Klaviyo SMS credits: how SMS pricing actually works

This is for Shopify founders who just saw their first SMS line on a Klaviyo bill, or who are about to turn SMS on and want to know what drives the cost.

What are Klaviyo SMS credits, and what replaced them?

Credits were Klaviyo's unit for SMS and MMS. Each message segment cost a set number of credits depending on the recipient's country, and your plan came with a pool of them.

Klaviyo's help center now says your account will move "from credits to per-message pricing," and once it does, you'll see message costs in your billing currency instead of credits. The page calls the monthly amount "plan spend."

The math didn't change. Klaviyo gives the new formula as:

Rate per segment x Recipients x Message segments = Total cost

The legacy credit formula was the same shape: credits per segment x recipients x segments per message.

Klaviyo doesn't publish one universal rate on that page. It tells you to check your account's own rates in Settings > Billing, because rates vary by country and by sending number type (toll-free or short code in the US and Canada).

If you're trying to work out why the whole bill moved, not just SMS, start with why did my Klaviyo bill go up.

What counts as one SMS segment?

This is where most surprise costs come from.

Per Klaviyo's guide to crafting SMS and MMS messages, a single SMS segment holds up to:

• 160 characters using the standard SMS character set
• 70 characters when the message includes an emoji or certain special characters

Longer messages get split, and each piece holds less: up to 153 characters per segment with the standard set, or 67 with special characters. Klaviyo's special characters article puts it as 134 characters across 2 segments or 201 across 3. Each segment is billed.

A few details from Klaviyo's special characters article that catch people:

• One emoji or special character changes the encoding for the whole text, not just that character.
• Some emojis count as 2 characters toward the 70.
• Symbols like the euro sign, backslash, square and curly brackets, the pipe, tilde and caret count as 2 characters.
• Some accented letters are special and some aren't. Lowercase à is standard, uppercase À is special.
• Klaviyo converts curly quotation marks to straight ones before sending, but it doesn't replace every lookalike character. Text pasted from a doc can quietly flip a message to the 70-character limit.

Klaviyo also allows up to 1,600 characters in one message. That's a ceiling, not a target. Every 153 characters past the first segment is another segment you're paying for.

My take: write the text in Klaviyo, not in a doc you paste from, and check the segment count before you schedule. SMS is a more acute form of marketing than email. It's a reminder, not the whole story, so it rarely needs more than one segment anyway.

How much does MMS cost compared to SMS?

More. Klaviyo says MMS "has a higher rate than a single SMS segment because it includes multimedia content (an image or GIF)."

Under the legacy credit table, a US SMS segment was 1 credit and an MMS was 3. Klaviyo says the MMS rate covers an image or GIF under 600 KB and up to 1,600 characters of text, so a long MMS isn't split into segments the way SMS is.

MMS is only available on some numbers: US toll-free numbers and short codes, Canadian toll-free numbers and Australian long codes. The legacy table lists UK MMS as not available.

On whether it's worth paying for, Klaviyo's own SMS guide says MMS "typically" performs similarly to SMS, and that SMS tends to perform better than MMS in most cases. It suggests testing MMS for things like product launches or abandoned cart reminders. So start with plain SMS and earn your way into MMS with a test.

Why does SMS cost more in some countries?

Because carriers charge differently. Here's the legacy credits-per-message table from Klaviyo's help center. Klaviyo labels these as values to use only if your account's differ, so treat them as a guide to the ratios, not your bill.

Klaviyo's own worked example: a 2-segment SMS sent to 50 UK and 50 Ireland recipients came to 1,400 credits. The same send to 100 US recipients would have been 200.

If most of your customers are in the US and a handful are overseas, look at who's in your SMS segments before a big send. A small international slice can cost more than you'd expect.

Do unused credits roll over?

No. Klaviyo's help center answers this directly: "You have a set amount of plan spend each month, and unused spend doesn't roll over." You can upgrade or downgrade your plan each month.

The page doesn't say whether legacy credits rolled over, so I won't guess.

What does Klaviyo charge for, and what's free?

From the billable table in Klaviyo's help center:

Billable - Campaigns - Flows - Outbound conversations (replies you send) - Auto-responses or keyword responses when no keyword is recognized - Failed-to-deliver messages

Not billable - Inbound messages a customer sends to your number - Opt-in messages - Replies to YES and HELP keywords - STOP and similar opt-out replies, and START or UNSTOP - Skipped messages - SMS preview messages

Two things worth noticing. Failed messages still cost you, so a list full of bad numbers burns spend. And the auto-reply that fires when someone texts something your keywords don't recognize is billable.

Does the Klaviyo free plan include SMS?

Yes, a little. Klaviyo's pricing page lists "$5 of mobile messages/month" on the free plan, region and carrier dependent, alongside 250 profiles and 500 emails a month. Once the free plan's limits are hit, Klaviyo says the account can't send more until the next billing cycle or an upgrade.

$5 is enough to test the setup, send yourself previews and run a small flow. It's not enough to run SMS as a channel.

Klaviyo's pricing page has a "Build a plan" tool for paid SMS. It doesn't list a published starting price for paid SMS, so build your plan there and check your rates in billing. For how the paid email side of Klaviyo is structured, see my Klaviyo Starter post.

How do you keep SMS costs down without cutting revenue?

Focus on making more money from Klaviyo, not on saving money on it. Upgrade when you hit plan limits. That's the frame. Cutting texts that make money to save on the bill is backwards.

What you can do is stop paying for waste:

• Stay in one segment. No emoji unless you've decided it's worth the 160-to-70 drop. Klaviyo's SMS guide says texts without media or emojis tend to perform just as well, or better.
• Use plain SMS before MMS. Test MMS on one launch before making it the default.
• Watch your international numbers. Check the country mix in your SMS segments.
• Keep flows tight. I only use one-step flows for SMS. One well-timed text in a flow beats three that repeat your emails.
• Let texts be reminders. Emails do the branding and awareness. Texts remind people to read the email. Short reminders cost less and do their job better.

If you just turned SMS on, send your highest-leverage marketing first and see what works before you spread spend across everything. My take on whether to add SMS at all is in should I add SMS marketing, and what's normal for results is in my SMS marketing benchmarks. If you're still choosing a platform, here's Klaviyo SMS vs Postscript vs Attentive.

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WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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