What email marketing costs.

The three ways email platforms charge

• By contacts. You pay for the size of your list, in tiers, with a monthly send allowance on top. Klaviyo bills active profiles, the contacts it can email (Klaviyo). Omnisend bills contacts, subscribers and non-subscribers alike, but not unsubscribed ones (Omnisend). Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts, and bills on your peak count for the period (Mailchimp).
• By emails sent. You pay for what goes out, and the list can be any size. Shopify Messaging bills per email after a free monthly allowance (Shopify). Amy charges $10 a month including 2,000 emails and your sending number, then $0.90 per 1,000 emails. Contacts are never billed.
• By quote. Enterprise platforms such as Attentive price by volume, list size and channels (Attentive).

What it costs at each list size

Klaviyo’s published email prices, beside what the same number of emails costs on Amy. Each Klaviyo plan includes 10 times its profile limit in sends, and the Amy column assumes you send all of them, which is Amy’s most expensive case.

* The biggest gap on Klaviyo’s published list is at 13,500 profiles: $325 against $129.70, or 60% less. Every Klaviyo tier, explained.

Per contact or per send: which costs less?

It comes down to how much of your list you email, and how often.

• Per send costs less when your list is bigger than the part you email. Most stores collect contacts faster than they lose them, and send most campaigns to the people who still open. On a per-contact plan you pay for everyone else too.
• Per send costs less in a quiet month. Send half as much and a per-send bill halves. A per-contact bill stays the same.
• Per contact can cost less when you send a lot to a small list, especially at a negotiated rate. Compare against your own invoice, not a list price.

On every tier of Klaviyo’s published ladder, Amy costs less for the same email volume, up to 60% less. Compare with your own Klaviyo bill.

Work out your own email bill

1. Count your emails, not just your contacts. Campaigns: how many a month, times how many people each one reaches. Automations: welcome, abandoned cart, shipping updates and the rest add a steady stream.
2. Price it both ways. On a per-contact plan, find the tier your list falls in. On a per-send plan, multiply your monthly emails by the rate.
3. Add what isn’t email. Texting, AI writing credits and add-ons are usually billed separately.

For example, 4 campaigns a month to 5,000 engaged customers is 20,000 emails, and automations add about 3,000 more. On Amy that’s 23,000 emails: $10 plus 21 × $0.90, or $28.90. Estimate your bill.

The costs that aren’t on the price list

• Texting. Usually a separate product. See what SMS marketing costs.
• AI writing. Some platforms sell AI in credits. On Amy, writing your campaigns and automations is part of the $10 a month.
• Your time, or an agency’s. A flow builder needs someone to build and maintain the flows. Many stores pay a specialist for it.
• Deliverability. A new sending domain needs warming up and watching. See how to warm up an email domain.

Sources: klaviyo.com/pricing (read August 30, 2026) and the vendors’ own help centers on Klaviyo active profiles, Omnisend charges, Mailchimp pricing tiers, Shopify Messaging pricing and Attentive pricing, gathered October 2026. We only quote Klaviyo’s prices; check each tool’s own page for its current figure.