Brevo Price Increase: Legacy Plans Move to New Pricing This September

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the latest email platform to raise prices on its existing customers: starting this September, customers on Brevo's legacy plans will be migrated to its new pricing structure.

If you've been on the same Brevo plan for years, this is the moment your bill changes. Here's what's happening, why, and what to do about it.

We run Audienceful, an AI-powered email marketing platform, so we watch this industry closely—and Brevo is far from alone in raising prices (more on that below).

What is changing at Brevo?

Brevo overhauled its pricing in October 2025. Anyone who subscribed to a paid plan between August 31, 2022 and October 1, 2025 was kept on a legacy plan—the old structure, priced primarily on email sending volume with generous contact storage. Legacy Starter and Business plans let you store hundreds of thousands of contacts regardless of what you paid.

The new plans work differently: pricing now scales with how many contacts you store, not just how many emails you send, and the entry tiers come with strict contact limits. That's a fundamental shift, since "free contact storage" was one of Brevo's biggest selling points versus Mailchimp and other contact-priced competitors.

Until now, legacy customers were allowed to stay on their old plans. That grace period is ending: starting in September, Brevo is moving legacy plans onto the new pricing.

How much more will Brevo cost?

It depends entirely on your list size. If you send frequently to a small list, you may see little change. But the customers who benefited most from the old model—large stored lists with moderate sending—will feel it the most, because the new pricing charges for exactly the thing that used to be free: contact storage.

A few things worth knowing before your migration date:

Check which contacts count. Like most contact-priced platforms, stored contacts count against your tier whether or not you email them. Unsubscribed and dead contacts sitting in your account can push you into a higher tier.
Clean your list now. Deleting bounced, unengaged, and unsubscribed contacts before you're migrated is the single fastest way to lower your new bill (and it helps deliverability anyway).
Compare against the market. Once you're paying new-customer prices, the switching-cost argument for staying disappears. It's the right moment to evaluate alternatives.

Why is Brevo raising prices?

The same forces pushing up prices across the whole email industry:

Sending infrastructure costs are rising, and Brevo's famously cheap email-volume pricing left money on the table with every large list stored for free.
Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 bulk-sender requirements made deliverability more expensive to maintain, and made platforms less willing to subsidize senders who store huge, unengaged lists.
Contact-based pricing is the industry's real business model. Volume-only pricing attracts senders who never clean their lists, which damages shared IP reputation for everyone. Charging for stored contacts aligns incentives—which is why every holdout eventually converges on it.

In other words: the cheap legacy deal was a subsidy, and the subsidy is ending.

Brevo isn't alone: every ESP is raising prices

Over the past three years, nearly every major email platform has raised prices, cut free plans, or force-migrated legacy customers. We've covered each one in detail:

The best Brevo alternative

If Brevo's September migration has you re-evaluating, Audienceful is the modern, AI-native platform that has leapfrogged the legacy ESPs on functionality:

A real AI agent, not a writing gimmick: Audienceful's built-in agent writes emails in your voice, generates images, builds segments and entire automations from a plain-language brief, runs list hygiene, and answers questions about your data—included on every plan. Nothing else on this list comes close.
Feature-complete and then some: Multi-step automations with branching logic, segmentation, A/B testing, detailed analytics, and deep Stripe and Shopify integrations—everything Brevo offers, without the tier games.
Next-gen, real-time collaborative editor: We've spent years crafting our Notion-style email builder to render beautifully across Gmail, Outlook, and more—enabling real design workflows and email design systems (themes) without gimmicks.
Honest pricing, no bait-and-switch: No unsustainable promises followed by forced migrations. Our pricing scales with your growth, but remains predictable and transparent.
Easy migration: Import your contacts, tags, and templates in minutes—most people switching from Brevo are fully set up the same day.

See our full side-by-side breakdown: Brevo vs Audienceful.