Klaviyo Pricing in 2026: How Your Monthly Bill Is Worked Out

Hayes Media is an eCommerce growth agency that runs email and SMS retention for DTC and Shopify brands, mostly in Klaviyo. Klaviyo charges by active profiles, meaning every contact it can email, plus a separate Mobile Messaging plan if you send SMS. So your bill tracks the size of your emailable database, not the number of people who buy. Klaviyo's public pricing page shows exact limits for the free plan only. Paid prices come from a calculator, so this guide explains the billing model, what makes the bill grow, and how to judge it against the gross profit your flows return.

Every Klaviyo quote below comes from the pricing page or Klaviyo's help centre, listed in the sources at the end. Where Klaviyo doesn't print a number, we don't guess one.

How much does Klaviyo cost per month?

It depends on two numbers: how many active profiles you have, and how much you send. Klaviyo doesn't publish a fixed price table for paid plans on its pricing page. You enter your profile count into the calculator on klaviyo.com/pricing and it shows the tier price. Inside an account, Billing then Change plan shows the cost of each tier.

How does Klaviyo billing work?

Klaviyo sells email and SMS as two separate plans that sit side by side on one bill.

Profile and Email plan. This is the core platform plan. Klaviyo's help centre says these plans are based on the number of active profiles in your account and the emails sent during the current billing cycle.

Mobile Messaging plan. This covers SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and other mobile channels. It's an add-on, so an email plan with no SMS is a normal setup.

Klaviyo defines the profile count this way:

"Any profile, regardless of consent status, that can be emailed through Klaviyo is considered an active profile. This includes your subscribers and those who are added by general engagement (such as sharing their email on a store's checkout page but not actually opting in)."

That last part matters. A shopper who checks out without ticking the marketing box still counts toward your tier, because Klaviyo can still email them.

What happens when you go over your profile limit?

Klaviyo moves you up automatically. The help centre says: "Your billing plan must cover the number of active profiles in your account. If not, you will be moved to a profile-compliant plan as of the next billing cycle."

To avoid that, Klaviyo says you need to get your active profile count back within your plan's limits at least 24 hours before your next billing cycle. Downgrades aren't automatic by default. Unless you've turned on auto-downgrade, which Klaviyo offers only with flexible sending, you have to choose the lower tier yourself in Billing.

What happens when you hit the email send limit?

Klaviyo gives three options for consumption-based limits like email sends and mobile messaging: flexible overages, which give you the next tier's sends for that month; an upgrade, manual or automatic; or stopping all sends until the next cycle. Klaviyo recommends upgrading rather than flexing if you have flexed more than a few times a year, because it can be more cost effective. Bounced emails count toward the limit. Skipped emails don't.

How does Klaviyo SMS pricing work?

SMS runs on a prepaid dollar budget, not a message count. Klaviyo's help centre says: "You pay upfront for a monthly Mobile Messaging subscription based on the amount of spend you think you need i.e. $15 or $25." It also says the plan resets monthly and unused dollars do not carry over.

Each message draws down that budget at a per-message rate. Klaviyo says each rate reflects the channel (SMS, MMS, WhatsApp or RCS), the recipient's country or region, the number type for US and Canada SMS (toll-free or short code), carrier and provider costs, and the number of message segments. Carrier fees are bundled into the rate, so they don't show as a separate line on your invoice. You can see your exact rates in your account under Account Usage.

Every Klaviyo account also gets $5 of Mobile Messaging each month for free. Our guide to SMS marketing for eCommerce covers when SMS earns its place next to email.

What does the Klaviyo free plan include?

The free plan is the only tier where Klaviyo prints every limit on the pricing page. It lists:

Profiles: Up to 250 profiles.

Email: 500 emails/month.

Mobile: $5 of mobile messages/month.

AI: $5 of Composer usage/month.

Support and reporting: Built-in reporting and email support for the first 60 days.

Klaviyo's FAQ says the plan is free "as long as your account remains under the limits of 250 active profiles and 500 monthly email sends." Go past either and your account stops sending until the next billing cycle or until you upgrade. You won't be upgraded automatically on the free plan, but you also can't set flow emails live while you're over.

For a live store, 250 profiles is very small. Once you connect Shopify and pull in past customers, any store with more than 250 of them is already over it.

Why does my Klaviyo bill grow faster than my list?

Because the bill counts what Klaviyo can email, while your list is only the people who opted in. Three things push the bill up without adding buyers.

Unengaged profiles. Every profile that hasn't opened, clicked, visited or bought in a long time still counts as active until you suppress it. Klaviyo's sunset flow article puts it plainly: once a profile is no longer generating revenue and you see no chance to win it back, you can suppress it so it does not count towards your Klaviyo billing plan. If nobody does that, dead profiles pile up and push you into higher tiers.

Non-subscribers from checkout. As quoted above, profiles added through checkout without opting in still count.

Imported and system profiles. Klaviyo flags that some accounts hold profiles created by other systems with no email address or phone number. Klaviyo's advice is to delete them if you don't need them for reporting, or suppress them if you do.

On the SMS side, cost grows with how you write and where you send, not just how many people you text.

Message segments. Klaviyo says an SMS holds 160 characters, but only 70 when there's an emoji or special character. Longer texts are split into segments, and segment count is part of the rate. One emoji in a long text can raise the cost of every send.

MMS. MMS is priced as its own channel with its own rate. Before you add images to every campaign, compare the SMS and MMS rates in your account.

Failed sends. Klaviyo says skipped and inbound messages don't cost you, but failed deliveries do. A list full of old or invalid numbers spends budget for nothing.

How do you keep your Klaviyo bill honest?

You pay for the profiles you keep, so the lever is deciding who stays.

Run a sunset flow. Klaviyo describes the sunset flow as a last-ditch effort to win back people who've stopped engaging before you suppress them. Build a segment of profiles with no opens, clicks, site visits or purchases over a long period, send one to three final emails, and exclude anyone who engages. Klaviyo recommends keeping it to three emails or fewer, since repeatedly mailing unengaged people can hurt deliverability.

Suppress the people who finish it. Profiles that complete the flow without engaging get tagged, then you suppress that segment. Klaviyo notes this step is manual, because suppression isn't available as a flow action. Suppressed profiles drop out of your billable count once processing finishes, which Klaviyo says can take up to 72 hours. They stay in the account for reporting.

Downgrade on time. Suppression lowers your count, not your plan. Check the new count, then choose the lower tier in Billing more than 24 hours before your cycle renews, or the change won't apply that month.

There's a second reason. Klaviyo says sending to unmonitored inboxes will hurt your deliverability over time. Suppressing those profiles protects the sender reputation that every other email depends on.

If you haven't looked at this in a while, an email marketing audit is a good place to start.

Is Klaviyo worth the cost for my store?

Judge it on gross profit, not revenue. The Klaviyo dashboard shows attributed revenue, which is a useful diagnostic and not a verdict. The real question is how much gross profit the program adds after the platform bill and the cost of running it.

Step 1. Take the revenue from your flows and campaigns.

Step 2. Multiply it by your gross margin to get gross profit.

Step 3. Subtract the Klaviyo bill, the Mobile Messaging plan, and whatever you pay to run the program, whether that's staff time or an agency.

Step 4. Ask how much of that would have happened anyway. Some buyers who click a flow email would have bought regardless, and a holdout test on your key flows shows how many.

Flows do much of the work here. They send on behaviour, like an abandoned cart or a first order. If you're paying for Klaviyo but running a thin welcome series and a single cart email, you're paying for capability you aren't using. Our breakdown of the Klaviyo email flows every store should run shows what a full build looks like.

Hayes Media judges retention on one scoreboard: lifetime gross profit to CAC. Lifetime gross profit is the margin one customer returns across their whole life with you. CAC is what you pay to acquire one new customer. A Klaviyo bill earns its place when the flows raise lifetime gross profit by more than they cost.

What does Klaviyo cost in practice? An illustrative example

These are made-up numbers to show the math. They are not Klaviyo's prices or a real client. Use the calculator on klaviyo.com/pricing for your own tier.

Say a skincare store has 60,000 active profiles. Its email plan costs a made-up $700 a month at that tier, and it buys a made-up $300 Mobile Messaging plan. Total platform cost: $1,000 a month.

Flows and campaigns drive $40,000 a month in attributed revenue. At a 65% gross margin that's $26,000 in gross profit. Assume a holdout test shows about half of that is truly incremental: $13,000. After the $1,000 platform bill, the program adds $12,000 a month in gross profit before the cost of running it.

Now 20,000 of those profiles haven't engaged or bought in a long stretch. The store sends them a sunset flow, 1,000 respond, and it suppresses the other 19,000. The billable count drops to 41,000, and the store picks the lower tier before the next renewal. Revenue barely moves, because those profiles weren't buying. The bill drops to whatever the calculator shows for the smaller tier, and the store stops mailing inboxes that Klaviyo says hurt deliverability.

What matters is the mechanism: you pay per emailable profile, so profiles that never buy cost money and return nothing.

When is Klaviyo not worth it?

Klaviyo is usually a poor fit when:

You don't have the data to use. Klaviyo's strength is segments and flows built on store and order data. A brand with a small catalogue, few repeat buyers and no plan to build flows pays for depth it won't touch.

You only send newsletters. If your email program is a weekly broadcast to everyone, a simpler tool can do that job. Our Klaviyo vs Mailchimp comparison walks through where each one makes sense.

Nobody will run it. An account with good flows that nobody maintains slowly turns into a large bill for a stale program. The platform doesn't run itself.

Should you get help running Klaviyo?

Our list of the best Klaviyo agencies compares the options, with Hayes Media listed first because we wrote it.

Hayes Media runs email and SMS retention for eCommerce brands: email, SMS, loyalty programs and subscribe-and-save, as a complete engagement on its own. Hayes works in Klaviyo for most accounts and has experience in most other email and SMS platforms, so a brand on a different tool is still a fit. Our retention site, email.hayesmedia.co, states "Trusted by 50+ eCom brands" and "8 yrs Retention expertise". Those figures and our case studies are published by Hayes on our own site, and we don't have a third-party review profile or a Klaviyo partner listing, so weigh them accordingly.

One-time email projects start from $2,000 USD, and retainers for ongoing full management start from $4,000 USD per month, scoped on the discovery call.

Sources

Klaviyo pricing page: https://www.klaviyo.com/pricing

Klaviyo help centre, How Klaviyo bills customers: https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000976672

Klaviyo help centre, How to create a sunset flow: https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017518492

Want to know what your Klaviyo account should cost and what it should return? Book a discovery call. We'll audit your Klaviyo setup, from billable profiles and list health to the flows that should be earning their keep, and show you where the bill and the returns don't match. No onboarding fees. No lock-in contracts. No junior marketers.