Why did my Klaviyo bill go up?

How does Klaviyo billing work?

Klaviyo's own pricing explainer says its Profile and Email plans are priced by active profiles, with email send capacity included in each tier. Billing is based on reachable contacts. Unsubscribed and suppressed contacts don't count.

Klaviyo's help center defines an active email profile as any profile that can be emailed through Klaviyo. That's the part that surprises founders. Someone who signed up for a spin-to-win three years ago and hasn't opened anything since is still billable if they're still emailable.

So your bill isn't tied to how many people actually care about your emails. It's tied to how many people you're allowed to email.

What changed in February 2025?

Klaviyo rolled out billing changes that went into effect February 18, 2025. According to its FAQ on those changes, customers are now required to be on an email plan that matches or exceeds their active profile count. The changes applied to customers who pay by credit card.

The same FAQ says that on a paid account, if you go over your active profile limit, your plan automatically upgrades to the next tier at the start of your next billing cycle. Klaviyo's pricing explainer says the same thing in different words: if active profiles exceed your tier, the account moves to a compliant plan at the next billing cycle. It notes these details apply to month-to-month customers.

The February 2025 changes also added billing preferences you can choose, and Klaviyo says you have to select them yourself. One of them is upgrading automatically when you send past your limit. Klaviyo's explainer notes that auto downgrade on profiles can't run at the same time as auto upgrades based on sends, so it's worth checking which one you picked.

Why did my Klaviyo bill go up when sales didn't?

Because your list can grow while your buyers don't. Every form sign-up, checkout opt-in and list import adds emailable profiles, and nothing removes them unless you do.

Here's where I'd look first:

• Your active profile count crept past a tier line, and the plan moved up at the next billing cycle.
• You imported an old list or a list from another tool, and all of it counted as emailable.
• A pop-up offer pulled in a lot of sign-ups who took the code and never came back.
• Nobody has ever suppressed anyone, so years of people who stopped engaging are still on the bill.

Open your billing page and compare your active profile count to your tier. Then check your billing preferences, since Klaviyo says those don't change on their own.

How do I lower my Klaviyo bill without hurting revenue?

Stop paying for people who never engage. Klaviyo's own help article on active profile management says profiles who have churned can be suppressed so they no longer count as billable, and it recommends running them through a sunset flow first.

Here's how I'd set it up:

1. Build an unengaged segment. I'd base it on no clicks, no site visits and no orders over a long window, because Apple Mail auto-opens make opens unreliable.
2. Send that segment through a sunset flow: a short series that gives them a real reason to stay, and an easy way to say they still want your emails.
3. Anyone who finishes the sunset flow without engaging gets suppressed. They stop counting toward your bill.
4. Keep the sunset flow running so this happens every month, instead of a giant cleanup once a year.

I wrote a full walkthrough of how to build a Klaviyo sunset flow, including how long to wait and what to send.

Why engaged sends earn more per person

The fear is always the same: if I email fewer people, I'll make less money. Sometimes the numbers say the opposite.

A fitness tech brand I work with sent one campaign to an engaged segment of 7,145 people and earned $0.19 per person. A full-list blast to 49,475 people earned $0.04 per person. That's almost 5x more per person from a list about a seventh the size.

Say you have 40,000 active profiles on your plan, and 15,000 of them haven't clicked or bought in over a year. Those 15,000 cost you on every bill and add little to every send. Suppressing them after a sunset flow drops your active count and makes your per-person numbers honest.

Sending to engaged people also helps your sender reputation, since the inbox providers see more people actually interacting with your emails. For how to split your list into segments that earn, read my guide to email segmentation for ecommerce.

Should I switch platforms to save money?

Probably not, at least not first. If your list is full of people who never engage, you'll carry them to the next platform and pay for them there too. Clean the list, then compare.

If you're still deciding between platforms, I wrote an honest Klaviyo vs Omnisend breakdown.

FAQ

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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