Store email, compared by the meter each platform actually bills you on

Seven platforms will sell an online store email, and they do not bill for the same thing. Klaviyo charges by active profiles, Omnisend and Mailchimp and Sender and Moosend charge by contacts, and Brevo and Shopify's own email tool charge by emails sent. Work out which meter your store is standing on and the shortlist mostly picks itself.

Every price below was read at the vendor's own pricing page on 24 September 2026, in a browser configured for the United States, with each billing toggle opened panel by panel rather than trusted as it loaded. Three of those pages open on a discounted panel by default and one headlines a first-month offer, so the figure a visitor sees first is often not the figure they will pay. Where a vendor publishes no number, this page says so rather than estimating one.

The three meters, and which one your store is on

The meter matters more than the sticker price, because it decides how your bill behaves as the store grows. A profile meter charges for every person who has interacted with you recently, whether or not you mail them. A contact meter charges for the size of the list and usually bundles a send allowance on top. An emails-sent meter barely cares how large the list is.

That produces a result worth sitting with: the same store, sending the same campaigns, can cost four times as much on one platform as another purely because of which thing is being counted.

The four flows every store builds, and what they need

Almost every store ends up running the same four automated sequences, and they are worth naming because they determine which plan tier you actually need, not which platform's marketing you liked.

• Abandoned cart — someone added to the basket and left. This is the flow with the clearest job, and every platform on this page can run it, including on some free plans.
• Browse abandonment — someone looked at a product and left without adding anything. This needs on-site behaviour tracking, which is where the cheaper tiers start dropping away.
• Post-purchase — the order confirmation's follow-up: how to use the thing, when it ships, what goes with it.
• Reorder or replenishment — for anything consumable, a nudge timed to when the last one runs out. This needs purchase history and a delay step, so it is the flow most likely to require a mid tier.

Cart and post-purchase are available almost everywhere. Browse abandonment and a genuine reorder flow are what push a store off an entry plan, and that is the upgrade to budget for.

A small store: 500 contacts

At 500 contacts every platform here is cheap, which makes this the tier where the meter is easiest to ignore and the differences are mostly about free allowances. Sender's free plan is the outlier: it covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, automation included, which is more than most new stores need in their first year.

Entry pricing at 500 contacts, read at each vendor's own pricing page on 24 September 2026, in US dollars. "List" means the rate after any introductory offer ends.

The same store at 5,000 contacts

This is where the meters separate. Take a store with 5,000 contacts sending roughly 60,000 emails a month — about twelve sends per contact, which is the allowance Omnisend, Mailchimp and Sender all attach to their mid plan. The published monthly rates spread from $39 to $158.

A store with 5,000 contacts sending about 60,000 emails a month. Every figure read at the vendor's own page on 24 September 2026, in US dollars. Brevo is matched on the send volume rather than the contact count, because that is the unit it bills.

Two things in that table are worth pulling out. Brevo includes 500,000 contacts at this send volume, so a large list mailed occasionally is priced quite differently there than anywhere else. And Omnisend's own Pro plan is $90 against Standard's $81 — nine dollars for unlimited sending and SMS, a gap that was $15 at 2,500 contacts and keeps narrowing as the list grows.

What the headline price is not

Four of these pricing pages present a number that is not the ongoing rate, and each does it differently. None of this is hidden exactly, but all of it is easy to miss.

Klaviyo: a dollar that is one month

At 500 active profiles Klaviyo's Email card headlines $1, with $20 struck through and a $19 OFF flag. The footnote says the offer is $19 off the first month of the $20 plan, so $20 is the rate from month two. No renewal figure beyond that struck-through list price appears on the page.

There is also a gap the page does not reconcile: the same $19 OFF flag sits on the Marketing card, showing $59 against $78, while the footnote beneath it describes the offer as applying to "the $20 email plan". Both figures are printed here as read. This page does not pick one, because picking one would mean inventing the rule that connects them.

Omnisend: the panel it opens on

Omnisend's pricing page loads with "Pay 3 months upfront (save 30%)" already switched on, showing Standard at $11.20 and Pro at $41.30 a month. Switch it off and the monthly rates are $16 and $59. The vendor's own arithmetic is consistent — $16 across three months is $48, less thirty per cent is $33.60, which is $11.20 a month — but a visitor who never touches the toggle is comparing a prepaid rate against other platforms' ordinary ones.

Mailchimp: half price for a year

Every Mailchimp card shows a rate "for 12 months" and a "then, starts at" figure underneath. At every contact tier read, the second number was exactly twice the first. Budgeting from the headline means budgeting for half of year two.

Sender and Moosend: where annual billing does and does not help

Sender's page opens on annual billing showing $6.30 a month, which is a thirty per cent discount the page describes as valid for first-time users. Underneath it, the list annual price is $108 a year for Standard — exactly $9 a month, the same as paying monthly. Annual billing at Sender does not reduce the standing rate; the first-year offer does.

Moosend does discount for annual billing, and rounds the result to whole dollars, which makes its "Save 20%" headline approximate at small list sizes. At 500 contacts the annual rate is $7 against $9 monthly, which is a saving of about twenty-two per cent; at 1,000 contacts it is $13 against $16, closer to nineteen. The discount lands on exactly twenty per cent at the larger round figures. The vendor's numbers are quoted here as published and the percentage is described as rounded, because that is what it is.

What SMS actually costs on top

SMS is the second channel most stores add, and it is priced separately from every email plan on this page. Only one platform here publishes rates plainly enough to plan against.

Omnisend advertises SMS from $0.007 a message, and its own United States estimator shows $50 buying 5,882 messages — a volume rate of $0.0085 each, which is the figure it prints beside the estimate. On its Pro plan, SMS credits are added to the email subscription rather than bundled into it.

Klaviyo does not publish a per-message rate. Its pricing page shows "$5 of mobile messages" included as a plan inclusion and lists mobile messaging at $5 a month on the free column, but no rate card appears there, and the SMS pricing addresses that might carry one return a 404. Brevo says only that SMS price depends on volume and destination. Sender bundles "Free SMS ($10/month)" into its Professional plan without publishing a per-message rate either.

So the honest planning advice is to treat SMS as a separate budget you size against your own send volume, and to get a rate confirmed in writing before you commit to a platform because of it. No per-message figure appears anywhere on this site for a platform that does not publish one.

Shopify stores and WooCommerce stores

If the store runs on Shopify, its own email tool is the cheapest starting point by a wide margin and deserves a straight look before anything else: 10,000 emails a month free, then $1 per 1,000, with no contact meter at all. It is a modest tool rather than a deep one, and Shopify says rates drop again above 300,000 emails a month without publishing what they become.

For WooCommerce, the calculation is different because nothing is bundled. Every platform here integrates with WooCommerce, so the choice is made on the meter and on how much of the store's behavioural data the plugin passes across. That is covered separately.

Which one, for which store

Klaviyo is not on that list, and it is worth saying why plainly rather than by omission. It is the most capable platform here on segmentation, predictive data and the depth of what a store can trigger on, and for a store whose flows already earn real money that capability is what the profile meter is buying. It is also the one platform in this comparison that cannot pay this site a penny, which is exactly why it gets recommended on merit where it fits and is not quietly left out.