Klaviyo withholds nothing on free, and holds 250 people
Two hundred and fifty active profiles and 500 emails a month is Klaviyo's free plan, one of the two tightest in email marketing (as of July 2026). For a store with any traffic at all, that is about a fortnight.
What makes it worth a page anyway is the shape of it. Klaviyo does not strip features out of the free tier the way most of this category does. Flows, segmentation, sign-up forms and A/B testing are all there. It meters volume instead, so the question is not what you can build, it is how long you get to run it and what happens the moment you cross either number.
Facts checked July 2026
Klaviyo free plan at a glance
- Free plan score
- 47/100Limited
- Is it really free?
- Not really
Why Klaviyo scores 47, and why its pillars disagree
47 sits in our Limited band, described as a taste of the product rather than a way to get the job done, and for once that description fits exactly. What the total hides is the widest spread of any tool in this category: one pillar is near the bottom of the file and another is the highest in it, and both readings are true at the same time.
The useful comparison is Mailchimp, which scores 29 on almost identical numbers. The caps are the same order of size. The difference is that Mailchimp also withholds A/B testing, scheduling and its journey builder from free users, while Klaviyo withholds none of that and simply runs out of room. Eighteen points is what our weighting thinks that difference is worth, and the reasoning under each pillar sets out the rest.
47/100
Limited
The whole product for free, metered to 250 profiles and 500 emails.
- Free plan generosity35% of the score
20/100
250 active profiles and 500 emails a month (as of July 2026), which is the tightest pair of numbers in this category alongside Mailchimp's. Both caps bite at once: 500 sends across a full 250 profiles is two emails each. A working store passes 250 profiles in a fortnight, and there is no daily sub-cap, which is the only reason this scores a shade above Mailchimp's 16.
- Feature depth for the category25% of the score
84/100
The highest in this file, because Klaviyo caps volume instead of features. Flows, automations, segmentation, sign-up forms and A/B testing are all on the free plan, and the ecommerce data layer underneath them, order and browse events feeding one profile per shopper, is something nothing else in this category does at any price. What free gives up is branding removal, custom hosted pages and human support, not capability.
- Freedom and honesty20% of the score
42/100
Klaviyo branding sits in both your email footers and your sign-up forms, email support stops after 60 days, and the quota behaviour is unusually hard: cross 250 profiles and you cannot send at all until you are back under, and Klaviyo warns that flow email deliverability can fall when you hit the 500-email ceiling. Credit where it is due, Klaviyo publishes a guide to migrating off, which almost nobody does, but a profile export leaves event data and message history behind and flow logic cannot be exported at all.
- What free users report20% of the score
52/100
Three providers and a genuine split: Capterra 4.6 from 531 reviews (read off the page), G2 4.6 from about 1,355 (snippet-sourced), and Trustpilot 1.8 from about 362 (snippet-sourced). We checked whether the gap was a fetch artifact and it is not. The honest reading is a venue difference: the B2B sites collect reviews from practitioners who chose the tool, while Trustpilot is an open complaint venue. None of the three is about the free tier, so averaging them would invent a number, and we score at the middle instead.
Scored July 2026. How we calculate the free plan score.
The two limits are 250 profiles and 500 emails
Both caps bind at once, which is unusual, and what happens when you reach them is worth knowing before you import anything (as of July 2026):
- 250 active profiles. Cross it and you cannot send at all until you are back under 250 or you upgrade. It is a lockout rather than a warning.
- 500 emails a month. Reach it and sending stops until the month turns over. Klaviyo also warns that flow email deliverability can fall when you hit this limit, which matters because flows are the reason people choose it.
- $5 a month of mobile messaging, metered in dollars rather than credits, and unused spend does not roll over.
- Klaviyo branding stays in your email footers and in your sign-up forms, so it is visible to people who never opened an email.
- Email support for your first 60 days, then community support only.
Five hundred sends across a full 250 profiles is two emails per person a month. Run the three flows Klaviyo is normally bought for, abandoned cart, browse abandonment and post-purchase, and between them they will spend that allowance on a few dozen shoppers.
One thing that is not a limit, and worth correcting because most write-ups say the opposite: suppressed and unsubscribed profiles are not billable, and Klaviyo's own documentation says they are not counted. The profiles that catch people out are the ones who never consented, because somebody who abandoned a cart without opting in is still mailable and therefore still counts.
The add-on prices we can quote, and the plan prices we cannot
We have to be straight about a gap. Klaviyo's pricing page renders its rates through an interactive configurator, and we could not get a single per-tier figure out of it. Our rule is that a price has to be readable on the vendor's own site or it does not appear here, so we are quoting no Klaviyo plan price at all. Figures do circulate on third-party listings, and one of those listings is provably out of date in the section we could check, which is why we are not repeating any of them.
What we can describe first-hand is the model, and the model is what decides your bill. You pay for active profiles held rather than profiles emailed, which has been the case since 18 February 2025, and your plan includes roughly ten times your profile maximum in monthly sends. A store holding 20,000 profiles and mailing 8,000 of them is billed for 20,000. Suppression rather than deletion is the lever, since suppressed profiles are not counted.
Three add-ons are published as flat prices and those we are happy to quote: Customer Hub at $20 a month for up to 10,000 active profiles, Helpdesk at $10 a month for up to 50 tickets, and Customer Agent at $50 a month for up to 75 conversations (as of July 2026).
The thing people upgrade for is not a feature. It is the two hundred and fifty-first profile.
Free
Free
The whole product rather than a cut-down build: flows, automations, segmentation, sign-up forms and A/B testing are all included
250 active profiles, 500 emails per month, $5 a month of mobile messaging, Klaviyo branding in email footers and forms, email support for the first 60 days then community support
Free
Scales with the number of active profiles you hold, with an included send allowance of roughly ten times your plan's profile maximum. Adds branding removal, custom hosted pages, chat support and a dedicated account manager at the top
Klaviyo publishes no static rate card. Its pricing page quotes rates through an interactive configurator, which we could not read a figure out of, so we quote no plan price here
Add-ons
Free
Customer Hub, Helpdesk and Customer Agent are sold separately from the marketing plans, and these are the only Klaviyo prices we could verify first-party
Customer Hub $20/month up to 10,000 active profiles, Helpdesk $10/month up to 50 tickets, Customer Agent $50/month up to 75 conversations
As of July 2026. Check current pricing on the Klaviyo pricing page.
Is Klaviyo really free? Only as a look at the product
The free plan is there to show you the product, not to get your work done.
No, and our answer is taster, which is where a score of 47 lands anyway. Klaviyo's free plan exists so a brand can watch the flows work before committing, and it is honest about being that: free forever, nothing switched off, and small enough that anyone with a real store passes it quickly.
Who can genuinely live here: someone evaluating Klaviyo against another platform, a pre-launch shop with a waitlist under 250 people, an agency building a demo for a client. That first 250 is the full product with nothing held back, which is a better taster than most of this category offers.
Who cannot: any store with traffic, because profiles accumulate whether you mail them or not. Anyone running the three flows Klaviyo is bought for, since 500 sends covers a few dozen shoppers between them. Anyone who needs an unbranded sign-up form, since the branding shows up there as well as in the footer.
If it is the profile-based bill rather than the free plan that brought you here, Brevo's free plan never charges for stored contacts at all, and free Klaviyo alternatives is honest about which tools can do the ecommerce job and which cannot. The best free email marketing tools ranks the category on both caps.
Frequently asked questions about Klaviyo
What are Klaviyo's free plan limits?
250 active profiles and 500 emails a month, plus $5 a month to spend on mobile messaging (as of July 2026). Klaviyo branding stays in your email footers and your sign-up forms, and email support runs for the first 60 days before dropping to community support.
What happens if I go over Klaviyo's free limits?
You stop sending. Go over 250 profiles and you cannot send again until you are back under the cap or you upgrade. Reach 500 emails in a month and sending is barred until the next month, and Klaviyo warns that flow email deliverability can fall when you hit that ceiling (as of July 2026).
Why don't you list Klaviyo's paid plan prices?
Because we could not read them. Klaviyo quotes paid rates through an interactive configurator on its pricing page rather than a static rate card, and we only publish prices we can verify on the vendor's own site. The add-on prices we do quote, $20, $10 and $50 a month, are published as flat figures (as of July 2026).
Where to go next
If this free plan does not stretch far enough, these are the tools we would look at instead.