Free calculator · no email required
What is your list actually costing you?
Not the tier price — you already have that on the invoice. The share of it carried by profiles that have not opened anything in three months, and what removing them is worth in money and in deliverability.
How email platform pricing works
Klaviyo and its competitors price on active profiles, in stepped tiers, with SMS billed separately per message. That means your bill is set by list size rather than by how much of the list is worth mailing — so a profile that has ignored every send for a year costs exactly the same as your best customer, and costs you again in sender reputation.
Four numbers from your account.
Prefilled with an illustrative account. The first comes off your invoice; the other three off the platform’s own reporting.
From the invoice, email plan only. We deliberately do not reprint a tier table — published pricing changes without notice, and yours is the accurate figure.
The number your tier is priced on, not total contacts ever collected.
Opened or clicked. If your purchase cycle is longer than three months, widen the window — a customer who buys twice a year is not unengaged at day 91.
Email and SMS revenue as the platform reports it — its own attribution, with its own generous window.
Carried by unengaged profiles, a year
$9,344
65,000 profiles — of the list — have not opened or clicked in 90 days.
- Cost per profilebill ÷ active profiles
- $0.012
- Cost per engaged profilewhat you actually pay to reach someone
- $0.037
- Revenue per engaged profileplatform-attributed
- $5
- Return on platform costattributed revenue ÷ bill
- 129×
A linear estimate. Tiers are stepped, so suppressing profiles saves nothing until it drops you a tier — then it saves the whole step. Treat this as the size of the prize rather than a quotation.
Why the dead list costs you twice
The bill is the smaller half, and the larger half lands on your best customers.
- Engagement is a sender signal Mailbox providers weight recent engagement heavily when deciding whether your mail reaches the inbox or the promotions tab. A large unengaged segment drags the average down for everyone on the list, including the customers who do want to hear from you.
- Old addresses become spam traps Abandoned mailboxes are recycled by providers into traps. Mail to one is a direct hit on sender reputation, and the only defence is not sending to addresses that stopped responding a year ago.
- The cost shows up twice You pay the tier for the profile, and you pay again in deliverability for sending to it. The second cost lands on your engaged subscribers, which is why this is a revenue problem rather than a billing one.
The sunset policy, stage by stage
What we implement on client accounts, published so you can disagree with a specific stage. It is a policy, not a benchmark — none of these windows is a measured threshold.
| Since last engagement | What happens | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 0–90 days | Full sending | Engaged by any definition. Nothing to do. |
| 90–180 days | Reduce frequency, keep flows | Still worth reaching, but broadcast frequency is what turns a lapsed subscriber into a complaint. Transactional and lifecycle flows continue. |
| 180–270 days | Win-back sequence, then stop broadcasts | One deliberate attempt with a reason to return. If it fails, continuing to send is buying deliverability damage with money. |
| 270+ days | Suppress | Suppressed, not deleted — you keep the record and the purchase history, and you stop paying the tier for it. |
Suppress, never delete. Suppressing removes the profile from the billable count and stops sending while keeping the record and the purchase history — which you will want for cohort analysis later. Deleting destroys it permanently. No benchmark engagement rate appears on this page; the windows are our policy and the right ones for you depend on your purchase cycle. metric to confirm. Reviewed 2026-09-09.
What this calculator does not do
Quote you a price. Deliberately. Published tiers change without notice and differ by region, so a calculator that reprints them misquotes the vendor sooner or later. Your invoice is the input.
Model SMS. SMS is billed per message rather than per profile and follows completely different economics. Keep it out of the cost field or the cost per profile is meaningless.
Judge the attribution. The revenue figure is the platform's own, with its own attribution window, and it is generous by design. It is fine for a ratio you track against itself over time; it is not a number to put in a board pack unchallenged.
Tell you what to send. A list that stops engaging is often a content problem before it is a hygiene problem. Suppression removes the cost; it does not fix the reason people stopped opening.
Definitions
- Active profile
- A contact your plan is priced on. Not the same as everyone who ever gave you an address.
- Engaged
- Opened or clicked within a chosen window — 90 days by convention, longer for slow purchase cycles.
- Suppression
- Stopping sending to a profile while keeping its record and history. Removes it from the billable count.
- Sunset policy
- The staged rules that move a profile from full sending to suppression as engagement decays.
- Spam trap
- An abandoned address recycled by a mailbox provider to catch senders who never clean their lists.
Questions about list cost
How is Klaviyo priced?
On active profiles, with SMS billed separately by message. That is the mechanism, and it is why this calculator asks for the number on your invoice rather than reprinting a tier table: published pricing changes without notice and varies by region, so a hardcoded table is wrong within a year and misquotes the vendor in the meantime. Your bill is the accurate input.
Why does this ask for my current cost instead of telling me the price?
Because the useful question is not what the platform costs — it is how much of what you already pay is going on profiles that will never open anything again. Your invoice answers the first question already. This one answers the second, which nobody sends you a report about.
What counts as an unengaged profile?
The common working definition is no open or click in 90 days, which is what this calculator uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule: a brand with a 6-month replenishment cycle should use a longer window, because a customer buying twice a year is not unengaged at day 91. Set the window to your own purchase cycle and the number becomes meaningful.
Will suppressing profiles actually lower my bill?
It lowers the profile count the tier is priced on, so it lowers the bill when it takes you into a lower tier. Tiers are stepped rather than linear, so suppressing 4,000 profiles might save nothing or might save a whole tier — the estimate here is linear and labelled as an approximation for exactly that reason.
Is suppressing the same as deleting?
No, and the distinction matters. Suppressing stops sending and removes the profile from the billable count while keeping the record, the purchase history and the ability to reactivate if they come back. Deleting destroys the history, which you will want later for cohort analysis. Suppress; do not delete.
Does a big list hurt more than it costs?
Usually, yes. Mailbox providers weight recent engagement when deciding inbox placement, so a large unengaged segment drags down deliverability for the subscribers who do want your mail. Abandoned addresses also get recycled into spam traps. You pay for the profile in the tier, then pay again in reputation — and the second cost lands on your best customers.
Is any of this sent to you?
No. The arithmetic runs in this browser tab, and your invoice figures are not transmitted or stored anywhere.
Related
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