Email marketing

Mailchimp, Brevo or Klaviyo: what each charges for, what the free plans allow, and where your list is kept

All three have a free plan and charge more as your list or your sending grows, but each counts something different. Brevo keeps its servers in the EU; Mailchimp and Klaviyo keep your list in the United States, unless EU data residency is part of your Klaviyo agreement.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 30 October 20266 minute read12 sources

What each charges for

Mailchimp prices by contacts, Klaviyo by active profiles, and Brevo by the emails you send each month, with a number of contacts included that rises with the volume. As each pricing page showed them in October 2026:

	Mailchimp	Brevo	Klaviyo
What the price counts	Contacts: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed	Emails a month, campaigns and transactional together	Active profiles: contacts who may receive marketing email
Free plan	250 contacts; 500 emails a month, 250 a day	300 emails a day; up to 100,000 contacts	250 active profiles; 500 emails a month
Entry paid price	Essentials from €11.76 a month, Standard from €18.09, each for up to 500 contacts	Starter from €7 a month, for 5,000 emails and 500 contacts	Email from USD 20 a month, for 500 profiles and 5,000 emails
A step up	1,501 to 2,500 contacts: Essentials €40.70, Standard €54.27 a month	10,000 emails and 1,500 contacts: Starter €14 a month	2,500 profiles and 25,000 emails: USD 60 a month
Billing	Monthly; annual plans on Standard and Premium from 10,000 contacts	Monthly, or yearly at 10% less	A monthly price
Currency on the page	Euro, chosen on the page	Euro, chosen on the page	US or Canadian dollars only

Sending allowances

Mailchimp's monthly sending limit is 10 times your contact limit on Essentials and 12 times on Standard, and test and transactional emails count towards it. Klaviyo's email allowance comes with the profile tier: 5,000 emails a month at 500 profiles, 25,000 at 2,500. Brevo's paid plans are bought as an email volume. Paying Brevo yearly takes Starter from €7 to €6.33 a month. Klaviyo's page offered a first month's discount at 500 profiles, for a limited time, which is left out of the table.

The free plans

Each free plan is a working account with a ceiling:

1Mailchimp Free: up to 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, no more than 250 in a day, for one user and one audience, with email support for the first 30 days. If the list passes 250 contacts, Mailchimp holds sending, test emails included, until you upgrade or reduce the list.
2Brevo Free: up to 300 emails a day, once Brevo approves the account for sending, and up to 100,000 contacts, for one user. Its emails keep the Sent with Brevo footer, and automations reach up to 2,000 contacts.
3Klaviyo Free: up to 250 active profiles and 500 emails a month, with USD 5 of mobile messages a month and email support for the first 60 days. Past either limit, Klaviyo stops sending until the next billing cycle or an upgrade.

What counts as a contact

Mailchimp counts every contact stored across all your audiences, unsubscribed ones included; archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count. On a paid plan, going over the contact limit does not stop sending; it adds a charge to the bill. Moving up a tier removes the extra charges, and after a temporary rise, keeping the list lower for a full billing cycle avoids further ones.

Klaviyo counts active profiles, the contacts who may receive marketing email. As the count grows, Klaviyo moves the account to a plan that fits it, and suggests suppressing profiles you no longer want to pay for.

Brevo sells its paid plans by monthly email volume, campaigns and transactional email together, and the contacts included rise with the volume chosen: on Starter, 500 contacts with 5,000 emails a month, and 1,500 with 10,000.

Where each keeps your list

All three act as your processor: your business decides who is on the list and why, and each sets that out in a data processing agreement that is part of its terms. Controller or processor explains the two roles.

1Mailchimp says its servers are in the United States, so data may be stored and processed there. Its data processing addendum is part of its Standard Terms of Use and needs no signature. Transfers rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which covers Mailchimp through Intuit's certification, with the EU's standard contractual clauses in the addendum if the Framework is invalidated.
2Brevo, a company registered in Paris, says its servers are in the EU, with account data backed up across three geographically separate servers. Its data processing agreement is an appendix to its Terms of Service. Processing can at times happen outside the EEA, where Brevo, its affiliates or its sub-processors operate, under standard contractual clauses, and Brevo may rely on the Data Privacy Framework for transfers to the US.
3Klaviyo says data is hosted in an Amazon Web Services data centre in the United States. Its data processing agreement, updated in September 2026, is part of its agreement with each customer, and provides for storage in the EU where a customer has stipulated EU data residency as part of the service. Transfers rely on the Data Privacy Framework, with standard contractual clauses for as long as Klaviyo cannot rely on it.

Before the first campaign

The platform does not decide who you may email. The rules on consent, and the soft opt-in for existing customers, are in the Irish rules for marketing email, and they apply whichever platform sends the email.

Email a platform sends in your domain's name also depends on your domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records: what each of them decides. Before relying on the Data Privacy Framework for Mailchimp or Klaviyo, sending personal data to the US from Ireland covers what to check.

Which suits which business

From what each vendor documents:

1Under 250 contacts: any of the three free plans. Mailchimp's and Klaviyo's cap sending at 500 emails a month; Brevo's allows 300 a day and keeps its footer on every email.
2Prices in euro: Mailchimp's and Brevo's pricing pages offer euro; Klaviyo's offers US or Canadian dollars.
3The list stored in the EU: Brevo, whose servers are in the EU, or Klaviyo where EU data residency is part of the agreement. Mailchimp's servers are in the United States.
4Text messages as well as email: Klaviyo's free plan includes USD 5 of mobile messages a month; Mailchimp sells SMS as an add-on to paid plans in select countries; Brevo sells SMS credits separately.
5A list that keeps growing: Klaviyo moves the account up a plan by itself; Mailchimp keeps sending and adds a charge until you change tier; Brevo's contacts follow the email volume you buy.

Sources

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Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

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