Brevo (rebranded from Sendinblue in 2023) prices email marketing by monthly send volume rather than by contact list size. The free plan caps you at 300 emails per day with unlimited contacts up to 100,000, paid plans start at $9/month for 5,000 emails, and the most common Business tier is $18/month for 5,000 emails or $65/month for 20,000. That headline is honest, but the real number you pay depends on add-ons (logo removal, dedicated IP, SMS credits) and which tier carries the features you actually need.
This breakdown walks through every tier with current 2026 pricing, the gotchas, and where Brevo's economics work versus where they stop making sense.
Brevo's free plan: what's actually included
Brevo's free plan allows 300 emails per day with unlimited contacts up to 100,000, according to Brevo's pricing help docs. That works out to roughly 9,000 emails per month - more than enough to test the platform but constrained for any serious campaign cadence. There's no credit card required and no expiration date.
What you get on free:
- 300 emails/day (~9,000/month)
- Unlimited contacts up to 100,000
- Drag-and-drop email editor
- Basic segmentation
- Transactional email and SMS (pay-as-you-go)
- Customizable templates
What's missing:
- No way to remove Brevo branding. Every email shows a "Sent with Brevo" footer with the logo - this is non-negotiable on the free tier.
- No A/B testing or marketing automation workflows.
- No phone support (chat and email only).
- No multi-user access - one seat only.
- Daily limit, not monthly. If you have a 20,000-subscriber list, you literally cannot send to everyone in one campaign on free - you'd need to split sends across days.
The 300/day cap is the practical wall. Most newsletter operators with a growing list outgrow it within weeks.
Brevo Starter: the entry paid tier
Brevo Starter starts at $9/month for 5,000 emails and scales up by volume to $69/month for 100,000 emails, per Brevo's pricing page. It removes the daily limit and converts your allowance to a monthly send pool - this alone is the biggest practical upgrade from free. Starter is the cheapest way to send to a list larger than 300 contacts in a single batch.
Starter pricing by volume:
- 5,000 emails: $9/month
- 20,000 emails: $29/month
- 100,000 emails: $69/month
What Starter adds beyond free:
- Monthly send pool (no daily cap)
- Basic chat support
- Sales platform basics
What Starter still lacks:
- No marketing automation workflows. You can't build welcome sequences, drip campaigns, or behavior-triggered emails.
- No A/B testing.
- No landing pages.
- Brevo logo still in your footer unless you pay $9/month extra for the removal add-on. So a "real" Starter plan that doesn't look like a free trial is $18/month - identical to Business at the base tier.
That last point is the gotcha: at the entry volume, Business is the same price as Starter-plus-logo-removal but ships with automation, A/B testing, and landing pages included. Few teams should stay on Starter for long.
Brevo Business: the most common plan
Brevo Business is the most-recommended tier and starts at $18/month for 5,000 emails, scaling to $65/month for 20,000 and $129/month for 100,000. According to Brevo's pricing documentation, this is the tier where Brevo stops being a glorified bulk sender and becomes a real marketing platform.
What Business adds:
- Marketing automation workflows (welcome sequences, drips, triggers)
- A/B testing on subject lines and content
- Send-time optimization (machine-learning best-send-time)
- Landing page builder
- Advanced analytics including click maps and engagement scoring
- Phone support
- Multi-user access (additional seats are extra)
- Brevo logo removed by default
Business pricing by volume:
| Plan | 5,000 emails | 20,000 emails | 100,000 emails | Logo | Automation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 (300/day cap) | N/A | N/A | Required | ✗ No |
| Starter | $9/mo | $29/mo | $69/mo | +$9/mo | ✗ No |
| Business | $18/mo | $65/mo | $129/mo | ✓ Removed | ✓ Yes |
| Enterprise | Custom quote (typically $1,000+/mo) | ✓ Removed | ✓ Yes | ||
Most serious marketing teams land on Business. The next tier up adds enterprise governance, not core functionality.
Brevo Enterprise: high-volume and custom pricing
Brevo Enterprise is a custom-quote tier targeted at organizations sending millions of emails per month or needing dedicated infrastructure. Brevo does not publish a list price; per EmailToolTester's 2026 Brevo pricing review, Enterprise contracts typically start around $1,000/month and climb with send volume, dedicated IPs, and add-on modules.
What Enterprise adds:
- Custom send volumes (millions/month)
- Dedicated IP addresses (or several)
- Dedicated customer success manager
- SSO and advanced user management
- SLA guarantees on uptime and deliverability
- Custom onboarding and migration support
- Enhanced security features (SOC 2 audit access, etc.)
Enterprise is also where Brevo's Sales Cloud, Conversations, and CDP modules can be bundled together. If you're using Brevo as a single platform across marketing, sales, and customer support, this is the only tier that gives you holistic governance and unified billing.
The honest take: most companies considering Enterprise should also be evaluating HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Customer.io at the same price point. Brevo Enterprise is competitive but rarely the obvious winner against those at $1,000+/month.
How Brevo's pricing compares to alternatives
At the entry tier, Brevo undercuts most hosted ESPs - Starter at $9/month is cheaper than Mailchimp's Essentials plan, which starts at $13/month for 500 contacts (per Brevo's pricing page and Mailchimp's published rates). But the math shifts as you scale, and a BYO Amazon SES setup at $0.10 per 1,000 emails stays nearly flat where hosted ESPs climb. Here's how Brevo's Business tier ($65/month for 20,000 emails) stacks against Mailchimp at similar volume and a BYO-Amazon SES setup.
For a deeper price comparison against Mailchimp specifically, see our Mailchimp pricing breakdown. For the Amazon SES math, see Amazon SES pricing.
The chart shows the structural difference clearly: Brevo and Mailchimp climb roughly in parallel as volume grows, while BYO Amazon SES stays nearly flat because you're paying per-1000-email infrastructure costs, not retail SaaS markup.
Where Brevo's pricing climbs faster than expected
Brevo's headline numbers look friendly, but three add-on categories drive most of the surprise bills. Per Brevo's add-ons help docs, dedicated IP addresses run roughly $145/month, additional user seats start around $12/month each, and SMS credits are billed separately on top of any plan.
Where the budget actually drifts:
- Dedicated IP. If your deliverability team requires it (and at 100k+ emails/month, you'll want one), that's ~$145/month on top of your plan. That's nearly double your Business subscription at the 5k tier.
- Logo removal on Starter. $9/month forever, just to look professional.
- SMS. Brevo's SMS pricing varies by country, but US SMS runs around $0.0149 per message. A 10,000-contact SMS blast costs ~$149 - separate from your email plan.
- Transactional volume overages. If you also use Brevo for password resets and receipts, you'll burn through your monthly pool faster than expected, and overages aren't cheap.
- Multiple users. Solo founders are fine, but a 5-person marketing team adds ~$48/month in seat fees on Business.
- Landing pages. Included on Business, but capped - heavy landing page use pushes you toward Enterprise.
A "real" Brevo bill for a 5-person marketing team sending 50,000 emails/month with a dedicated IP and basic SMS use lands closer to $300-$400/month, not the $99 Business sticker price.
When Brevo is the right choice
Brevo is genuinely well-priced for a specific operator profile: small-to-mid businesses with a large stored contact list but moderate send frequency, where the contact-based pricing of Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign would punish them. According to Sender's 2026 Brevo pricing review, Brevo is "one of the few major ESPs that doesn't penalize you for list size."
Brevo makes sense when:
- You have 20,000+ contacts but only send 1-2 campaigns per month (Mailchimp would charge you $100+/month just for the list size; Brevo charges by what you send).
- You want a single platform for email + SMS + transactional + light CRM under one bill.
- You're a non-profit, school, or community org with a big list and limited budget.
- You're outside the US (Brevo is French - its EU GDPR posture and EU data residency are mature).
- You need transactional email and marketing email in the same dashboard without juggling two providers.
These are not small advantages. For the right use case, Brevo's pricing is honestly excellent.
When Brevo isn't the right choice (and what to consider)
Brevo's pricing model breaks down when your send frequency is high relative to list size, when you need clean deliverability isolation, or when you want zero-branding on a tight budget. Amazon SES charges a flat $0.10 per 1,000 emails (AWS, 2026), so for any sender pushing past 500,000 emails per month, a Brevo Business or Enterprise subscription runs 5-10x the cost of running your own SES with a thin management layer on top.
Brevo isn't the right fit when:
- You send a lot relative to list size. A daily newsletter to 30,000 subscribers = 900,000 emails/month. On Brevo, that's pushing $500+/month. On Amazon SES with a management layer, it's closer to $90 + the management fee.
- You need dedicated deliverability infrastructure without paying $145/month per IP.
- You hate vendor lock-in. Brevo owns your sending IPs, sender reputation, and bounce-handling logic. Migrating off is non-trivial.
- You want zero branding on a free or near-free plan. The Brevo logo is mandatory unless you pay.
- You need full multi-brand agency tooling without Enterprise pricing.
For high-frequency senders, the alternative most teams move to is BYO Amazon SES - paying AWS directly for infrastructure ($0.10 per 1,000 emails) and using a management layer on top for the editor, list management, automation, and analytics. That setup keeps you in control of your own sending domain and reputation, and the per-email cost is roughly 1/30th of a hosted ESP at scale.
This is the model behind Mailblast, the management layer for your own Amazon SES account: drag-and-drop editor, automation included on every paid plan, CSV import and double opt-in, per-link click tracking, and no platform branding in the email footer from the entry paid rung. The free plan covers 1,000 contacts and 10,000 emails per month; paid plans start at $10/month for that same 1,000 contacts, on a 32-rung ladder up to 500,000. If you're still under the 100k emails/month threshold and the list-size-not-volume math works for you, Brevo is a legitimately good fit; above it, the BYO-SES route usually wins on total cost.
FAQ
How much does Brevo cost per month?
Brevo's Free plan is $0 with a 300 emails/day limit. The Starter plan begins at $9/month for 5,000 emails, the Business plan at $18/month for the same 5,000-email tier (with automation and A/B testing), and Enterprise pricing is quote-only. Prices scale with send volume, not contact count.
Is Brevo really free forever?
Yes - Brevo's free plan has no time limit and no credit card required. You get 300 emails per day (around 9,000/month) and unlimited contacts up to 100,000. The catch is the Brevo logo in every email footer; removing it costs $9/month on Starter or is included on Business and above.
Does Brevo charge per contact like Mailchimp?
No. Brevo is one of the few major ESPs that doesn't charge by contact list size on its standard plans - you can store up to 100,000 contacts on the free plan. Pricing scales by emails sent per month, which is friendlier for large lists with infrequent sends but punishes high-frequency senders.
What's the difference between Brevo Starter and Business?
Starter ($9/month base) covers basic email sending, templates, and SMS. Business ($18/month base) adds marketing automation workflows, A/B testing, send-time optimization, advanced analytics, landing pages, and phone support. Most growing teams outgrow Starter within a quarter because they need automation.
Are there hidden costs in Brevo?
Yes, a few. The Brevo logo removal is $9/month on Starter. Dedicated IPs cost extra (around $145/month). SMS credits are pay-as-you-go on top of your plan. Transactional email volumes beyond your plan trigger overage charges. Landing pages and multi-user seats are gated behind Business+.
Disclosure: This pricing breakdown is published by Mailblast. We've represented Brevo's plans using their public pricing and help documentation and linked sources throughout. Mailblast is a different model - the management layer for your own Amazon SES account, not a hosted ESP - which is the alternative referenced in the closing section.