Shopify email apps: what is worth paying for, and when

For a Shopify store the cheapest starting point is Shopify's own email tool, which gives 10,000 emails a month free and then charges $1 per 1,000. Whether anything else is worth paying for depends on one question: do you need to trigger messages off what people browse, or only off what they buy?

This page is about email apps for Shopify stores. It does not price the Shopify platform itself or rank Shopify's app ecosystem generally — those are different subjects and out of scope here.

Start with the one that is already there

Shopify Email — now presented under Shopify Messaging — is free for the first 10,000 emails every month, then $1 per 1,000 additional emails, which the page prints as $0.001 per email and labels explicitly in US dollars. There is no contact meter at all: the size of your customer list does not enter into the price.

It publishes ready-made automations including welcome, winback and upsell sequences, a drag-and-drop editor, templates that pull products and prices out of your store, and express checkout buttons inside emails. Shopify also says rates drop again above 300,000 emails a month without publishing what they become, so that ceiling is unpriced here.

For a store sending four flows and a weekly campaign to a few thousand people, that is very likely under the free allowance, and paying nothing is a difficult price to beat.

What the free 10,000 actually covers

It is worth converting that allowance into store terms rather than leaving it abstract. Ten thousand emails a month is a weekly campaign to about 2,300 people, or a weekly campaign to 1,500 people plus a decent volume of automated flow messages on top.

Past that, the arithmetic stays gentle. A store sending 60,000 emails a month pays for 50,000 of them at $1 per 1,000 — fifty dollars. The same 60,000 emails to a 5,000-contact list costs $81 on Omnisend Standard, $100 on Klaviyo's Email plan and $100 at Mailchimp's list rate.

When to pay for something else

Email apps a Shopify store would realistically consider, priced for a 5,000-contact store sending about 60,000 emails a month. Read at each vendor's own page on 24 September 2026, in US dollars.

Two of those are cheaper than Shopify's own tool at this volume, which is not the result most roundups reach. Sender at $39 and Moosend at $38 on annual billing both undercut the $50 that 60,000 emails costs on Shopify Email, and both add triggers Shopify's tool does not publish.

The feature that actually justifies paying

Browse abandonment. Shopify Email's published automations are built around welcome, winback and upsell — events anchored on a customer relationship or a purchase. Triggering on what someone looked at and did not add to the basket needs on-site behaviour tracking, and that is the line the paid platforms sit on the other side of.

Moosend publishes a "when someone browses any page" trigger and a "when someone views any product" trigger by name on its feature table. Omnisend and Klaviyo build their ecommerce automation around the same class of event. If your product range is one people research before buying, that is the capability worth fifty dollars a month; if you sell one thing people buy immediately, it is not.

The two ways a Shopify store's bill grows

Because Shopify Email charges for sending and the paid apps mostly charge for the list, the two move for different reasons — and a store can find itself on the wrong side of that without changing anything it does.

On Shopify Email, the bill grows when you send more: a second weekly campaign roughly doubles it. The customer list can grow indefinitely without costing anything. On a contact meter, the reverse holds — sending more costs nothing until you hit the allowance, and every new customer adds to the monthly rate permanently, including the ones who bought once and never returned.

Stores that collect addresses aggressively and mail conservatively are therefore much cheaper on Shopify Email than a headline comparison suggests. Stores that mail a small list frequently are the ones where a paid contact-metered app starts looking sensible, because their sending volume is high relative to their list.

SMS on a Shopify store

Shopify Messaging covers SMS campaigns alongside email, and its pricing page presents the two under one "pay for what you use" heading without breaking out a per-message SMS rate, so none is printed here.

Of the paid apps, Omnisend is the one that publishes rates: from $0.007 a message, with a United States estimator showing $50 buying 5,882 messages at a stated $0.0085 each. Klaviyo publishes no per-message rate at all. If SMS is going to be a real channel rather than an occasional one, that difference is worth more than the monthly gap between them.

What Shopify does not publish

Two gaps are worth naming, because both sit exactly where a growing store will meet them.

The first is the volume tier. Shopify says that after the first 300,000 emails a month you automatically pay lower rates on every additional email, and links elsewhere for the detail rather than printing it. So a store planning past that point cannot model its bill from the pricing page, and no figure for it appears on this site.

The second is SMS. Shopify Messaging covers SMS campaigns alongside email under a single "pay for what you use" heading, without a per-message rate on the page read here. For a store weighing SMS seriously, that is a number to obtain before committing rather than after.

All seven platforms, including the ones that are not Shopify-specific, are priced side by side at two store sizes in the main comparison. Stores on WooCommerce have a different calculation.