Klaviyo pricing: what it really costs

What actually counts as an “active profile”?

Klaviyo doesn’t price by seats or by everyone who has ever landed in your database — it prices by active profiles, a metric that is narrower than “everyone I’ve collected” but wider than “people I actually email.” Klaviyo’s help center splits active profiles into two groups: subscribers who explicitly opted in, and profiles added through general engagement, such as a shopper who abandoned checkout or placed an order without checking a marketing box. Both types count toward your paid tier, whether or not you ever send them a campaign.

That is the detail most buyers miss when they estimate their bill. A store connected through Shopify or WooCommerce can add profiles automatically from checkout traffic alone, before anyone subscribes to anything. Simply not emailing someone does not lower your bill; the only two things that do are suppressing or deleting them, which is also the one lever Klaviyo gives you to avoid being pushed onto a bigger tier, covered next.

How fast does the bill climb as your list grows?

Klaviyo’s paid Email plan runs on a continuous scale, not a small set of named plans: $20 a month gets you 500 active profiles, and the price rises from there to $860 once you’re in the 60,000-profile band, with custom Enterprise pricing above 150,000. In that upper range the slider moves in 5,000-profile increments, so the bill can jump between the round numbers buyers usually quote.

Each tier also includes email sends equal to ten times its profile count, so a list that grows in step with how often you email it rarely forces an early upgrade on volume alone. It can still happen: the growing-team bill above sits on the 60,000-profile tier, not the cheaper 50,000-profile one, because campaigning to the full list roughly twelve times a month runs past the sends that tier includes — the sending schedule forced the upgrade, not the profile count.

The bigger trap is what Klaviyo calls profile compliance. If your active-profile count outgrows your current tier, Klaviyo moves you to the next tier up automatically at the start of your next billing cycle, whether or not you had turned on any upgrade preference. The only way to stay put is to suppress or delete enough profiles before the cycle renews — once you are over the line, the upgrade itself is not optional.

Which Email tier should your business actually budget for?

A freelancer or solo creator with roughly 1,000 subscribers and a handful of campaigns a month fits the tier behind the solo bill above. A small ecommerce store, or an agency running a single client’s list, both usually sitting around 10,000 active profiles, fit the tier behind the small-team bill. Past that point, budget by sending frequency as well as list size, not list size alone — the growing-team bill above is the clearest example of that, and the previous section explains why.

Add-ons don’t belong in this first calculation. Composer, Customer Hub, Social Marketing and Reviews are all optional, and none of them is required to send email or SMS — a buyer who only wants core email and SMS marketing can ignore all four when picking a starting tier and add them later if a specific feature earns its keep.

Why is SMS a second bill, not a feature of the Email plan?

SMS and MMS run on a separate Klaviyo product, Mobile Messaging, billed apart from Email and not included in any Email tier’s price. You prepay a monthly plan spend, and every send draws down that spend at a rate set by country, channel, and, in the US and Canada, whether you’re texting from a toll-free number or a short code; a US toll-free SMS segment costs $0.01, with carrier fees already folded into that rate instead of added as a separate line on your invoice.

The catch: Mobile Messaging spend does not roll over. Unused budget resets every billing cycle, so overbuying wastes money and underbuying means an overage charge or paused sends. Klaviyo offers a flexible-sending option that bills you once for extra capacity instead of pausing, but it only kicks in once your Mobile Messaging plan is large enough — small senders don’t get that safety valve. Klaviyo’s own calculator has not shown usable MMS, WhatsApp or RCS rates, so confirm those with Klaviyo directly before you commit to them.

What else gets added on top of Email?

Composer, Klaviyo’s AI agent, costs $20 a month flat on top of any Email tier, metered in AI credits rather than a fixed number of actions; unused credits expire at the end of the billing period, and going over costs $10 per extra 1,000 credits if you opt in. Customer Hub and Social Marketing are also priced by active-profile count, but on their own, coarser tiers: when we checked on 26 September 2026, both showed introductory rates at the 10,000-profile mark — $20 for Customer Hub and $38 for Social Marketing — running only through 30 September 2026 per Klaviyo’s pricing page. Their list prices are $30 and $50; budget for those once the introductory window closes. Reviews is priced differently again, by monthly order volume rather than profiles, starting at $25 a month for Shopify and WooCommerce stores sending up to 250 orders.

None of this comes with an annual-prepay discount. Klaviyo’s self-serve pricing, Email included, is month-to-month only, with no toggle anywhere for paying yearly — a real gap if you’re used to tools that reward paying yearly. The only route to a different billing cycle is manual billing, arranged through a Klaviyo representative once your combined plans reach $2,000 a month, and Klaviyo has not published a discount for choosing it.

How does Klaviyo compare with the tools people actually put next to it?

Kit prices Creator at $39 a month and Creator Pro at $79, both for up to 1,000 subscribers and rising at higher subscriber counts, and it has no SMS product at all — a simpler bill than Klaviyo’s, but one that never covers text messaging. ActiveCampaign pairs email marketing with a CRM and prices by contact count much like Klaviyo does: $15 a month for 1,000 contacts, rising to $149 at 10,000, both billed annually, since ActiveCampaign’s public pricing page shows only the annual rate. Mailchimp is the other common cross-shop: its Standard plan comes to $135 a month for 10,000 contacts, against $150 for Klaviyo at the same list size. For more options, including all-in-one platforms that fold email and SMS into a bigger CRM, see our Klaviyo alternatives page.