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TL;DR: Klaviyo bills you on active profiles: every contact your account can email, including Shopify checkout abandoners who never opted in. Suppressed, unsubscribed, and deleted profiles are free. Plans run from free at 250 profiles to about $2,300 per month at 250,000. The fastest way to cut the bill is a sunset flow plus bulk suppression, which typically saves 20 to 30 percent without losing a single engaged subscriber.
Klaviyo active profiles are every contact that can be emailed through your account, including checkout abandoners who never subscribed, and they set your monthly bill, which is why suppressing unengaged profiles typically cuts a Klaviyo bill 20 to 30 percent. If your Klaviyo active profiles cost feels high, the problem usually isn't the pricing table. It's the profile count feeding it. Most Shopify brands pay for thousands of contacts who will never open another email, plus a hidden layer of Shopify-synced profiles who never opted in at all.
This guide covers what actually counts as an active profile, what's free, the 2026 tier pricing with real numbers, what happens when you cross a tier line, and the exact suppression playbook we use to shrink bills without shrinking revenue. Every number here comes from Klaviyo's own documentation and pricing, plus what we see across dozens of Shopify accounts. Read it before your next billing date, not after.
What is an active profile?
An active profile in Klaviyo is any profile your account can send email to. That covers people who opted in through a form and people who never subscribed at all, like order placers and checkout abandoners synced from Shopify. If Klaviyo can email a profile, that profile is billable.
Klaviyo splits active profiles into two buckets. The first is explicit subscribers: people who filled out a popup, checked a box at checkout, or joined a list on purpose. The second is what Klaviyo calls general engagement profiles: contacts who took an action like placing an order or starting a checkout but never opted in to marketing. Klaviyo's Help Center article on understanding active email profiles confirms both buckets count the same way.
That second bucket is the one that catches Shopify brands off guard. Your store feeds Klaviyo a steady stream of buyers and abandoners, and every one of them lands in your billable count whether or not they ever agreed to hear from you.
Active profiles vs total
Your total profile count and your billable count are different numbers. In your Account Usage page, Klaviyo breaks total profiles into three groups: non-email profiles, active email profiles, and suppressed profiles. Only the active email group drives your email plan price.
Here's what does not count toward your bill:
- Suppressed profiles. Klaviyo keeps all their data but won't email them.
- Unsubscribed profiles. They opted out, so they're automatically suppressed.
- Deleted profiles. Gone entirely, data included.
- Non-email profiles. SMS-only contacts with no email address on file.
One more distinction worth locking in: subscribed describes consent, active describes billability. A checkout abandoner can be active and billable without ever being subscribed. When you're auditing your count, check Account Usage first. That page tells you exactly how many profiles you're paying for and how close you sit to your tier ceiling.
The Feb 2025 billing change
On February 18, 2025, Klaviyo moved every account to active-profile billing. Before that date, plenty of brands stored huge databases and only paid based on how they used them. After it, database size itself became the price driver.
Klaviyo softened the blow for existing customers with an "appreciation discount" that capped any single increase at 25 percent. That helped in year one. But the structural change stands: every emailable profile in your account now costs money every month, forever, until you suppress or delete it. Brands that never cleaned their lists before 2025 have been paying for that habit every cycle since.
What do active profiles cost?
In 2026, Klaviyo email plans start free for 250 profiles, then scale by tier: $20 a month at 500 profiles, $30 at 1,000, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, $720 at 50,000, and about $2,300 at 250,000. Combined email and SMS plans start around $35 a month.
Here's the email plan ladder at a glance, per Klaviyo's pricing page:
- Up to 250 profiles (Free): $0 a month, 500 email sends.
- 500 profiles: $20 a month, about 5,000 sends.
- 1,000 profiles: $30 a month, about 10,000 sends.
- 5,000 profiles: $100 a month, about 50,000 sends.
- 10,000 profiles: $150 a month, about 100,000 sends.
- 50,000 profiles: $720 a month, about 500,000 sends.
- 250,000 profiles: about $2,300 a month, about 2,500,000 sends.
Two mechanics matter beyond the sticker price. First, each paid tier includes roughly 10x your profile count in monthly email sends, so your profile count gates your send volume too. Second, SMS runs on credits, not profiles: 1 credit per text message up to 160 characters, 3 credits per MMS in the US, and unused credits don't roll over. The free plan includes 150 SMS credits to test with.
Is Klaviyo worth it?
Honest answer: Klaviyo costs more than most budget alternatives at the same list size. What you're paying for is the Shopify data depth, the segmentation engine, and flows that sell around the clock. Across the Shopify stores we manage at CartStrings, well-built email automations and campaigns drive 32 percent of total revenue on average, which makes the platform fee a rounding error.
The math only breaks when your list is bloated. At $150 a month for 10,000 profiles, you pay about 1.5 cents per profile per month. If 40 percent of those profiles are dead, that's roughly $60 a month for zero revenue, and those dead profiles drag your sender reputation down at the same time.
What if you exceed your tier?
Nothing stops. Klaviyo keeps sending your emails, then automatically moves you up to the next tier at the start of your next billing cycle. There's no hard cutoff and no send freeze, which is exactly why bills creep upward for months before anyone notices.
The reverse doesn't happen on its own. Auto-downgrade exists, but it's off by default. When you turn it on, Klaviyo checks your active profile count about 24 hours before your billing cycle ends and drops you to the matching tier if you qualify. One catch: you can't run auto-downgrade and the send-based auto-upgrade setting at the same time, so pick the direction that matches your goal. If you're cleaning your list, that's downgrade.
How do you lower the bill?
Suppress your unengaged profiles. Suppression keeps every piece of profile data but removes the profile from your billable count, and it's the cost lever Klaviyo itself sanctions. Across the Shopify stores we manage at CartStrings, suppressing dead weight typically cuts the Klaviyo bill 20 to 30 percent.
Suppression beats deletion because nothing is lost. If a suppressed contact buys again, their history is intact. One warning before you start: unsuppressing a profile locks it as billable for at least 90 days, so don't suppress anyone you plan to email next month.
The exact segment recipe
Build one segment with all four conditions:
- Profile created more than 180 days ago, and
- Opened or clicked zero emails in the last 180 days, and
- Placed zero orders, and
- Received at least 5 emails.
That last condition is the safety net. It filters out people you never really tried to reach. Then run a short sunset flow, which is Klaviyo's own recommended process: tag the segment, send 2 to 3 last-chance emails over a week or two, and bulk-suppress everyone who doesn't open or click.
The payoff goes beyond the invoice. One 85,000-profile brand in our industry suppressed about 31,000 unengaged contacts this way. Open rates jumped from 12 percent to 28 percent, and campaign revenue rose 40 percent, because inbox providers started trusting the sender again. If your opens are stuck in the low teens, list bloat and inbox placement are usually the same problem, and a deliverability cleanup fixes both at once.
What not to suppress
The segment recipe protects you from most mistakes, but triple-check these groups stay out of any suppression job:
- Recent checkout abandoners. They're your hottest revenue source, not dead weight.
- Anyone mid-flow. A contact halfway through a welcome or post-purchase sequence still converts.
- Recent purchasers. Someone who bought in the last 90 to 120 days is engaged with your brand even if they skip your emails.
Verify, then auto-downgrade
Suppression only saves money if your count drops before Klaviyo measures it. Run the sunset and bulk suppression at least a few days before your billing date, then open Account Usage and confirm the active email number sits below your target tier's ceiling. Once it does, enable auto-downgrade so the savings apply on the very next cycle instead of whenever you remember to check.
The Shopify sync problem
This is the part almost nobody talks about. Your Shopify integration syncs checkout abandoners and one-time buyers into Klaviyo as active profiles even though they never subscribed. Every guest checkout, every abandoned cart from a cold ad click, every one-time gift buyer adds a billable profile. On a busy store, that inflates the count by thousands per year without a single form fill.
You can't stop the sync, and you wouldn't want to, because those profiles power your highest-converting flows. The fix is twofold: run the sunset recipe on the stale ones a couple of times a year, and convert more of that anonymous traffic into real subscribers with better popups and email capture so the profiles you pay for actually want your emails.
The bottom line
Your Klaviyo bill is a mirror of your list hygiene. The platform charges for every profile it can email, including Shopify-synced contacts who never opted in, and it never trims that count for you. Check Account Usage, run the sunset segment, suppress the dead weight before your billing date, and turn on auto-downgrade. Most brands doing this for the first time save 20 to 30 percent in one cycle and see opens climb within weeks.
If you'd rather have a practitioner confirm exactly where your account is leaking, a Klaviyo audit from CartStrings maps your billable count, your engagement tiers, and your suppression candidates in one pass. Book a call and we'll walk through your numbers together.
Frequently Asked Questions
What counts as active?
Any profile Klaviyo can send email to counts as active and billable. That includes explicit subscribers plus general engagement profiles like order placers and checkout abandoners who never opted in. Suppressed, unsubscribed, deleted, and SMS-only profiles without an email address don't count.
Do suppressed profiles cost?
No. Suppressed and unsubscribed profiles are removed from your billable count, and Klaviyo keeps their full data and history. That's why suppression, not deletion, is the standard way to cut a Klaviyo bill. Just remember that unsuppressing a profile makes it billable again for at least 90 days.
Are unmailed profiles billed?
Yes. If a profile is emailable, it counts toward your bill even if you never send it a single message. This surprises a lot of Shopify brands, because buyers and checkout abandoners sync from Shopify as active profiles automatically.
Cost for 10,000 contacts?
On Klaviyo's 2026 email plan, 10,000 active profiles costs $150 per month and includes roughly 100,000 email sends. That works out to about 1.5 cents per profile per month. Email plus SMS costs more depending on how many SMS credits you buy.
What if I exceed my limit?
Your emails keep sending, so nothing breaks. Klaviyo then moves you to the next tier automatically at the start of your next billing cycle. To move down after cleaning your list, you need to enable auto-downgrade in settings, because it's off by default.
