Klaviyo Price Increase: How 'Active Profiles' Billing Raised Everyone's Bill

Klaviyo pulled off one of the most consequential price increases in email marketing—without changing a single sticker price. In January 2025, it announced that billing would be based on your total "active profiles" rather than the contacts you actually email, and unlike its previous changes, this one applied to existing and legacy customers automatically.

For ecommerce brands with big lists, the result was the same as a large price hike. Here's how it works and what to do about it.

We run Audienceful, an AI-powered email platform, and we've been tracking price increases across the whole ESP industry—Klaviyo's move is part of a much bigger pattern.

What changed in Klaviyo's pricing?

Before February 2025, Klaviyo customers effectively paid based on the contacts they actively emailed. Under the new model, which took effect February 18, 2025, you're billed on all active profiles in your account—every subscribed contact, whether you've emailed them in the past year or never.

Two details made this sting for existing customers:

It applied to everyone automatically, including legacy accounts. Klaviyo's 2024 pricing changes had only affected new signups; the 2025 change did not offer that grace.
Tier upgrades became automatic. If your active profile count crosses a threshold, Klaviyo upgrades your plan (and bill) automatically each billing cycle.

Klaviyo capped any single increase at 25%—which tells you how common large jumps would otherwise have been.

How much more does Klaviyo cost now?

Klaviyo's Email plan starts free up to 250 active profiles, then $30/month at 1,000 contacts—but the curve steepens dramatically past 10K contacts. By 50K contacts Klaviyo costs roughly double what comparable modern platforms charge, and enterprise spend above $10K/month pushes you toward Klaviyo One with a 20% surcharge.

The active-profiles model means brands with large, partially-engaged lists—exactly the profile of a mature ecommerce store—saw the biggest increases. A list you built over years of paid acquisition now costs you monthly whether or not it produces revenue.

How to lower your Klaviyo bill

Suppress aggressively. Suppressed profiles don't count as active. Set up a sunset flow that suppresses contacts with no opens/clicks in 6–12 months.
Audit your signup sources. Old imports, giveaway lists, and abandoned integrations quietly inflate your active profile count.
Re-evaluate at renewal. Once the platform bills you for storage rather than results, it's worth comparing what the same list costs elsewhere.

Klaviyo is part of an industry-wide trend

Nearly every ESP has raised prices in the past three years: Brevo is moving legacy plans to new pricing this September, ActiveCampaign force-migrated accounts with 30%+ increases, Mailchimp keeps shrinking its free plan and hiking legacy prices, and Drip raised its minimum to $39/month. Charging for stored contacts rather than engaged contacts is where the whole industry has landed—Klaviyo just did it most abruptly.

The best Klaviyo alternative

If the active-profiles change pushed your bill past what Klaviyo's features justify, Audienceful is the AI-native platform that's leapfrogged the legacy players on functionality—and still runs up to 57% cheaper at scale:

A built-in AI agent that does the work: It writes emails in your voice, generates images, builds segments and entire automations from a plain-language brief, runs list hygiene (goodbye, billable dead profiles), and answers questions about your revenue and campaign data—on every plan.
All features at every tier: Multi-step automations with branching logic, segmentation, A/B testing, and detailed analytics included—no per-feature upsells or forced plan upgrades as you grow.
Ecommerce-ready: Native Shopify and Stripe integrations for revenue tracking, segmentation and automation triggers—without Klaviyo's price curve.
Predictable pricing: No automatic tier upgrades sneaking onto your invoice. Your cost scales with your growth, transparently.

See the full side-by-side breakdown: Klaviyo vs Audienceful.