Hi @JuleeF - welcome to the community.

Klaviyo charges by the total number of “contacts” and not how many subscribers per Lists as some other ESPs may do.  So a contact can be in one or multiple Lists and should not affect the number of contacts pricing threshold.  Note, there’s also a sending threshold so you should plan for that as well. 

Here’s some more information about Klaviyo email billing here:

• How Klaviyo bills customers for emails

Hope that helps!

Great - thank you for the additional info!

Hi @retention & @JuleeF 

Klaviyo says in their documentation that their email billing structure is based on the number of contacts in your account. However, this is not true, and I suspect that they are being deliberately unclear with their language so that you self-opt into a higher dollar tier than you need to.

The truth is, Klaviyo’s email plans are determined not by the number of contacts in your account, but rather by the number of contacts that you send to in a single blast (plus the number of emails that you send out each month).

In the below screenshot, you can see how their language is misleading -- the language on the right gives the impression that the highlighted column corresponds with the number of contacts in your account. However, that column is actually the number of people you can send to in a single blast!

In other words, you could have a million contacts in your account, but as long as you only send 10,000 emails per month total (between your campaigns and flows), and you only blast to 1000 people at a time, then you only need to pay for the $30 per month tier.

For my company, this makes a huge difference. We have a lot of contacts in our account that we don’t send to on a regular basis, but we like to send to occasionally (like during BFCM). We naturally assumed (as many Klaviyo customers probably do) that the column highlighted above is the number of contacts in our account, so we opted for a much higher price tier than we had to for a long time.

Why they do this, I can’t say. I have emailed them repeatedly about how misleading this is, and that they really should update the language in their documentation. Otherwise they are at best inadvertently misleading their customers into overpaying, and at worst deliberately deceiving us.

Klaviyo, if you’re reading this, and your goal is to make it clear to your customers how your billing works, then the language in above screenshot should read as follows: 

"Klaviyo email plans are determined by the number of contacts you send to in a single blast and the number of emails you send out each month."

And it should be updated in this article as well. 

Hi @MattR, 

I can see that you posted a similar question in this thread, I have linked a response to your original discussion here: