Klaviyo Pricing Explained: What Actually Drives Your Bill

Klaviyo pricing for email is set by your active profile count, and that count is almost never the same as your subscriber list. On top of it sit a separate text messaging plan billed in dollars, and newer AI products that bill on their own meters. If your Klaviyo bill surprised you, the cause is usually one of those four lines, and each one can be managed.

This guide covers what each line costs, what counts toward it, and what to change to bring it down. For a Shopify store already on Klaviyo or about to sign up, the bill is a list hygiene and plan choice problem before it’s a reason to switch tools.

How much is Klaviyo for a small store? The Klaviyo Free plan (opens in new tab) covers up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, plus $5 of mobile messages and $5 of Composer usage each month. Mobile message volume on that $5 depends on the region and carrier. Free accounts get email support for the first 60 days, then move to Klaviyo’s self-service help resources.

The first paid email tier is $20 a month for 251 to 500 contacts, on Klaviyo’s Shopify App Store listing (opens in new tab). That listing also notes that Klaviyo may bill some charges separately from your Shopify invoice, and that all charges are in US dollars, with recurring and usage-based charges billed every 30 days.

Above that entry tier, Klaviyo pricing comes from the calculator on its pricing page (opens in new tab), where you enter your profile count. Professional Services and Enterprise sit behind a talk-to-sales button. Since the price follows your count, the number to work on is how many profiles you’re paying for.

Every Klaviyo plan renews automatically each month (opens in new tab), and billing starts the day you begin a paid plan. All your plans renew on the same date every month.

The Profiles and Email plan is priced by active profiles (opens in new tab), with email send capacity included. Your plan has to cover your active profile count. Klaviyo defines an active profile this way: “Any profile, regardless of consent status, that can be emailed through Klaviyo is considered an active profile.”

That means a profile counts whether or not the person ever subscribed to marketing. If Klaviyo holds an email address for someone and that address isn’t suppressed, you’re paying for them. A store that syncs every customer who ever checked out will carry a much larger active count than its subscriber list.

Some profiles don’t count. Unsubscribed and suppressed contacts (opens in new tab) are left out of billing, and so are deleted profiles. A phone number by itself doesn’t put a profile on your Profiles and Email plan, and someone who unsubscribes from texts but can still be emailed stays in the email count.

What happens to Klaviyo active profiles in a migration? Every contact you import becomes a profile, so the count after the move can look nothing like the old platform’s subscriber number. Our guide to moving from Mailchimp to Klaviyo recommends sizing your plan from the active profile count after the import and the Shopify sync have finished, and cleaning the list in Mailchimp before you connect the two.

One add-on breaks the suppression rule. Advanced KDP billing (opens in new tab) is based on total profiles, suppressed ones included. Suppressing profiles lowers what you pay for Profiles and Email, but it won’t lower an Advanced KDP charge.

Going over your active profile limit on a paid plan doesn’t stop you from sending or adding profiles. Instead, the account moves to a higher tier (opens in new tab) at the next billing cycle. The Free plan works differently: an account over 250 active profiles can’t send email until it’s back under the limit.

Email sends are a separate limit inside the plan. Any email that’s received or bounces counts toward it, skipped emails don’t, and double opt-in confirmation emails never count on any plan.

What happens when you run out of sends depends on your upgrade preference (opens in new tab). There are three, and the default matters, because auto-upgrade is switched on for new Profiles and Email and Mobile Messaging plans.

An upgrade, manual or automatic, takes effect immediately (opens in new tab), and you’re charged the difference between the old plan and the new one for the current cycle. Klaviyo notifies the account Owner as you approach a limit, at marks such as 75% and 90%.

Auto-upgrade is the reason a single busy sending month can raise your bill for every month after it. Flexible overages cover a one-off spike, like a holiday campaign, without moving you to a higher plan for good.

Suppression takes a profile off your active count, but Klaviyo pricing doesn’t follow it down by itself. Deleting or suppressing profiles (opens in new tab) won’t change your Email subscription plan on its own. You either change the plan yourself or turn on auto-downgrade.

Auto-downgrade has two limits. It’s only available on the Profiles and Email plan (opens in new tab), and it’s based on active profile count, not sends. It also can’t run alongside auto-upgrade: “You will not be auto-downgraded if using auto-upgrade or based on the number of messages you send.” Since auto-upgrade is on by default, an account that never touched this setting won’t drop a tier no matter how many profiles it suppresses.

A downgrade, by hand or automatic, takes effect at the start of the next billing cycle (opens in new tab), and Klaviyo doesn’t refund the difference if you downgrade mid-cycle. Plan the cleanup a few days before your renewal date, check that the active count has dropped, then change the plan.

If you switch to auto-downgrade, decide what you want at the send limit instead of auto-upgrade. Flexible overages keep sending through a spike for a one-time fee, and None stops sending until the next cycle.

A suppressed profile stops receiving marketing emails (opens in new tab) and stays in your account, so its history still shows up in reporting. A manual suppression comes off when the person resubscribes to email or when you remove it yourself. If you remove a manual suppression, you can’t manually suppress that profile again until 90 days after the original suppression, and only an Owner, Admin or Manager can suppress profiles.

Klaviyo will suggest profiles to suppress. Its suppression recommendations (opens in new tab) flag profiles created at least 365 days ago that have received 5 or more emails over roughly the last 72 weeks and never opened or clicked one. Profiles with recorded clicks or purchases are left out of those recommendations, along with anyone who had a suppression added in the last 90 days.

For Klaviyo pricing, a bulk suppression is a one-time saving: it runs once and doesn’t catch profiles that join later, so a single cleanup slowly undoes itself as new profiles arrive. The lasting fix is an unengaged segment and a sunset flow that suppresses people who stop opening. Our guide to Klaviyo segmentation covers how to define that segment, use it as an exclusion, and build the sunset sequence that suppresses its members.

Before a suppression run, check a few points:

Text messaging is a separate plan from email (opens in new tab), covering SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and RCS. Klaviyo SMS pricing moved from credits to per-message, dollar-based rates (opens in new tab) starting July 13, 2026. New customers and free Mobile Messaging plans switched that day, and existing paid subscribers switched on their first billing date after August 13, 2026. Any plan you see described in SMS credits is the older model.

Your rate depends on the channel, the country, the message type and the number you send from. In the US and Canada, toll-free numbers and short codes are priced differently. Carrier fees are built into the rate rather than billed as a separate line, and larger monthly plans come with lower per-message rates. Klaviyo can update rates by country, channel and number type from time to time, and your account’s current rate table sits under Settings > Billing > Overview.

You pay per segment, per recipient (opens in new tab). One SMS segment holds 160 characters, or 70 if the message has an emoji or special character, and longer messages split into segments of 153 or 67 characters. A 160-character text with one emoji in it becomes three segments, so sending it to 10,000 people means 30,000 segment charges instead of 10,000. Each segment is billed at the per-segment rate.

MMS is billed as a single message rather than split into segments, at a higher rate than one SMS segment. Skipped and inbound messages are free, but failed deliveries cost you. Your plan spend renews every month and unused dollars don’t roll over.

Overages work differently under Klaviyo SMS pricing than on email. Flex is only available (opens in new tab) on self-service Mobile Messaging plans with a monthly list price of $490 or more, where flexing adds spend for the current cycle. Below that, the choice is between auto-upgrade and None.

Keep emoji out of the copy unless the message is already short enough to fit in 70 characters, and test whether an MMS image earns its higher rate. Our guide to SMS marketing covers building a compliant list and the first flows to send, which decide how much of that spend goes to people who want the texts.

This part of Klaviyo pricing doesn’t scale with your list. The AI products bill on usage, so a store with a small list can still run up a charge here.

Composer measures capacity in credits (opens in new tab). The free Composer plan includes 500 credits a cycle, and the $20 monthly paid plan includes 2,000, four times the free allowance. At $20 for 2,000 credits, a credit costs a cent, so the free 500 credits match the $5 of Composer usage on the Free plan. Leftover credits don’t roll over to the next month.

Composer’s cost depends on the task. Asking it for support or general information is free. Klaviyo estimates that auditing a campaign runs $0.10 to $0.50, analyzing data $0.35 to $0.90, and creating a campaign $0.10 to $10.00, and a complex request can cost more than the top of its range. Pricing you may see for 10,000 free credits or a $14 plan belongs to the earlier early-adopter offer (opens in new tab), not the current plans.

Customer Agent (opens in new tab) is priced on resolved conversations that a shopper started, starting at $50 a month for up to 75 conversations. That works out to about 67 cents a conversation at the entry tier. Conversations escalated to a human agent don’t count, and a conversation becomes billable once the AI has replied and 48 hours pass with no reply from the shopper. Flexible overages are the default on Customer Agent and None isn’t offered, so plan for usage to keep billing past the limit.

Klaviyo expanded both products at its K:BOS event on September 9, 2026 (opens in new tab), including SQL in Composer as a preview. Neither was new at that point: Composer was already in public beta by Klaviyo’s Q2 release (opens in new tab), and Customer Agent had launched earlier.

Klaviyo also sells Helpdesk, Reviews, Customer Hub, Marketing Analytics and Advanced KDP as separate paid plans. Upgrades to Customer Hub, Marketing Analytics and Advanced KDP are prorated (opens in new tab), while Profiles and Email, Mobile Messaging and Reviews aren’t prorated if you add them mid-cycle. Our post on Klaviyo as a customer data platform covers what the data side of the platform is for, which is the question to answer before you add any of those plans.

Some stores don’t need Klaviyo yet. Our comparison of Shopify Email vs Klaviyo finds Shopify Messaging a sound choice for a store sending campaigns to a modest list with standard automations, where the cost is little or nothing. Klaviyo earns its price once you need branching inside flows, email and texts in the same flow, or predictive segments.

If you’re comparing Klaviyo’s bill against a cheaper tool, our Klaviyo vs Omnisend comparison finds Omnisend the cheaper, simpler option for a store running regular campaigns and a few standard automations. It finds Klaviyo worth the higher price when predictive segmentation and flow branching drive the program.

Before switching, compare like with like. Check Klaviyo pricing and price the other tool on the profile count you’d have after suppressing unengaged profiles in Klaviyo, not on today’s bloated count, because a cleaned-up Klaviyo account may land on a lower tier than the one you’re comparing against.

Most of a Klaviyo bill comes down to a few settings and habits:

BLKDG is a Klaviyo Partner, and our Klaviyo agency work starts with a free Growth Audit: a look at the account you already have, covering the integration, consent, deliverability, segments, flows and attribution windows. Bring your Klaviyo bill to it, and we’ll go through which billed products you actually need and which you don’t.