Brevo pricing explained: you pay for the emails you send, not the people you send them to
Almost every email tool charges you for the size of your audience. Brevo charges you for how much you send. That one difference decides who wins: a 30,000-contact list mailed twice a month costs nearly nothing extra here, while a 2,000-contact list mailed every day climbs a volume ladder. Most pricing pages bury this. Brevo's is built on it.
What the tiers publish
| Free | Starter | Standard | Professional | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly-billed price | $0 | $9/mo | $18/mo | $499/mo |
| Annual-billed price | $0 | $96.96/yr (≈$8.08/mo) | $194.04/yr (≈$16.17/mo) | $5,388.96/yr (≈$449.08/mo) |
| What the meter measures | Emails sent per day | Monthly email volume | Monthly email volume | Monthly email volume |
| Published floor | 300 emails/day | From 5,000 emails/mo | From 5,000 emails/mo | From 5,000 emails/mo |
| Enterprise | Custom quote, not published | |||
The ruler is the send, not the list
Contact-based tools count your failures. Unsubscribes, bounces and stale addresses all occupy metered space on Mailchimp, and subscriber-based tools like Kit are kinder but still meter the audience. Brevo's meter attaches to something else entirely: the emails that actually leave. Your list can be enormous, half-dead, and duplicated — under this ruler none of it costs a cent until you press send. We mapped all three models side by side in how email pricing rulers work.
That makes Brevo the structural opposite of the tools it is usually compared against. A monthly broadcast newsletter to 25,000 people is the worst case on a contact ruler and close to the best case on Brevo's. A daily send to 2,000 people — 60,000 emails a month — is trivial on Kit's free plan and rung-climbing on Brevo's. Neither tool is overpriced; they are measuring different objects.
The free plan's limit is a day, not a list
Brevo's free plan caps you at 300 emails per day once your account is approved for sending. There is no published list ceiling in the material we read — the constraint is the day, not the audience. Three hundred a day is roughly 9,000 a month if you maxed it every single day, but you cannot actually do that: the cap forbids the one thing a launch requires, which is emailing your whole list at once.
So the free plan's real shape is this: fine for drip behaviour, structurally wrong for blast behaviour. A welcome sequence, an onboarding drip, a weekly note to a rolling slice of your list — all fit. A product launch, a Black Friday blast, a "sorry we messed up" email to everyone — none fit. Compare that with Mailchimp's free tier, which is small in both directions at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, and read why free plans exist for why vendors draw the line in such different places.
The $18-to-$499 gap is where the ladder lives
The jump from Standard to Professional is 27.7 times in one step. No small business crosses it gradually — and that gap is exactly where Brevo's volume ladder does its work. The published $9 and $18 are the floors of their tiers; as your monthly send volume grows, the price of your tier grows rung by rung inside the page's selector, long before $499 becomes relevant.
This is the honest warning for anyone comparing Brevo against a contact-priced tool: your bill is a lookup, not a headline. A competitor's page shows you a price per list size; Brevo's shows you a starting price and a meter. Before committing, drag your real monthly volume — last month's sends, not an aspiration — through their selector and write the number down. We did not capture the full ladder, and we will not guess at it; that figure is part of what "hands-on testing in progress" means for this page.
The annual discount is a flat ten percent
Derived from Brevo's own published pairs: $9 monthly versus $96.96 annual ($108 if billed monthly, so 10% off), $18 versus $194.04 (10% off $216), $499 versus $5,388.96 (10% off $5,988). That is a clean, uniform discount — no "save up to 40%" badge arithmetic to unwind, and the annual figures work out to roughly $8.08, $16.17 and $449.08 a month. It is derived arithmetic from published numbers, not a quoted annual price, but it is at least arithmetic you can check.
When Brevo is the wrong purchase
- You send daily to a small list. Subscriber-priced tools eat this for free — Kit's free plan covers 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends. On Brevo the same behaviour buys rungs on the ladder.
- You need deep marketing automation on a budget. The automation feature set at Standard's $18 is not something we have verified in an account, and the Professional tier that assumes it starts at $499. Price your volume first; if the ladder lands you mid-gap, a contact-priced tool with automations included may simply be cheaper.
- You compare it feature-for-feature against Mailchimp at 500 contacts. At small list sizes Mailchimp Standard can be the cheaper way to get automations and seats — that is the honest conclusion of Kit vs Mailchimp, and Brevo does not automatically beat it.
And when it is the right one: a large list you mail rarely, transactional plus marketing email under one roof at the $9 floor — genuinely rare at that price — or any situation where list hygiene is out of your control because contacts accumulate whether you clean them or not. If that describes you, Brevo's free plan is worth testing — affiliate link, and the tiers above are what an upgrade actually costs.
What we cannot verify
Prices come from the structured data published on Brevo's own pricing page on October 23, 2026, in USD: Free $0, Starter $9 monthly / $96.96 annual, Standard $18 / $194.04, Professional $499 / $5,388.96, Enterprise custom, the 300-email daily cap on Free, and "from 5,000 emails per month" as the published floor of the paid tiers. The full volume ladder above the entry rung, contact storage limits, user seats per tier, SMS credits and pricing, and the automation feature split between Standard and Professional were not captured. We have not run a paid Brevo account, so deliverability, metering behaviour at the rung boundaries and automation reliability are unverified. Hands-on testing is in progress and this page will be updated when it lands. See How We Test.