Klaviyo Pricing in 2026: What Your List Actually Costs at Each Contact Count

How Klaviyo actually bills you

Two things sit on the plan page: a profile column and a send allowance. Only one of them sets your price.

The profile count sets the price. Your account lands in a band based on active profiles, and the plan assignment moves with that band. The send allowance is sized at roughly ten times the profile count, and three of the sources reviewed state this directly while one cites Klaviyo support confirming it. Treat the ten times ratio as design intent rather than a promise, because Klaviyo widens the allowance at the higher bands rather than holding the ratio.

So at almost every size, the question is not how many emails you send. It is how many profiles are sitting in the account.

The change that moved the number

Two separate billing changes get blurred together in most of the pages ranking for this query, and they are not the same change.

April 2024 moved the model from send-volume billing to total-contact billing. 18 February 2025, announced on 14 January 2025, moved it the rest of the way: billing now tracks every contactable profile in the account, whether you email them or not. Before that date, a store with 20,000 contacts emailing 8,000 paid on 8,000. After it, the same store pays on 20,000. The worked example from a source that shows the arithmetic: the 8,000 tier was $150 a month, the 20,000 tier is $375 a month. That is $225 more each month for a list nobody grew.

One claim from Klaviyo's own forum, and what it is worth

The short version of the billing model, "active profiles plus send volume", is correct but incomplete, and Klaviyo's own community forum is where the incompleteness shows up. A thread there argues that the profile column means contacts you can send to in a single blast, not contacts stored in the account, so an account holding a million records could bill at the $30 tier if each campaign only reaches a thousand people.

Read that as a user claim on a vendor forum, not as a mechanic. It is a two-year-old user argument, and it is disputed inside the thread by other users. The vendor's own FAQ text reads "up to 250 active profiles", the February 2025 change notice describes account-level profile billing, and every current third-party source describes the same thing. The forum post is worth knowing about because it circulates, but it does not describe how accounts are actually billed.

Where the free tier stops

The free tier is real and it is narrow. From the vendor plan page, checked 6 October 2026:

• 250 active profiles
• 500 email sends per month
• $5 of mobile messages per month
• $5 of Composer usage per month
• Built-in reporting

The support detail that matters more than the limits: email support is included for the first 60 days only. After that you are on documentation. You can stay on the free tier indefinitely while you remain under both the profile and the send ceiling. Exceeding either pauses sending until the next cycle or an upgrade.

The paid entry point is $20 per month in the 251 to 500 band. For most stores the free tier ends not at 250 subscribers but at the first serious welcome flow, because a launch or a seasonal campaign blows through 500 sends long before the list crosses 250 people.

The hidden-cost claims, assessed

This is where the query gets noisy, so here is the provenance before the claims. Omnisend and Retainful are competing email service providers and both publish pages ranking in the top ten for Klaviyo pricing that sell against Klaviyo. A third source, EmailWarmup, sells sending infrastructure and consultancy. That does not make their numbers wrong. It does mean every one of them is a third-party claim with a commercial interest, and I am labelling them as such rather than reporting them as neutral findings.

Which claims survive a first-party check:

• The February 2025 change is real and vendor-documented. Retainful names the date and the three mechanics correctly. Because it is the source of most of the cost increase, it is the one claim here worth checking yourself.
• Suppressed profiles do not count toward the bill. EmailWarmup states this and it is consistent with active-profile billing. A suppressed contact is not a contactable profile.
• The 25% appreciation cap is not a one-month thing. EmailWarmup corrects the common error that it applies to a single billing cycle. The Appreciation Discount for eligible accounts created before April 2024 caps the increase at 25% and continues indefinitely, but it shrinks on every downgrade and does not grow on an upgrade. Accounts created after April 2024 never qualified.

Which claims I would not act on:

• The KDP ceiling figures. Omnisend quotes 15 million profiles and $47,850 per month with no date attached. An undated price ceiling on a competitor's page is not a price.
• The support minimum. Omnisend's page states that professional support requires a minimum spend of $5,000 per month, also undated. Plausible, unverified, and worth confirming directly if support is what you are buying.
• The agency fee claim. Reports from agencies state that once monthly spend passes $10,000, Klaviyo One becomes mandatory with an additional 20% fee. Agency-sourced and unverified. Treat it as a question to ask in a renewal call, not as a line item.
• The million-contact figures. Community reports cite roughly $8,000 per month at one million contacts and $20,000 per month at four million. No first-party source publishes either number. They are the best available answer to the question a Reddit thread at position 2 is asking, and they are still unverified second-hand figures. I am giving them to you with that label on them and no other.

What the published table does not cover

Above 250,000 active profiles the self-serve table stops. Klaviyo moves the account to sales-assisted custom pricing, and that is the honest edge of this article: nobody, including the vendor, publishes a price above that line. Everything past it is a conversation, and the only figures available for it are the unverified ones above.

Email versus SMS: two meters on one account

Klaviyo bills email and SMS on separate tracks. Your email tier is set by profile count. SMS is bought as credits against a monthly allowance, and the two totals land on the same invoice without being comparable to each other.

This is where a budget surprise is most likely, because SMS is cheap to start and expensive to scale. The clearest evidence in this whole research set comes from an agency managing 11 or more Klaviyo accounts (BS&Co, 2026):

Read the middle row twice. On that account SMS is about 29% of the bill, and it got there without anybody changing the email plan. If your forecast prices email only, it is missing up to a third of the number. The same agency puts its client-base average at roughly $1,500 per month, and frames the range by revenue: under $1M brands at $150 to $500 a month, $1M to $5M at $500 to $2,000, and $5M and up at $2,000 to $3,500.

Annual, monthly, and what you are committing to

The plan page publishes one column of monthly prices, and I could not find a dated first-party discount figure for annual prepayment anywhere in the sources tracked for this article. Several third-party pages imply one and none dates it. That absence is worth stating plainly, because a discount you cannot source is not a discount you can budget.

What is verifiable is the behaviour of the plan itself, and it matters more than the billing term:

• Auto-upgrade is automatic with no opt-out. Crossing a tier boundary moves you up at the start of the next billing cycle. Klaviyo sends notification emails before and after. There is no setting to decline.
• Auto-downgrade is manual and OFF by default. It lives under Settings, Billing, Preferences. If it stays off, a list that shrinks keeps paying the higher tier indefinitely. This is a free change that most accounts never make, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
• The 90-day suppression lock. Once a suppressed contact is unsuppressed, they cannot be suppressed again for 90 days. Re-activating a dormant contact is a three-billing-cycle commitment, not a test.

If you take nothing else from this article, take the second bullet. Turning auto-downgrade on costs nothing and it is the one lever that works in your favour without a sales call.

Why the model is shaped this way

This is not a conspiracy, and framing it as one misses what the numbers show. Klaviyo's Q2 2026 results: revenue $370.6M, up 26% year over year, full-year guidance raised to $1.526B to $1.534B, more than 205,000 brands, and net revenue retention of 109%. Customers at $50,000+ ARR grew 36% to 4,477, and they now represent about 40% of total ARR. Nearly 20% of ARR comes from customers using three or more products, and those customers retain six points better on gross retention.

A profile-and-module pricing model is exactly the shape that extracts more from large multi-product accounts, and large multi-product accounts are where the growth is. Klaviyo is not hiding this. The billing design and the business model are the same thing described twice.

Klaviyo versus the alternatives at the same list size

Same contact basis, monthly, email only where the platform separates channels.

Sources: Retainful plan tables, Omnisend's comparison, sendx.io (1 July 2026), ActiveCampaign's blog (26 August 2026) and itqlick comparisons. Omnisend is a competing ESP and its figures resolve in its own favour, so read its row as a vendor claim rather than a neutral price.

Two cautions before you build a decision on this table. Mailchimp's structure is also contact-based and it includes unsubscribed contacts, so the comparison is not perfectly like for like, and at least one competitor page gets that backwards in both directions. Verify it against Mailchimp's own page before you print either claim. ActiveCampaign's pricing goes quote-based at depth, which means there is no published number to compare at 50,000 contacts, only a sales conversation.

The honest summary: at 1,000 contacts Klaviyo is not the cheap option and it is not meant to be. At 50,000 contacts the gap between Klaviyo and Mailchimp Standard closes to a few hundred dollars a month, which is the point at which the deciding factor stops being price and starts being whether the automation depth is worth the difference. Our Mailchimp alternatives and ActiveCampaign alternatives comparisons work the same contact basis through those two platforms, and the marketing automation tools guide covers the stack underneath if you are rebuilding rather than switching.

Before your next Klaviyo renewal

Go into Settings, Billing, Preferences today and check one toggle. Auto-downgrade ships off, it costs nothing to switch on, and it is the only part of this model that will ever move your bill down without a human at Klaviyo agreeing to it. Lists shrink quietly, and until that setting is on, a shrinking list keeps paying the tier it peaked at.

Then do the arithmetic this page is built around rather than the one the plan grid invites. Add your email tier, your SMS credits, and anything else on the account, and compare that total against what a migrating store would actually save. At 1,000 contacts Klaviyo is the wrong purchase and the plan page will tell you so. At 50,000 contacts the gap to Mailchimp Standard is a few hundred dollars a month, which is a real number but not a migration decision on its own. The number that decides it is the one nobody publishes above 250,000 profiles, and if your list is heading there, the useful move is to ask for it now rather than after you have rebuilt your flows.

If the reason you are sizing this at all is that the list work and the campaign work currently live in different tools, that is the problem one agent in one workspace is built to remove, and every Allable plan starts with a 7-day free trial: Pro at EUR 99, Business at EUR 199, Scale at EUR 399. The HubSpot pricing breakdown applies the same source-and-date method to a CRM bill, and the email marketing guide covers the program itself once the cost question is settled.