Klaviyo SMS Pricing Explained: What You'll Actually Pay (2026)

Klaviyo SMS pricing changed on 13 July 2026. Klaviyo dropped SMS credits and moved to per-message rates priced in dollars. Existing paid accounts switched on their first billing date after 13 August 2026.

You still buy a Mobile Messaging plan up front, and it sits on your bill separately from your email plan. The plan is now a dollar amount of message spend each month, not a balance of credits. Klaviyo added more than 70 plan tiers with the switch, so you can size it fairly closely.

Unused spend doesn't roll over

Your plan spend resets every billing cycle. Whatever you don't send that month is gone. A plan sized for your Black Friday month is overpaying in every quiet month around it.

What happens when you run out

Klaviyo gives you three settings for the month you hit your limit:

• Auto-upgrade moves you to the next plan tier and keeps sending.
• Flex buys extra usage from the next tier for a one-time fee and keeps you on your current plan. It's only available on plans of $490 a month and up.
• Manual stops all sending until you upgrade, flex, or the billing cycle renews.

Manual looks like the careful choice. It isn't. All sending includes the abandoned cart and back-in-stock texts that pay for the rest of the program, and nobody notices they've stopped until the month's revenue is already short.

What happened to Klaviyo SMS credits

Credits no longer apply to new sends. Your old credit usage stays visible in the account, so you can still compare past months. For reference, a US SMS segment used to cost 1 credit and a US MMS cost 3.

Klaviyo's formula is short: rate × recipients × segments = cost. The rate is fixed for a given channel and destination. Recipients and segments are where the bill actually moves.

What sets your rate

• Channel: SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and RCS are each priced separately.
• Country or region of the number you're texting.
• Number type, for US and Canada SMS only: toll-free and short-code sends carry different rates.

Carrier fees are bundled into the rate. There are no separate carrier fee line items on a Klaviyo SMS bill, so don't add a carrier surcharge on top when you budget.

Where to find your Klaviyo SMS rates

Don't budget off a rate table in a blog post, this one included. Your rates depend on your number type and where your subscribers live, and Klaviyo publishes them inside your account. Open Settings → Billing in Klaviyo to see your text message rates and plan options.

MMS costs more than SMS

An MMS carries an image or GIF, which takes more data and more sending infrastructure than plain text, so it's priced higher. Under the old credits a US MMS cost three times a US SMS segment. Check the gap in your own rate table before you make every campaign an MMS.

A segment is the unit you pay for. A plain-text SMS fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji or special character and the limit for that message drops to 70.

Go past the limit and the message splits. Each segment carries an invisible header of about 7 characters, so a split plain-text SMS holds 153 characters per segment. You pay for every segment, for every recipient.

The math on a real send

Say you text 10,000 subscribers a 150-character plain-text message. That's one segment each: 10,000 segments.

Now add one emoji. The message is still about 150 characters, but the limit is 70, so it splits into three segments. Same list, same offer: 30,000 segments. One character tripled the cost of the send.

The characters that catch stores out

Emojis are the obvious trigger. The sneaky ones are characters you can't see you've used: curly quotes and apostrophes pasted from a doc, em-dashes, and some accented letters. Write SMS copy as plain text and paste it in as plain text.

Where MMS fits

MMS allows up to 1,600 characters, and emojis don't change that limit. That makes it the format for a message that genuinely needs an image and longer copy, not a fix for SMS copy that runs long.

Not every message in your SMS reporting costs money. Klaviyo bills for:

• Campaign messages
• Flow messages
• Outbound replies in Conversations
• Auto-responses and custom keyword replies
• Messages that fail to deliver

These cost nothing:

• Inbound messages from subscribers
• Opt-in messages
• Standard keyword replies: YES, HELP, STOP, START and their variants
• Skipped messages
• SMS previews

Failed sends are the quiet leak

A text to a dead or mistyped number still bills. On a list that has been collecting numbers for years, that adds up every send. Check failed deliveries in your SMS reporting and clean out the numbers that keep failing.

Skipped messages are free

Klaviyo doesn't bill for messages it skips. That makes Smart Sending, which skips anyone you've messaged recently, a cost control as well as a courtesy. Leave it on for campaigns unless you have a specific reason not to.

Most of the savings sit in a handful of habits. Start with flows, not campaigns: a flow message sends every day, so a segment saved there is saved thousands of times.

Write flows to 160 plain characters

Abandoned cart, welcome and shipping texts don't need emojis to work. Get each one to a single segment, then do the same for your recurring campaign templates.

Check where your SMS spend goes by country

Rates are set by destination, so a small share of international subscribers can be a much larger share of spend. Segment your SMS subscribers by location and decide whether every market earns its rate.

Send campaigns to engaged segments

Texting the whole list pays to reach people who stopped reading months ago. Send campaigns to subscribers who have clicked or bought recently. Our Klaviyo segmentation guide covers how to build those segments.

Use MMS where the image does the selling

A product launch or a back-in-stock alert can justify the higher rate. A discount reminder rarely does.

Pick the over-limit setting on purpose

If SMS flows drive real revenue, use auto-upgrade or flex rather than manual. Then right-size the plan after the busy month, because unused spend won't carry over.

SMS earns its cost on messages where timing matters: abandoned cart, back in stock, a limited drop, a delivery update. It rarely earns it on newsletter-style content that would work just as well as an email. Our Klaviyo abandoned cart flow guide shows where SMS fits in the flow that matters most.

If your bill jumped and your send volume didn't, this probably isn't a Klaviyo pricing problem. It's usually segments, country mix or failed sends, and all three show up in your own reporting.

When to bring in a Klaviyo expert

• Your SMS spend is large enough that cutting segments and wasted sends pays for the work.
• You text subscribers in several countries with different rates and consent rules.
• You can't tell which flows and campaigns earn back their SMS spend.
• Your flows need rebuilding, not just shorter copy.

The shopexperts directory lists 44 Klaviyo experts who work on Shopify stores. If the problem is the copy itself, email and SMS copywriters can rewrite flows to fit single segments. For broader programs, browse Shopify email marketing experts.

Choosing an SMS platform

Weighing Klaviyo SMS against a dedicated SMS platform is an app decision. Our sister site, app store research, covers it in a Klaviyo vs Attentive vs Postscript comparison built on operator reviews.

• What Klaviyo actually costs — email plan pricing
• The Klaviyo flows every Shopify store needs first
• Klaviyo welcome series — where welcome texts fit
• Is Klaviyo worth it?