Per-Email Pricing: Examples & Companies

What is it

Per-email pricing is a billing unit where the number of emails sent in a billing period sets the price or the plan cap, common in email marketing, lifecycle messaging, and cold-outreach tools.

The send is the unit an email vendor actually pays to deliver, which is why it is one of the oldest usage meters in SaaS. What varies is how directly a vendor exposes it. Brevo makes it the headline meter: its Free plan sends 300 emails a day (about 9,000 a month) and every tier, free or paid, carries unlimited contacts. Klaviyo sits at the other end. Its Email product is priced on active profiles, and the send count rides along as an allowance: $20 a month at 500 active profiles buys 5,000 emails.

Most of the companies here fall between those two, so the practical question for a buyer is which meter actually binds: the audience you store or the volume you send. The answer decides whether list growth or campaign frequency moves the bill. For the general mechanics of metering a usage unit like this, see the introduction to usage-based pricing.

How it works

Send volume enters the bill in one of four ways:

Unit math: 2,000,000 transactional emails in one month

• Customer.io Essentials: $100 base (5,000 profiles, 1M emails included) + 1,000 × $0.12 for the second million = $220
• Mailchimp Mandrill: 2,000,000 ÷ 25,000 = 80 blocks, which falls in the 41–80 band at $16/block = $1,280, on top of a Standard or Premium marketing plan
• Twilio Email: 2,000,000 × $0.0013 = $2,600

The same workload spans a nearly 12× price range. Two things drive the gap: Customer.io’s overage rate is about a tenth of Twilio’s list rate, and its base fee already covers the first million sends.

Companies using this

Nine companies in the corpus list emails sent as a billing unit. Only a minority make send volume the primary price driver; for most, sends are a cap, an overage line, or a free-tier throttle next to a contact, profile, or active-user meter.

Patterns observed

• The audience meter binds before the send cap. Constant Contact advertises flat-looking $12 / $35 / $80 tiers, but its footnote says the price is “based on number of contacts and email sends. Overage fees may apply.” In practice list size moves the bill first: a Lite buyer who grows from 500 to 1,000 contacts sees roughly a 150% jump even if send volume stays the same. In six of the nine companies, the email meter sits next to a contacts meter.
• Vendors redefine the meter away from sends, not toward it. On February 18, 2025, Klaviyo stopped billing on profiles emailed or texted in the prior 90 days and started billing on every active profile in the account, capping any single email-plan increase at 25%. A send-linked definition gave way to a stored-audience one, so dormant contacts now count even if they are never mailed.
• Free tiers are rationed in sends, and the ration keeps shrinking. Mailchimp’s Free plan is down to 500 sends a month (250 a day) alongside a 250-contact limit, from 2,000 contacts in 2022. In April 2025 Twilio’s SendGrid replaced its perpetual “100 emails/day for free” plan with a 60-day trial, which removed the only forever-free plan in Twilio’s portfolio. The send cap is the lever vendors pull when they want free users to convert sooner.

Counterexamples & variants

Pure send-metering has cliffs of its own. Brevo avoids contact inflation entirely, but its ladder jumps from $18 a month on Standard to $499 on Professional, which starts at 150,000 emails a month and bundles 10 seats. A sender crossing into six-figure monthly volume pays for a seats-and-AI package it may not need, so unlimited contacts do not guarantee a smooth price curve.

Cold outreach uses sends as the tier separator. Smartlead sizes its four plans at 6,000, 90,000, 150,000 and 500,000 emails a month, and its two upper tiers drop the contact limit altogether. The implied cost per send falls from about $0.0065 on the $39 Base plan to under $0.001 on the $379 Prime plan. In cold email, send volume is also what drives deliverability risk, so it is metered and contacts are not.

The send can disappear into a credit pool. Braze does not price email on its own at all. Sends draw down a shared Action Credits pool that also funds SMS, in-product messaging and the BrazeAI Agent Console, and every edition is quote-only, so the buyer never sees a per-email rate. It is the credit-based variant of this unit.

Sends as a trial gate, not a price. Keap lists emails sent as a billing unit, but its $299-a-month plan is priced on contacts (1,500 included) and users. Sends matter only in the free trial, which is hard-capped at 25 emails. There the send cap acts as a demo limit, not a meter.

What this means for buyers vs vendors

For buyers

Work out which meter binds for your list. Divide your planned monthly sends by your contact count. If the ratio is well below the plan’s send multiple, you are paying for audience and a send-metered vendor may be cheaper. If you mail the same list many times a month, a contact-priced plan with a generous allowance usually wins. Ask every vendor three things in writing: what happens when you exceed the send cap (paused sending, automatic overage, or forced upgrade), whether unsubscribed and dormant contacts count toward the tier, and whether transactional email is a separate product with its own minimum plan. Model at least two volumes, today’s and 3× today’s, in the pricing calculator hub before you sign, and set usage alerts on send volume so an overage never shows up first on the invoice.

For vendors

Sends track your delivery cost well, but customers budget by audience. Decide which of the two is the price and which is the guardrail, and put both on the pricing card. A send cap buried in a footnote reads as a trap when it binds. If you meter sends, publish the overage rate next to the included volume and avoid tier gaps where one extra batch of mail forces a jump to a much larger plan. If you price on contacts, a send allowance expressed as a multiple of contacts is easy for buyers to check. Run transactional and marketing email on separate meters only if your product gives buyers a clear reason why. Our guide to choosing the right usage metric covers this trade-off between cost alignment and budget predictability.

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