Klaviyo vs Mailchimp pricing: what a store actually pays

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp pricing is the comparison most store owners end up making, and the price pages make it harder than it should be. Both start at $20 a month, both scale by contacts, and neither number is what you will pay in a year. This article puts the published tiers side by side at the list sizes stores actually have, explains the three rules that move the bill (send caps, how contacts are counted, and what happens the month you outgrow a tier), and then shows the same audience on a flat rate. Every competitor figure below was read from klaviyo.com/pricing and mailchimp.com/pricing on 12 September 2026, in US dollars, billed monthly. Prices change; check the pages before you sign anything.

How Klaviyo prices

Klaviyo has one paid email plan, and its price is set by active profiles. Since February 2025 that means every profile in your account that can be emailed and is not suppressed, whether or not that person ever opted in to marketing; someone who typed an email into your checkout and never subscribed is an active profile. Suppressed and unsubscribed profiles stop counting once the suppression has processed, which Klaviyo says can take up to 72 hours. The free plan covers 250 profiles and 500 sends a month. Paid tiers start at $20 for 500 profiles and step up in small increments: $60 at 2,500, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, then a steep climb to $350 at 15,000, $400 at 25,000, $720 at 50,000 and $1,380 at 100,000. Above 150,000 profiles it is custom pricing.

Two rules sit behind those numbers. First, every tier includes roughly 10 sends per profile per month: 250,000 emails at the 25,000 tier. Go over and you either pay flexible overages at your plan's unit rate or get auto-upgraded to the next tier. Second, your plan must cover your active profile count at the end of each billing cycle; if it does not, Klaviyo moves you to a compliant tier automatically. Plans are billed monthly and there is no published yearly discount. Marketing Analytics, the deeper reporting product, is a separate subscription from $100 a month.

How Mailchimp prices

Mailchimp has three paid plans and the one a store needs is Standard: Essentials caps automation flows at four steps, which rules out a proper abandoned cart or post-purchase sequence, and Premium starts at $350 for 10,000 contacts with unlimited seats and phone support. Standard is $20 for up to 500 contacts, $60 at 2,500, $100 at 5,000, $135 at 10,000, $230 at 15,000, $310 at 25,000, $450 at 50,000 and $800 at 100,000, which is the plan's ceiling. The free plan is 250 contacts and 500 sends a month with a 250 per day cap and no automations.

Mailchimp's rules are different in two ways that matter. The send cap is 12 emails per contact per month on Standard (300,000 at 25,000 contacts), and exceeding it or your contact limit does not pause sending: Mailchimp adds an overage charge to the bill. And the contact count includes subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contactsalike. Someone who unsubscribed two years ago still counts toward your tier until you archive or delete them. The page also shows a 15 percent discount for the first 12 months at 10,000 contacts and up, and prices vary by region; the figures here are the US list.

The two plans side by side

Here is the plan a store would actually pick on each platform, at typical list sizes, next to the equivalent MailingPlatform plan. Our prices are in euro, billed monthly; yearly billing is about 20 percent less. Klaviyo and Mailchimp are US dollars as published.

Read the table honestly and it says three things. Below 3,000 contacts all three cost about the same, and between 3,001 and 5,000 both Klaviyo and Mailchimp are cheaper than our Professional plan on the sticker. At 10,000 the prices converge ($150 and $135 against €129). From 15,000 upward the per-contact model pulls away fast: at 25,000 contacts Klaviyo is roughly three times the flat rate and Mailchimp roughly two and a half times, and at 100,000 the gap is $1,380 or $800 against €299. If your list is small and will stay small, the price is not the reason to switch. If it is growing, it is.

What the sticker price leaves out

• The send cap decides your calendar. 10 or 12 sends per contact sounds generous until you run a weekly newsletter plus abandoned cart, welcome, post-purchase and back in stock flows. Stores that send more than twice a week during peak season hit the Klaviyo cap and pay overages or get bumped a tier for the whole month.
• Dead contacts are a line item. On Mailchimp every unsubscribed and never-confirmed contact sits in your tier until you archive them by hand. On Klaviyo the checkout-only profiles who never subscribed count as active. Either way a store is often paying a tier above its real subscriber count until someone cleans up. Our list cleaning guide covers the hygiene side; the billing side is that suppressed contacts never count here.
• Tier jumps are not smooth. Klaviyo goes from $150 at 10,000 to $350 at 15,000: crossing 10,001 profiles more than doubles the bill, and the move is automatic at the end of the cycle. Mailchimp's step from 10,000 to 15,000 is $135 to $230.
• Features are a tier too. Klaviyo's deeper analytics is a separate $100 a month subscription; Mailchimp gates multi-step flows behind Standard. Every MailingPlatform plan has every feature, so the only thing that moves the price is audience size.

What a flat rate actually means here

MailingPlatform prices by audience size band: Starter is €39 a month for up to 3,000 active subscribers, Professional €129 for up to 25,000, Scale €299 for up to 100,000, and Unlimited €499 above that. Every plan includes every feature: all automation triggers, segmentation, the AI builder, signup forms, validation, the REST API and the Shopify and WooCommerce apps. Platform sends are unlimited; there is no send cap, no send credits and no overage. Only active, emailable subscribers count, so unsubscribed, bounced, complained and suppressed contacts stay in your account as protection and never appear on the invoice. You can run the flat rate email marketing pricing calculator with your own list size, and the plan and trial details live in the billing help article.

The honest footnote: delivery runs through your own Amazon SES account, so AWS bills the actual sending volume at its list rate, currently $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000 emails depending on the SES plan you choose. A store sending 300,000 emails a month pays AWS roughly $30 to $48 on top of the plan, and in return owns its sender reputation and IP history outright. Add that to the table above and the 25,000 contact comparison becomes about €129 plus $30 against $400 or $310 with a hard cap.

Which one should you pick

Klaviyo is the right choice if SMS is a core revenue channel for you or you rely on its predictive analytics and Customer Hub; nothing here replaces those, and you should pay for them if they earn their keep. Mailchimp is a fine choice for a newsletter-first business with a small, stable list that rarely needs more than four automation steps. MailingPlatform is built for the store in between: a Shopify or WooCommerce shop with a growing list, a full set of flows, a preference for EU-hosted data, and no appetite for a bill that climbs every month the list does. The Klaviyo migration guide and the Mailchimp migration guide say plainly what carries over by CSV (subscribers, tags, custom fields, unsubscribe status) and what you rebuild in an afternoon (flows and templates, from the ready-made workflows and the AI builder).

Whatever you choose, do the arithmetic on your real list: count active subscribers, not total contacts, multiply your planned sends per month by that number, and check it against the cap. That single exercise explains most of the difference between the price page and the invoice. The Shopify email marketing page shows what the store integration does with the data once it is flowing.