyo alternatives guide and my broader ranking of the best newsletter platforms both point toward better-fit options for audience-first businesses.

If you landed here trying to price software for a newsletter rather than a store, the better test is direct: open a free beehiiv account and send your next issue from it. Free to 2,500 subscribers, no card required, and built around the exact growth mechanics Klaviyo’s pricing does not include at any tier.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Klaviyo cost per month? Klaviyo is free up to 250 active profiles with 500 monthly email sends. Paid plans start at $20 a month for the Email plan (251 to 500 active profiles, 5,000 monthly sends) or $35 a month for Email plus SMS. Pricing increases in tiers as your active profile count grows.

Does Klaviyo charge for unengaged or unsubscribed contacts? Klaviyo bills based on active profiles, which excludes suppressed or unsubscribed contacts, but it does include every profile with an active status regardless of whether you actually email them. A large database of active-but-unengaged contacts still counts toward your tier.

Is Klaviyo’s free plan good enough to run a small store on? It works as a genuine testbed, but the 500-email monthly send limit is tight. A store sending even one weekly campaign to a couple hundred subscribers, plus automated flows, will typically hit that ceiling within the first billing cycle.

How much does Klaviyo SMS cost? SMS is bundled into the Email plus SMS plan starting at $35 a month, which includes 1,250 SMS/MMS credits at the entry tier. Credit consumption varies by message type (MMS uses more credits than plain SMS) and by destination, with international sends typically costing more credits per message.

Why did my Klaviyo bill go up without adding new subscribers? Klaviyo’s February 2025 shift to active-profile billing means your entire contact database counts toward your tier, not just the people you email. If old imported contacts remain in “active” status, they can push you into a higher tier even without new signups. Cleaning your list is the standard fix.

Is Klaviyo cheaper than beehiiv? At the very entry tier, Klaviyo’s $20-a-month Email plan is cheaper than beehiiv’s $43-a-month Scale plan, but they are priced for different jobs. beehiiv’s price includes growth tooling (referrals, Boosts, an ad network) that Klaviyo does not offer at any price, while Klaviyo’s price includes ecommerce-specific automation and attribution beehiiv does not attempt.

My verdict after pricing every Klaviyo plan

Klaviyo’s pricing is fair for what it sells, but it is not the platform to choose because it looked affordable on the first page. The entry tiers, $20 and $35 a month, are reasonable next to the depth of segmentation and automation you get in return, and the free plan is honest enough to let you evaluate the product properly before paying anything. What trips people up is not the sticker price, it is the shift to active-profile billing and the steep curve past the entry tier that Klaviyo does not fully expose on its public pricing page.

If you run a store with real purchase data, price this platform against the revenue its flows can recover, not against a newsletter tool’s monthly bill, and it will very likely look cheap by comparison. If you do not run a store, this is the wrong price to be comparing at all, since you would be paying for a Customer Data Platform layer built around events your business does not generate. Know which category you are in before the calculator on Klaviyo’s page shows you a number, and this pricing page will make a lot more sense.

Pricing captured from vendor pricing pages, July 2026. Plans change, so confirm current details before you buy.