Understanding how Klaviyo billing works

You will learn

Learn how Klaviyo bills customers for profiles and emails, SMS, reviews, Advanced KDP (formerly “CDP”), and Marketing Analytics.  

This article is only for customers who are not using manual billing (i.e., are on a contract). 

About the changes in billing structure

As of February 18, 2025, the following changes will apply to your account starting at your next billing cycle:

• If your account has more active profiles than your plan allows, you will be moved to a plan that covers the number of active profiles (i.e., a profile-compliant plan).
  • The new plan may include more emails than you currently send.   
• For the profile and email plans and the SMS plans, there’s a new flexible sending option (i.e., “flexing up”), which allows you to purchase messages and profiles from a higher tier for a single billing cycle. 
  • You can set your account to auto-downgrade based on the number of active profiles in your account if using flexible sending. 
• Any previous billing upgrade choices (e.g., if you enabled auto-upgrade) will stay the same in your account. 

The information in this article describes your plan options, including these new changes.

View your billing plans

To view your plans, 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. 

You can also 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. 

Understand the different plan types 

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

There are 5 products available: 

• Profile and email (i.e., the base plan)
• SMS 
• Reviews 
• Advanced KDP (previously called CDP)
• Marketing Analytics

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

Profile and email plans are based on both the number of:

• Active profiles in your account.
• Emails sent during the current billing cycle.

This means that if you have 7,000 active profiles, your plan must allow for at least that amount. 

Your emails can be to any of your active profiles. You can send an equal amount across all of your profiles (10 to each), or send more to certain groups and less to others (e.g., 100 to group A, and 1 to group B).

SMS

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 3 key factors: 

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

As an example, say you want to send a single SMS to 100 people: 50 to the United States and 50 to Canada. The table below breaks down the credit cost:

See this article for a full breakdown of credits by country. Note that while skipped and inbound messages do not cost credits, failed deliveries do. Further, short codes are billed separately from the SMS product. 

Klaviyo Reviews

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

Klaviyo Reviews pricing is based on how many orders are placed on your website each month.  

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. 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).  

Marketing Analytics

Marketing Analytics provides actionable customer and product insights that enable you to enrich your marketing strategy with additional data and use cases for better personalization. Marketing Analytics is not included in Klaviyo’s base email and profiles plan, and a subscription is required to access the associated functionality. 

Marketing Analytics is priced based on your active profile count, starting at $100 per month for up to 13,500 active profiles.

CDP (renamed to Advanced KDP)

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

Since Advanced KDP 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. 

Total profiles comprises any profile that is stored and tracked in Klaviyo, including:

• Subscribers (email, SMS, push, etc.)
• Suppressions
• Non-subscribers

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

What happens if you reach your plan’s limits

What happens when you reach your plan’s limits depends on what type of product it is: email and SMS, Reviews, Advanced KDP, or Marketing Analytics. 

Email and SMS

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

Profile limit

When you exceed your plan’s active profile limit, Klaviyo does not stop you from sending or adding additional profiles. However, you are notified and automatically upgraded as of your next billing cycle. This is different from auto-upgrade, which is an optional setting that moves you to the next tier when you reach your message limit. 

If you don’t want to be upgraded, you can manage your active profiles to stay within your current plan limits. 

If you are on the free email and profiles plan and are over your profile limit, you won’t be upgraded but you also cannot send emails until you are under your active profile limit. 

Send or credit limit

When your account reaches your plan’s sending limits (i.e., emails or SMS credits), there are 3 options you can choose from. You can:

• Flex plans (i.e., use flexible sending), which provides the next tier’s amount of sends in full. The cost to flex is based on the unit pricing of your base plan (the plan you started the month on).
• Upgrade (manually or via auto-upgrade) to a higher-tiered plan. Upgrading is generally more economical than flex sending if your upgrade needs are consistent.
• Stop all sending until the next billing cycle.

Want more information about these options? Jump ahead to this billing preferences section. 

Reviews

Review plans are similar to email and SMS plans, but are based on orders from your store rather than messages.  

If your plan allows you 20 Oorders, you can send review requests for only those orders. When you reach your plan’s limit, you can either upgrade manually or pause sending review requests until your billing cycle renews. 

Advanced KDP 

As mentioned, CDP is being renamed to Advanced KDP. Currently, you’ll see CDP in the billing pages, and Advanced KDP in Klaviyo’s main navigation. 

Advance KDP plans are priced so that you pay based on the selected plan and for overages beyond that plan.  

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. 

Example of usage fee

Say that the company Funky T-shirts pays $4,765 per month for a Advanced KDP plan that allows 1 million profiles. However, the next month, their profile count grows to 1.52 million, exceeding their plan by 520,000. 

Instead of forcing Funky T-shirts to upgrade to the next tier (2 million profiles at $9,100), they pay a usage fee that is: 

• Number of 1,000 profiles that exceed the current tier: 520
  X
• Price per 1,000 profiles at the current tier: $4.77
  =
• Total usage fee: $2,480.40. 

This means that between their plan ($4,765) and usage fee ($2,480.40), the total cost is $7,245.40. This is less than what Funky T-shirts would pay if they upgraded. Unlike with other products (where you pay before), this fee is billed after usage.

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. 

Marketing Analytics 

Marketing Analytics plans are priced based on active profiles, so your plan automatically upgrades or downgrades based on the number of active profiles in your account at the end of your billing cycle. Your plan is automatically upgraded at the start of the next billing cycle. 

Upgrading and downgrading your billing plan

You can upgrade or downgrade at any time during the billing cycle, but please note: 

• Upgrading takes effect immediately and is permanent until you choose to downgrade.
  • Whenever you upgrade, the cost per message goes down, meaning you get a better deal as you go up tiers.
• Downgrading takes effect at the start of your next billing cycle. 
  • You cannot downgrade to a plan if you have more active profiles than that lower-tiered plan allows. 
  • Klaviyo does not issue refunds if you downgrade in the middle of a billing cycle, as stated in our terms of service.
  • If you choose to downgrade, but then upgrade (either manually or automatically), the downgrade is canceled. 
  • The only time downgrades take effect sooner than the next billing cycle is if you:
    • Cancel your plan(s).
    • Close your account and choose for it to take effect immediately.

Klaviyo also provides several settings you can use to automatically switch plans: 

* Both the Marketing Analytics as well as emails profiles are automatically upgraded based on profiles. However, this is not a setting you can turn off.  

** Auto-downgrading based on profiles happens automatically for Marketing Analytics, so it’s not a setting you can turn on or off. 

You can switch between these options at any time. 

Use flexible sending 

When you hit your plan’s limit while using flexible sending, it is a 1-time add-on of all of the profiles and messages included in the next highest tier without permanently upgrading your account. This way, you stay on your current plan and don’t need to worry about downgrading before the next billing cycle.

The amount it costs to flex is based on the unit cost of your current plan and the capacity in the following tier(s). Flexing is a 1-time purchase that includes all of the capacity in the next tier (credits for SMS, profiles and messages for email) at the unit rate of your current plan. This means that while there are no additional fees to flex, it generally costs more than upgrading, as upgrading makes you eligible for a reduced cost per unit with a higher volume.

You can check how much it will cost to flex either in the Billing Preferences tab or at checkout.

Auto-downgrading based on profiles

Auto-downgrade is:

• Available for profiles plans only when using flexible sending
• Always on for Marketing Analytics plans 

You cannot auto-downgrade based on message sends. 

You can choose to auto-downgrade your profiles and email plan in Klaviyo’s billing preferences page. Your plan will automatically downgrade to the lowest tier that can cover your active profile count 24 hours before the end of your billing cycle. The downgrade goes into effect for the next billing cycle. 

Automatically upgrade based on messages (also called auto-upgrade) 

Auto-upgrading your messages is only available for the email and profiles plan and SMS plan. It automatically moves you to the next tier when you reach your messaging limit. It does not apply when you reach your profile limit, since Klaviyo now enforces profiles. 

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

When you upgrade, you pay the difference between your base plan (i.e., the plan you entered the billing cycle with) and the plan you’re upgrading to during that first month. 

It is recommended that you upgrade (rather than flexing) if you have flexed more than a few times a year, it can be more cost effective.

Manually upgrade or stop sending: use the None option  

If you want to manually choose when you upgrade or to stop sending when you reach your plan’s limits, you can set your billing upgrade preference to the None option. 

This means that you won’t be able to send any flow and campaign messages, and any messages scheduled during the current billing cycle will be canceled. However, if you decide to upgrade or flex plans, you can resume sending.

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 changes the credit card on file. If your payment ever fails, the account Owner and billing contact 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.

Additional resources

• Learn more about Klaviyo’s SMS credit system, including how many credits are used per country
• See how to add your tax ID in Klaviyo so that you can include it on invoices