You are billed for contacts you never email

This is the mechanism behind almost every complaint about Klaviyo, and it is worth understanding before you compare prices.

Klaviyo’s free plan covers 250 profiles and 500 emails a month. Above that, pricing steps up by the number of profiles stored in your account. A profile counts whether it is an engaged customer, a three-year-old cart abandoner, or someone who unsubscribed in 2023.

So a shop with 50,000 profiles and an active segment of 6,000 pays for 50,000. Growth inflates the bill automatically, and the only lever you control is deleting people, which nobody wants to do in case they come back.

Brevo and Listmonk invert this: you pay for what you send. For a large, quiet list that single difference can be larger than every feature gap combined.

Klaviyo alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 14 September 2026.

Work out which number you are buying

Email tools are priced three ways, and picking the wrong shape costs more than picking the wrong brand.

Per contact stored. Klaviyo, Omnisend, Drip, MailerLite. Simple to predict, and punishing if your list is large and your sending is occasional.

Per email sent. Brevo. Better if you store a lot and mail a little. Worse if you mail your whole list weekly.

Per send, at cost. Listmonk plus a provider like Amazon SES. Cheapest by a wide margin at volume, with no automation builder and no one to call.

Do the arithmetic on your own two numbers, list size and monthly sends, before you look at a single feature list. For most shops that calculation alone picks the tool.

What Klaviyo is genuinely good at

Being fair about this matters, because leaving for the wrong reason is expensive.

Its ecommerce data model is the best here. It ingests order, product and browsing data from Shopify deeply enough to build segments like “bought category X twice, not in 90 days, high predicted value” without exporting anything. Predicted lifetime value and churn risk are real features, not badges.

It also has the largest agency ecosystem in ecommerce email, which means hiring someone who already knows it is easy and cheap.

If you use that segmentation, Klaviyo earns its price and the cheaper tools will disappoint you. If you send a weekly newsletter and three automated flows, you are paying for a data platform to do a mail merge.

Moving a list without destroying deliverability

The technical risk in switching email tools is not losing data. It is landing in spam.

Your sending reputation is tied to the sending domain and to the provider’s IP addresses. Move 40,000 subscribers to a new platform and send to all of them on day one, and mailbox providers see a sudden flood from an unfamiliar source. Open rates drop and stay dropped.

The correct process: set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the new tool before sending anything. Export your list with engagement data if you can. Then warm up, sending first to your most engaged segment, perhaps the people who opened something in the last 30 days, and widen over two to three weeks.

Also export your flows as screenshots before you cancel. Automation logic never transfers between platforms, and rebuilding from memory is how sequences end up broken. If you are also comparing general-purpose email tools, our Mailchimp alternatives guide covers that side.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 14 September 2026, not copied from another round-up.

For email platforms we state the billing basis first, because per contact, per send and per email behave completely differently as a list grows. We check what the free tier caps in both dimensions, contacts and monthly sends, since a generous contact allowance with a tiny send limit is not a usable free plan.

We also note whether automation is included on the free or entry tier or reserved for a higher one, as that is the most common upsell in this category. We read current Reddit threads for each tool, so the views here are from this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.