Black Forest · Klaviyo

What Klaviyo actually costs

Six months of invoices from the Klaviyo billing page, set against the volume and the revenue they bought. Klaviyo Settings, Billing, Payment and invoices, read 2026-09-04.

The vendor Klaviyo replaced on SMS is costed separately: what Postscript cost us in 2026, eight statement months through August.

The bill is up 7.3 times in six months. Mar 26 cost $3,655. Aug 26 cost $26,650. The next payment on 2026-09-30 is estimated at $25,770, which annualises to $309,240 against roughly $43,860 at the March run rate.

Paid, six months

$88,760

16 invoices

Current run rate

$25,770

per month, next charge 2026-09-30

Annualised

$309,240

was $43,860 in March

Share of attributed revenue

2.00%

$88,760 on $4,431,220

Six months, invoice by invoice

$3,655

Mar 26

$3,785

Apr 26

$3,900

May 26

$15,320

Jun 26

$35,450

Jul 26

$26,650

Aug 26

Klaviyo Platform, email and profiles Mobile Messaging, SMS

Cash paid in each calendar month. Klaviyo bills the auto-renewal at month end for the month ahead, so its own chart assigns the same money to a slightly different month.

Month	Auto-renewal	Top-ups	Total paid	Invoices	Attributed revenue	Cost as % of revenue	Cost per order
Mar 26	$3,655	—	$3,655	1	$691,277	0.53%	$0.40
Apr 26	$3,785	—	$3,785	1	$658,581	0.57%	$0.43
May 26	$3,900	—	$3,900	2	$822,465	0.47%	$0.35
Jun 26	$4,610	$10,710	$15,320	2	$803,323	1.91%	$1.35
Jul 26	$25,030	$10,420	$35,450	6	$633,426	5.60%	$3.99
Aug 26	$25,770	$880	$26,650	4	$822,147	3.24%	$2.42
Six months	$66,750	$22,010	$88,760	16	$4,431,220	2.00%	$1.47

Which channel the money is going to

The invoices are itemised, so this is the billed split rather than an estimate. SMS first appears as a recurring line on the 2026-07-31 invoice. Before that the whole bill was the platform line, which is priced on profiles and email volume.

Invoice	Line	Monthly
31 Jul 2026	SMS: 2,850k credits	$21,000
	Klaviyo Platform: 430k profiles, 4,300k emails	$4,030
	Total	$25,030
26 Aug 2026	SMS tier upgrade, 2,850k to 2,950k credits, prorated	$750
	Platform tier upgrade, 430k to 450k profiles, prorated	$130
31 Aug 2026	Mobile Messaging	$21,610
	Klaviyo Platform: 450k profiles, 4,500k emails	$4,160
	Total, and the 2026-09-30 estimate	$25,770

SMS is 84% of the recurring bill. $21,610 of $25,770 a month. The platform line, which covers all email and every profile we store, is $4,160. Unit rates work out at $9.24 per thousand profiles a month and $7.33 per thousand SMS credits, which at 2.92 credits a message is about $0.0214 per text sent.

The 26 August upgrade is the overage resolving itself. Profiles had crossed the 430k allowance and SMS credits the 2,850k allowance. Klaviyo moved the account to 450k profiles and 2,950k credits and charged $880 prorated for the rest of the cycle. Ongoing that is $130 a month more on platform and $610 more on SMS.

Month	Email side	SMS side	SMS revenue	SMS return	Email revenue	Email return
Mar 26	$3,655	$0	$0	—	$691,277	189x
Apr 26	$3,785	$0	$0	—	$658,581	174x
May 26	$3,900	$0	$0	—	$822,465	211x
Jun 26	$4,610	$10,710	$4,734	0.4x	$798,589	173x
Jul 26	$4,030	$31,420	$117,339	3.7x	$516,088	128x
Aug 26	$4,290	$22,360	$177,953	8.0x	$644,194	150x

SMS now pays for itself, and the trend is the point. It returned 0.4 times its cost in Jun 26, 3.7 times in Jul 26 and 8.0 times in Aug 26. It went from losing money to comfortably profitable in three cycles.

But it is far less efficient than email, and that is the number to argue about. In Aug 26 the email side cost $4,160 and returned $644,194, which is 155 times. SMS cost $22,360 and returned $177,953. Per dollar of attributed revenue, email costs 0.65 cents and SMS costs 12.6 cents, so SMS is roughly 19 times more expensive per dollar earned. That is not an argument against SMS; it is the argument for keeping its send volume deliberate.

Two things in the invoices worth knowing

Jul 26 cost $35,450, the most expensive month, and $10,420 of it was ad-hoc top-ups across five separate invoices. That is the cost of running out of credits mid-cycle with auto-upgrade switched off. Aug 26 bought only $880 of top-ups because the plan had been upgraded by then, so the base renewal went from $4,610 to $25,030.

Four card payments were declined on 1 June, totalling $43,533 in void invoices. The charge cleared the following day at $10,710. Worth confirming with the bank that a repeat of that sequence will not interrupt sending, because with auto-upgrade off a failed payment and an exhausted credit balance would stop SMS.

What moves the number

Lever	Effect	Why
Suppress the unengaged	plan tier	178,002 profiles are excluded from almost every send but still billed. Removing them takes billable profiles from 436,204 to about 258,202, back inside the 430,000 allowance that forces the upgrade.
Shorten SMS copy	direct	2.92 credits per message means we pay nearly three times the single-segment rate. SMS is 84% of the bill, so this is the largest controllable line.
Turn auto-upgrade back on, or watch the meter	risk	Off means sends stop at the limit; the July top-ups are what happens instead. Either is fine, but only one of them is a decision rather than a scramble.

For context on the whole number. Six months of Klaviyo cost $88,760 against $4,431,220 of attributed revenue, which is 2.00%. Even at the current run rate the platform is a small fraction of what it returns. The question this report answers is not whether to keep it, but whether the $22,360 a month now going to SMS is buying the right things.