Understanding how Klaviyo billing works

You will learn

Learn how Klaviyo bills customers for profiles, emails, SMS, reviews, and CDP. 

How Klaviyo billing works

All Klaviyo plans are billed on a monthly basis, which starts the day you begin a paid plan. 

There are 4 plans available: 

• Profile and email (i.e., the base plan)

• SMS 

• Reviews 
• CDP

Profile and email (i.e., the base plan)

Every Klaviyo user must have a base plan, which is contingent on the number of active profiles you have in your account as well as the number of emails you send.

Active profiles are defined as the profiles in your Klaviyo account who you can email and who are not suppressed. Your plan must allow enough profiles to accommodate the number of active profiles in your account, or you may be automatically upgraded the next billing cycle.

As for email, the limit is 10 times the maximum number of profiles in your plan.

For instance, if you have a plan that allows 500 profiles, you can send up to 5,000 emails to any active profile per billing cycle. It can be an equal amount (10 to each) or send more to certain profiles, and only 1 to others.

SMS

Klaviyo SMS is not included as part of the profiles and email plans. You must have a separate SMS plan to send text messages with Klaviyo. 

The SMS plans are dependent entirely on message credits; i.e., how many text messages you want to send per month.

Note that the number of credits required when sending text messages depends on 2 key factors: 

• Where the subscribers are located 
• The type of messages you send

The table below breaks down the number of credits for each location and use case. 

Note that failed deliveries do count toward your SMS billing plan's limits. Further, short codes are billed separately from the SMS plan. 

As an example, say you want to send one SMS to 100 people; half are in the US, while the other half are in Canada. In this case, the campaign would cost 200 credits. 

Reviews

By using this plan, you can collect, display, and manage your product reviews. 

Klaviyo reviews pricing is based on how many orders are placed in your store each month. For example, the chart below outlines the first 6 Klaviyo reviews pricing tiers. 

Larger plans are available. Please contact sales at sales@klaviyo.com. 

What counts as an “order”? 

Each fulfilled order counts toward your Klaviyo reviews plan. You can make a product, customer, or order ineligible for reviews by applying the klaviyo_reviews_exclude tag to that item in your ecommerce platform. 

Orders that are ineligible for review do not count toward your plan limit. Consider this example: your store offers gift cards and you don’t want to collect reviews for them. You apply the klaviyo_reviews_exclude tag to the gift card product in your store. 

• A customer purchases a gift card and nothing else. They do not receive a review request, and their order doesn’t count towards your Klaviyo reviews plan. 
• A customer purchases a gift card and a coffee mug in the same order. They receive a review request for the coffee mug, not the gift card. This order does count toward your Klaviyo reviews plan. 
• Your family member orders a bag of espresso beans from you. You previously applied the klaviyo_reviews_exclude tag to their profile in your store, since you don’t want a review from a family member to bias your data. They do not receive a review request, and their order doesn’t count toward your Klaviyo reviews plan. 

The klaviyo_reviews_exclude tag does not apply retroactively (i.e., if a review request has already been sent, applying this tag cannot undo that action and it will still count toward your Klaviyo reviews billing plan). Learn more about excluding customers, orders, and products from Klaviyo reviews. 

CDP

Klaviyo’s customer data platform (CDP) is a vertically integrated customer data platform that allows users to more effectively manage and activate their data in Klaviyo, providing user-friendly tools to enrich and transform data, run more advanced reporting and predictive modeling, as well as sync data in Klaviyo with other systems at scale.

Klaviyo CDP is not included in Klaviyo’s base email and profiles plan, and a CDP subscription is required to access the associated functionality.

Since Klaviyo CDP allows you to better understand all customers (not just the ones you send to), the plans are based on total profiles in your Klaviyo account.  

The overall total profile count is the maximum number of profiles associated with your account, regardless of their marketing status and channel (this includes email, SMS, and push profiles today).  Any profile that is being stored and tracked in Klaviyo is represented in this count, including suppressed profiles.

You can view your profile count by going to Audience > Profiles.

What happens if your reach your plan’s limits

What happens when you reach your plan’s limits depends on what type of plan it is: marketing product (such as email, SMS, or reviews) or Klaviyo CDP. 

Marketing products

For marketing products, what happens varies by which limit you reached (i.e., profile or send) as well as your plan type:

• Profile limits
  • Free plans: you cannot send unless you upgrade to a paid plan.
  • Paid plans:
    • During the current billing cycle, you can continue to send as long as you have more emails in your plan.
    • As of the next billing cycle, you may be upgraded to a higher-tiered plan to accommodate the number of active profiles in your account. Learn how you can manage your active profiles.
• Sending limits (i.e., emails, SMS, reviews)
  • Once you hit your sending limits for a plan, you will not be able to send that type of message until you upgrade (manually or auto-upgrade) or your next billing cycle
    • For instance, you cannot send more emails once you meet your email plan limit, although you could still send SMS messages or reviews if you have more sends available in those plans.

If you choose not to upgrade once you reach your sending limit:

• Flows will stop sending.
• Campaigns will not send.
• You cannot reply to SMS conversations.
• Review requests will pause sending.

However, all flows, campaigns, etc. will begin to send again the next billing cycle.

Klaviyo CDP

Klaviyo CDP is priced so that you only pay for what you are using. There is a usage fee for exceeding a plan’s limits. The fee is defined as: the number of profiles that exceed your current tier (in 1,000s) multiplied by the price per 1,000 profiles at the current tier. 

Generally, if you’re using less than 85% of the next tier up, it is more cost-efficient to incur the usage fee. Once you’re using 85% or more of the next tier, it’s better to upgrade.

The fee is applied to the next month’s invoice. 

View your plans

To view your plan, follow these steps: 

1. Click your organization’s name in the bottom left corner.
2. Click Billing.

Once in the Overview tab, you’ll be able to view your plans. 

Downgrade your plan

You can downgrade at any time, but it will take effect as of your next billing cycle. You will finish out your current month's plan before your plan changes. Note that if you upgrade (manually or via auto-upgrade) before the downgrade takes effect, it effectively cancels the downgrade and you would need to request the downgrade again. 

The only time downgrades take effect sooner is if you downgrade to free or close your account and choose for it to take effect immediately.

Klaviyo does not refund downgrades, as stated in our Terms of Service. 

Note that Klaviyo cannot auto-downgrade your plan; if you want to downgrade, you must do so manually. 

Upgrade your plan

All upgrades are permanent until you manually downgrade your plan.

There are several ways you can manually upgrade your plan in Klaviyo, such as by going through the Billing page or via the Campaign Review page. You may also be upgraded automatically if you have auto-upgrade enabled (if you reach your message limit), or when you reach your profile limit.

You will be prompted to upgrade if you reach your plan’s sending limits and don't have auto-upgrade enabled. For instance, if you go to send a campaign and are close to or have hit your plan send limits, you will be prompted to upgrade. Additionally, if you have reached your message limits, you will not be able to send until you upgrade.

Auto-upgrade 

Auto-upgrade is an option to automatically upgrade plans when you reach your message limit. It is only available for the email and profiles plan and SMS plan. 

This feature ensures you don’t hit monthly sending limits so that you can continue to send SMS, email, and automated flows unimpeded. 

What happens after you turn on auto-upgrade is:

1. You either:
   • Reach your plan's message limits (e.g., if your plan allows for 2,000 emails, but you try to send more).
   • Schedule a campaign that will take you over your message limit for the current billing window.
2. Auto-upgrade moves you to the next plan up.
   Note: you can be auto-upgraded at any time in the billing cycle.
3. As soon as the account is upgraded, an email is sent to the owner informing them of this change.
4. Once you're on this next level of plan, you will stay there until you choose to downgrade, upgrade, or are auto-upgraded. You will not be auto-downgraded by Klaviyo.

Include your tax ID on invoices

You can include your tax ID on invoices by updating this manually. Navigate to your Billing Preferences page and add this under Tax ID. All future invoices will then include this information. For more information, head to How to find and update your tax ID in Klaviyo.

Adjust credit card details

Klaviyo does not support multiple credit cards in a single account. If you purchase a plan with a different credit card than the one in your account, this will change the credit card on file. If your payment ever fails, the account owner and billing email will be alerted via email.

For details on how to change the credit card on file, check out our article on how to update your credit card information. To see invoices and other details regarding your recent charges, select Billing > Payment History.

Find the cost of another plan

You can view the cost of other Klaviyo plans when changing plans. To do so:  

1. Select your account name in the bottom left. 
2. Navigate to Billing > Change plan. 
3. Open the dropdown under a plan type to view all the plans. 
   
4. Select a plan to view its cost. 

Additional resources

• Understanding Klaviyo's SMS credit system
• How to change your billing plan in Klaviyo 
• How to update your credit card information