Klaviyo review: what the profile meter actually buys

Klaviyo is the most capable email platform in this comparison for an online store, and the most expensive way to send a small number of emails to a large number of people. Both of those are consequences of the same design decision: it charges for active profiles rather than for contacts or for sending.

Klaviyo pays this site nothing. It runs partner programmes for agencies and technology vendors, not for publishers, so there is no commission available here at any price. Everything below is the assessment with nothing riding on it.

What an active profile is, and why it decides your bill

Klaviyo's meter counts people who have engaged with your store recently rather than everyone on file. The immediate effect is appealing: a long dormant tail of old customers eventually stops being billable, where a contact-metered platform would charge for them every month forever.

The effect that catches stores out is the reverse. You do not fully control the number. A seasonal rush, a viral product, a well-performing ad campaign — anything that makes a lot of people engage at once raises the profile count and therefore the bill, whether or not you sent them anything. A contact list can be pruned on purpose; an active-profile count moves with your own success.

The price at every step of the slider

Klaviyo's pricing page has an active-profiles slider. Driving it step by step gives the following, read on 24 September 2026:

Klaviyo monthly rates by active profiles, read at klaviyo.com/pricing on 24 September 2026, in US dollars. The final column is arithmetic on the two before it, not a figure Klaviyo publishes.

The flat $58 is the interesting part, and it is not something Klaviyo advertises. From 500 profiles all the way to 10,000, the Marketing plan costs exactly fifty-eight dollars a month more than the Email plan, regardless of list size. As a proportion that is enormous at the bottom — nearly four times the price at 500 profiles — and modest at 10,000, where it is under forty per cent. Above 10,000 the premium starts widening again.

So the sensible reading is: if you want what the Marketing plan contains, the worst time to buy it is when your list is small.

The dollar on the pricing page

At 500 profiles the Email card headlines $1, with $20 struck through and a flag reading $19 OFF. The footnote says: "Limited Time: Get $19 off your first month on the $20 email plan." So the ongoing rate is $20 and the dollar is a single month.

There is a second thing on that page which does not resolve. The same $19 OFF flag sits on the Marketing card too, showing $59 against $78 — but the footnote beneath it describes the offer as applying to "the $20 email plan". Whether a Marketing subscriber gets $19 off their first month, or the flag is displaying an offer that belongs to the other column, the page does not say. Both figures are reported here as they were read, and no rule is invented to connect them.

SMS: the gap in the published record

Klaviyo sells mobile messaging and does not publish a per-message rate anywhere this site could reach. The pricing page lists "$5 of mobile messages/mo" as an inclusion on the Email and Marketing plans and "Mobile messaging $5/month" against the free column, which tells you an allowance exists without telling you what a message costs.

Three addresses were checked on 24 September 2026: klaviyo.com/pricing/sms and klaviyo.com/pricing/sms-pricing both returned a 404, and klaviyo.com/sms-marketing rendered fully with no rate on it. So no Klaviyo per-message figure appears anywhere on this site. For a store choosing a platform partly on SMS economics, that absence is itself the finding — Omnisend publishes from $0.007 a message and a stated volume rate of $0.0085.

What the money actually buys

Klaviyo's published feature set is the deepest here for stores specifically, and it is worth being precise about what sits where. The Email plan carries 350+ integrations, A/B testing, an audience and conversion dashboard, and removal of Klaviyo branding. The Marketing plan adds mobile push and in-app messages, predictive analytics, onsite personalisation, product recommendations, loyalty rewards, order tracking, a customer self-service hub, and social engagement data.

Predictive analytics and onsite personalisation are the ones a store cannot easily assemble elsewhere at this price. If your flows already earn meaningful money and the next gain is going to come from segmenting better rather than sending more, that is what the profile meter is buying. If your flows are four sequences that fire on a trigger, you are paying for a machine you are not running.

Where the free plan stops being useful

Klaviyo's free tier is 250 active profiles and 500 emails a month, with email support for the first sixty days only. It also carries Klaviyo branding on outgoing email, which the plan comparison lists as removed on the paid tiers.

Five hundred emails a month is two sends to a 250-person list. That is a trial rather than a plan, and it is worth saying so directly because the free tiers in this category differ by more than an order of magnitude: Sender's covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month with automation included, and Shopify's own tool gives any Shopify store 10,000 emails a month indefinitely. A store with no budget that starts on Klaviyo's free plan will run out of it during its first real campaign.

The free tier does include generative AI for subject lines, basic segmentation, sign-up forms, reports and social auto-replies, so it is a fair way to see the interface before paying. It is not a way to run a store.

Klaviyo priced against the six other platforms a store would consider is in the main comparison, and the profile meter itself is taken apart separately.