I walked the pricing calculators of Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Drip and Brevo on the same day and wrote down what each one charges a 5,000 contact store. The gap between the cheapest and the priciest serious option is about $50 a month.
Comparing email platforms by their headline prices is close to useless, because every headline is anchored to a different list size. Omnisend’s page leads with $16, Mailchimp’s with $20, Brevo’s with $9, and none of those numbers describes what you would pay. So on July 16, 2026 I opened all six pricing pages, set every slider and dropdown to the same store, 5,000 contacts on monthly billing in USD, and recorded what the official calculators returned. No review-site tables, no cached screenshots from 2023, just the vendors’ own numbers on one day.
The store I priced is deliberately ordinary: 5,000 contacts is where a Shopify brand starts feeling list-size pricing in its budget, and it is the point where Klaviyo’s price becomes a line item someone questions in a monthly review.
The spread is real but smaller than the discourse suggests: $69 to $100 for the plans a retention program would actually run on. What separates the platforms at this size is less the sticker and more three quieter variables: included send volume, where the next price jump sits, and what the entry tiers quietly leave out.
Click a header to sort. Free plan limits and send allowances come from the same pricing pages on the same day.
| Platform / plan | $/mo at 5,000 contacts | Included sends at 5,000 | Free plan | Entry paid price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MailerLite Comfort | $49 | 50,000/mo | 250 subs, 2,500 emails/mo | $12 (500 subs, page shows promo pricing) |
| MailerLite Power | $69 | Unlimited | 250 subs, 2,500 emails/mo | $25 (500 subs) |
| Mailchimp Essentials | $75 | 50,000/mo | Under 250 contacts | $13 (500 contacts) |
| Omnisend Standard | $81 | 60,000/mo | 250 contacts, 500 emails/mo | $16 (500 contacts) |
| Drip (single plan) | $89 | Unlimited | None, 14 day trial | $39 (up to 2,500 people) |
| Omnisend Pro | $90 | Unlimited | 250 contacts, 500 emails/mo | $59 (2,500 contacts) |
| Klaviyo email plan | $100 | 50,000/mo | 250 profiles, 500 emails/mo | $20 (500 profiles) |
| Mailchimp Standard | $100 | 60,000/mo | Under 250 contacts | $20 (500 contacts) |
| Brevo Starter | from $9 (by email volume) | From 5,000 emails/mo | Free forever plan | $9 (5,000 emails/mo) |
Two footnotes belong next to that table. Mailchimp’s page was running a 50% off for 12 months promotion on the day I checked, so the amounts above are the standard “then starts at” prices, not the promo. And Omnisend’s page defaults to a pay-three-months-upfront toggle that shows 30% lower numbers; I switched it to plain monthly billing before recording anything.
Type your contact count and the calculator below returns each platform’s price using only the tiers I verified on the official calculators. Where your list size falls between two tiers I checked, it shows the honest range between the nearest verified prices instead of inventing a number in the middle.
Prices from official calculators, monthly billing, USD, checked July 16, 2026. Comparable plans: Klaviyo email plan, Omnisend Standard, Mailchimp Standard, MailerLite Power, Drip. Brevo shown as a note because it bills by email volume.
Send limits are the second price. Klaviyo’s $100 tier includes 50,000 monthly sends for 5,000 profiles, ten emails per contact, which a store running weekly campaigns plus flows will not exhaust. Omnisend Standard includes twelve per contact. MailerLite Power, Drip, and Omnisend Pro are unlimited. This only starts to matter if you send daily or run aggressive automation, but when it matters, it converts directly into overage or a forced upgrade.
The jumps are where budgets break. Klaviyo moves in small frequent steps: $100 at 5,000, $110 at 5,500, $150 by 10,000, and $175 just past it. Mailchimp Standard moves in big cliffs: $135 covers everything from 5,001 to 10,000, then the next tier nearly doubles the price to $230. If your list is growing fast, plot your six-month projection against these curves rather than today’s number.
Entry tiers are not the same product. Mailchimp Essentials at $75 drops generative AI features and caps automation at four flow steps per its own comparison table, while the platforms built for ecommerce (Klaviyo, Omnisend, Drip) keep automation full-featured on every paid tier. A cheap tier that cannot run a proper post-purchase flow is not actually cheap for a retention program.
Brevo’s model rewards low-frequency senders. If your 5,000 contact store sends one campaign a week, that is roughly 20,000 emails a month, which sits far above Starter’s included 5,000 but still prices from a much lower base than per-contact platforms. The page lists Starter from $9 and Standard from $18 with volume determining the real figure, so treat Brevo as the option to price out precisely when your send frequency is modest.
At 5,000 contacts the honest summary is that Klaviyo costs about $30 a month more than the cheapest serious alternative and about $10 to $20 more than the ecommerce-native ones. That is not a migration-worthy gap on its own; switching costs alone eat a year of the difference. The gap becomes an argument at the cliffs, 10,000 and especially 15,000 contacts, where the platforms diverge by $100 or more a month, and that is the moment to run this comparison again with your own numbers, on the vendors’ own pages, on the same day. That last part is the entire method of this article, and it is the part most comparison posts skip.
On the official calculator checked July 16, 2026, the email plan for 3,501 to 5,000 active profiles is $100 per month with 50,000 monthly email sends. SMS is a separate add-on billed per message, with US toll-free texts listed at $0.01 per send plus carrier fees.
Among the calculators I checked, MailerLite Power at $69 per month for up to 5,000 subscribers with unlimited emails. Whether it is a real alternative depends on how much you rely on Klaviyo's ecommerce-specific flows and segmentation, which is a feature question, not a pricing one.
Because it charges by email volume with no per-contact tiering: Starter begins at $9 per month including 5,000 emails and Standard at $18 on the page I checked. For a 5,000 contact list that sends four campaigns a month, that pricing model can be dramatically cheaper or roughly equal, depending entirely on your volume.
No. All six platforms sell SMS as usage-billed credits on top of the plan. If SMS is a serious part of your plan, model it separately, because per-message rates and supported countries differ more than the email plans do.