SMS for online stores: one platform publishes a rate

Of the platforms an online store would consider, exactly one publishes a per-message SMS rate clearly enough to budget against: Omnisend, from $0.007 a message, with a United States estimator showing $50 buying 5,882 messages at a stated volume rate of $0.0085 each.

Klaviyo, Brevo, Sender and Shopify all sell SMS. None of them publishes a per-message rate on the pages read for this site. That is the single most important thing to know before choosing a platform because of its SMS, and it is why no per-message figure for those four appears anywhere here.

What each platform actually publishes

SMS pricing as published on each vendor's own pages, read on 24 September 2026. "Not published" means no rate appeared on the pages named, with those pages fully rendered.

Three of those five "not published" entries do tell you something useful anyway. Klaviyo and Sender both quantify an inclusion — five dollars of messages a month, ten dollars of SMS a month — which puts a floor on the value without giving you a rate. Brevo says outright that price varies by destination, which is the honest reason a single number is hard to publish: a message to a US number and a message to a European one do not cost the same.

Why SMS is not comparable to email on price

Email pricing on every platform here is a subscription: you pay for a list size or a send allowance and the marginal message costs nothing, or a tenth of a cent on Shopify. SMS is a pass-through cost with a carrier on the other end, which is why it is sold as credits rather than folded into a plan.

The practical consequence is that SMS does not behave like a feature you switch on. At Omnisend's stated US volume rate of $0.0085, one message to a 5,000-person list costs $42.50 — more than half of what that store pays for its entire email plan for the month at Omnisend Standard's $81. A weekly SMS to the same list would cost about $170 a month on top.

That arithmetic is the whole argument for treating SMS as a separate budget line rather than a plan upgrade. It is not that SMS is expensive relative to what it can earn; it is that its cost scales with every send and every recipient, where email's largely does not.

What the vendors claim, and how to read it

Omnisend's own material includes the line "Make an average $79 for every $1 you spend", footnoted as its internal analysis of revenue attributed to email, SMS and push for its paying merchants in 2025, with an explicit caveat that results vary by circumstance, market and region.

That is a vendor's unaudited figure about its own paying customers, which is a self-selecting group. Reorderly publishes no return-on-spend figure of its own and has measured nothing of the kind. The reason for quoting the claim at all is to show what is attached to it in the footnote, because that footnote is where the useful information is — and most such claims in this category carry a similar one.

The same applies to Omnisend's "Same power as Klaviyo. Up to 35% less." Its footnote specifies a comparison between Omnisend's Standard plan and Klaviyo's Marketing plan, excluding SMS and add-ons — a middle tier against an upper one.

Where SMS sits in the four store flows

SMS is not a parallel channel to run everything through; the cost structure above makes that clear enough. It is a channel for the messages where immediacy is worth forty-two dollars a send.

Of the four flows a store builds — cart, browse, post-purchase and reorder — the cart reminder is the one most often put on SMS, because the window is short and the recipient has already shown intent. Post-purchase shipping notices are the other common case, and those are frequently transactional rather than marketing messages, which is a distinction worth keeping clear with your provider.

Browse abandonment on SMS is a harder argument, because the recipient has shown less intent and the cost per send is identical. A store working out where to spend the channel is usually better served putting it on the flow with the highest intent rather than the highest volume — which is the opposite of how email is usually allocated.

Before you commit to a platform for its SMS

• Get the rate in writing for the countries you actually send to. Brevo is right that destination changes the price, and a rate quoted for the US tells you little about elsewhere.
• Check whether credits expire. None of the pages read here stated an expiry for SMS credits either way, so no claim is made about it — which means it is a question to ask rather than an answer to assume.
• Work out the cost of one send to your full list, the way the chart above does, before deciding how often to use the channel.
• Remember the inclusion is not the rate. Klaviyo's "$5 of mobile messages" and Sender's "Free SMS ($10/month)" tell you what you get, not what the next message costs.

How SMS fits into the four flows a store runs is covered in the abandoned-cart guide, and all seven platforms' email pricing is in the main comparison.