Klaviyo's free plan covers up to 250 active profiles, 500 email sends a month, and $5 each of SMS and Composer AI usage. Past that, there's no fixed price list anymore: Klaviyo calculates your plan live based on exact active-profile count, which is why every "Klaviyo pricing" blog you find quotes slightly different numbers for the same tier. We make JetFlow, which plugs into Klaviyo, so we have a reason to be precise here rather than just restating round numbers that sound right.
How much does Klaviyo actually cost?
Klaviyo bills by active profiles, meaning anyone who can currently receive your emails (not bounced, not unsubscribed, not suppressed). The only numbers Klaviyo publishes directly on klaviyo.com/pricing are for the free tier:
- Up to 250 active profiles
- 500 email sends a month
- $5 of mobile messages (SMS/MMS) usage included
- $5 of Composer (AI) usage included
- Email support, but only for your first 60 days
Past 250 profiles, Klaviyo doesn't show a static table. You click "Build a plan," it asks for your profile count, and it returns a quote. That's a real change from how Klaviyo used to price (flat tables by contact-count band), and it's also exactly why the pricing roundups still floating around the internet don't agree with each other.
Why don't Klaviyo pricing blogs agree on the numbers?
Because they're describing a moving target with old, static language. Pull up three different "Klaviyo pricing explained" articles and you'll find three different dollar figures for the same profile count. One lists $20/month as the paid entry point then jumps straight to examples like $150/month at 10,000 profiles and $400/month at 35,000. Another publishes a full contact-tier ladder with different numbers at the same bands: $110/month at 5,000 profiles, $550/month at 30,000-35,000. Those aren't typos, they're two different snapshots of a pricing model that has since moved to a live calculator with no public static tiers for paid plans. If you want an exact number for your store, the calculator at klaviyo.com/pricing is the only source that's current. Anything with a specific dollar figure for a specific tier older than a few months should be treated as directional, not authoritative.
What should I actually expect to pay as I grow?
Without inventing numbers Klaviyo doesn't publish, here's the shape of the curve based on what's verifiable:
- 0-250 profiles: free, 500 sends/month, Klaviyo branding on, $5 SMS + $5 Composer included.
- Just over 250 profiles: this is where the first paid tier kicks in. Unlimited sends start here on paid plans.
- Low thousands of profiles: still a relatively small monthly number, growing with your list.
- Tens of thousands of profiles: the jump is noticeable; this is the range where stores typically start seriously comparing Klaviyo against Omnisend or Mailchimp on price alone.
- $495/month and up: Klaviyo's own help docs specifically call out this threshold as where flexible (pooled) SMS sending becomes available, so it's a real line in the pricing model, not a rounded estimate.
If your store is small, run the calculator yourself before reading further. It takes under a minute and it's the only number that's actually yours.
What do SMS and Composer cost on top of email?
SMS and MMS are billed as a separate plan from email, not an add-on bundled into one price. Usage is metered per message and varies by destination (a US text costs less to send than one to some international numbers). Composer, Klaviyo's AI agent that drafts flows and campaigns from your brand and catalog, is bundled into plan usage rather than sold separately: the free plan includes $5 of Composer usage a month, and paid plans include usage as part of what you're already paying, with overage billed if you go past it.
Is Klaviyo worth the price?
For most Shopify stores already running email seriously, yes. Klaviyo holds a 4.7-star rating across 3,418 reviews on the Shopify App Store, which is a large, consistent sample for an app most stores depend on daily. What you're paying for isn't really "the right to send email," it's segmentation, flow automation, deliverability infrastructure, and reporting that would take real engineering time to build yourself. The free plan is genuinely usable for testing whether email marketing works for your store before you commit to anything.
What does every Klaviyo pricing breakdown leave out?
The cost of actually writing the emails. Every pricing article, including the ones ranking above this one, stops at the subscription fee. None of them answer the question a store owner actually has: okay, so what does it cost to run this well?
The honest answer is that Klaviyo's bill is frequently the smaller number. A welcome series, an abandoned cart flow, a weekly campaign calendar, a Black Friday sequence: someone has to turn your product catalog and brand into actual subject lines, body copy, and layouts, on a schedule, every week. That's either:
- Your own hours. Doable, but it's ongoing work that competes with running the rest of the store.
- A freelancer or agency retainer. Often the single biggest email marketing line item, bigger than the Klaviyo bill itself.
- A tool that generates it from your store data. This is where JetFlow fits: it reads your Shopify catalog, images, and brand, generates on-brand campaign and flow emails and popups, and exports them straight into your existing Klaviyo account. It doesn't replace Klaviyo (Klaviyo still sends, segments, and reports) and it's a cost on top of your Klaviyo bill, so it only makes sense if it's saving you more in design or agency time than it costs. For stores evaluating that tradeoff, JetFlow's templates versus Klaviyo's built-in editor and the best Klaviyo add-ons for Shopify cover the specific gap in more detail.
If you're budgeting for Klaviyo this year, budget for both numbers: the platform fee from the calculator, and the real cost of keeping campaigns going every week. Most stores already pay the second one. They just don't put it on the same line as the first.