Abandoned cart email: the flow is free, the one before it is not
Every platform here sends a cart email and two do it free. The upgrade you are actually paying for is browse abandonment — and what each of the four store flows requires.
Store email & SMS · prices read 24 September 2026
The cart they left, and the bill for chasing it
Email and SMS for online stores, compared by what each platform actually counts — active profiles, contacts, or emails sent. Seven platforms, priced at two realistic store sizes, every figure read at the vendor's own page on 24 September 2026.
Three meters, and your store is standing on one of them
Active profiles
$20 → $400a month, from 500 to 25,000 active profiles on the Email plan. A big list you rarely mail is billed as if you mailed it.
Klaviyo
Contacts
12 × contactsis the monthly send allowance all three of Omnisend, Mailchimp and Sender attach to their mid plan — three vendors, one ratio.
Omnisend · Mailchimp · Sender · Moosend
Emails sent
10,000 freeemails a month at Shopify, then $1 per 1,000. Brevo starts at $9 a month for 5,000. Contacts barely matter on this meter.
Brevo · Shopify Email
Why the meter matters more than the price
A store with 20,000 customers who buy twice a year and a store with 20,000 subscribers who get mailed weekly look identical on a contact meter and completely different on a profile meter or an emails-sent meter. Picking the platform before working out which meter suits the shape of your store is how businesses end up paying three figures a month for sending they do not do.
So every comparison on this site leads with the unit, then the price, then what the plan actually unlocks. The full seven-platform comparison prices the same store at 500 and at 5,000 contacts, with every billing toggle opened individually.
What is checked, and what is refused
Every figure on this site was read at the vendor's own page on 24 September 2026, in a browser configured for the United States, because vendors localise and a price read from the wrong vantage point is not the price. Where a vendor publishes no figure — Klaviyo's per-message SMS rate, Shopify's rates above 300,000 emails a month, Brevo's higher tiers — this site says so and prints nothing.
There are no scores here, no open rates, no deliverability percentages and no test results, because none of those were measured. What is offered instead is arithmetic you can check against the pages it cites.
Start with a flow
Shopify email apps: what is worth paying for, and when
Shopify Email gives 10,000 emails a month free, then $1 per 1,000. Two paid platforms undercut it at 60,000 emails — and one feature is the real reason to switch.
Klaviyo alternatives: work out the ratio first
Six credible replacements, priced at 5,000 people. But the decision turns on one number most comparisons skip: how much of your customer file is actually active.
Klaviyo pricing: the whole curve, step by step
$20 a month at 500 active profiles to $400 at 25,000, read off Klaviyo's own slider. Where the curve jumps, why the Marketing plan costs a flat $58 more, and what an active profile really is.
Klaviyo review: what the profile meter actually buys
Klaviyo is the deepest store email platform here and the one that pays this site nothing. Its price at every step of its own slider, the flat $58 Marketing premium, and the SMS rate it does not publish.
Klaviyo vs HubSpot: the $3,000 line in the footnote
HubSpot's Professional tier carries a required one-time onboarding fee of $3,000 before the $800 a month begins. Why that settles the comparison for most stores, and the case where it does not.
Nothing here asks you for an email address
Reorderly runs no list, no popup and no quote form — which would be a strange thing for a site about other people’s email software to do without saying so. Read the comparison, check the arithmetic against the vendor pages it cites, and go straight to whichever platform fits.
Asked at the counter
What is the best email platform for an online store?
There is no single answer, because the platforms do not bill for the same thing — so the right one depends on the shape of your store, not on a ranking. Klaviyo charges by active profiles, so a big list you rarely mail is expensive there. Omnisend, Mailchimp, Sender and Moosend charge by contacts. Brevo and Shopify's own email tool charge by emails sent, which suits a large list mailed occasionally. At 5,000 contacts sending 60,000 emails a month, the published monthly rates run from $39 (Sender Standard) to $158 (Klaviyo Marketing) — same store, same sending, four times the price depending on which meter you are standing on.
Is Klaviyo worth it for a small Shopify store?
Only once the revenue from its flows clears the profile meter, which starts higher than most stores expect. Klaviyo's Email plan is $20 a month at 500 active profiles and $100 at 5,000, and its Marketing plan runs a flat $58 a month above that at every step up to 10,000 profiles. A new store with 500 contacts can run the same four flows — cart, browse, post-purchase, reorder — on Sender at $9 or Omnisend at $16. Klaviyo earns its price on segmentation and predictive data, not on the basic flows. Prices read at klaviyo.com/pricing on 24 September 2026.
How much does abandoned-cart email cost to run?
The flow itself is free on every platform on this site — what you pay for is the plan tier that unlocks automation and the meter your list sits on. Sender's free plan covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month including automation, which is genuinely enough to run a cart sequence at no cost. Shopify's own email tool gives 10,000 emails a month free, then charges $1 per 1,000 more. Paid entry points at 500 contacts are $9 (Sender Standard), $9 monthly or $7 annually (Moosend), $16 (Omnisend Standard) and $20 (Klaviyo Email, list price).
What does SMS add on top of email?
Enough to change the decision, and almost nobody publishes a full rate card. Omnisend is the clearest of the platforms here: it advertises SMS "starting at $0.007/SMS" and its US estimator shows $50 buying 5,882 messages, a volume rate of $0.0085 each. Klaviyo does not publish a per-message rate on its pricing page or its SMS page, and Brevo says only that SMS price depends on volume and destination. So SMS is best treated as a separate budget you size yourself, not a checkbox on a plan — and this site prints no per-message figure for any platform that does not publish one.
Why does Reorderly not score these platforms out of ten?
Because it has not run them. This site reads vendors' published pricing pages and documentation carefully — every billing toggle, panel by panel, in a US-configured browser — and that supports statements about price, plan limits and what each meter counts. It does not support a score, which would imply hands-on testing that did not happen. So there is no rating field anywhere in this site's content, no open rates, no deliverability figures and no "we tested" claim. What each page gives instead is who a platform suits, who it does not, and the arithmetic to check that for your own store.