Brevo Pricing and Cost Per Email: Brevo SMTP Plans and Limits

Brevo has four published plans plus a custom Enterprise tier. Starter is $9 a month, Standard is $18 a month, and Professional is $499 a month. The free plan is capped at 300 emails a day and Brevo has to approve your account for sending before that allowance unlocks.

Annual billing takes 10 percent off, which is worth noting because most of this market discounts annual plans by 20 percent. On Brevo the annual commitment saves you roughly one month a year rather than two.

Within Starter and Standard, the volume is adjustable. The configurator offers steps at 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, 80,000 and 100,000 emails a month, with a More option above that. The prices at each of those steps are rendered by the configurator rather than published in a fixed table, which is a large part of why no two Brevo pricing articles agree with each other.

At its plan floors, Brevo costs $1.80 per 1,000 emails on Starter, $3.60 per 1,000 on Standard and $3.33 per 1,000 on Professional. That is the calculation the pricing page does not show you, and it reframes Brevo completely. The headline price is among the lowest in the market. The unit price is not.

For scale, a pure transactional provider at 100,000 emails a month works out around $0.35 per 1,000 on Resend or SendGrid, and $0.10 per 1,000 on Amazon SES a la carte. Brevo at its floor is five to thirty times that per message.

That is not a criticism, and it is not a reason to avoid Brevo. You are not buying raw delivery. You are buying a campaign builder, marketing automation, segmentation, landing pages, a CRM and a transactional relay on one bill. The point is simply that if raw send volume is the only thing you need, Brevo is an expensive way to buy it, and the cost per 1,000 is the number that tells you which situation you are in.

The break in that logic comes as volume climbs. The unit price falls as you slide the volume up inside Starter and Standard, so a business sending 100,000 emails a month on Standard pays far less per message than the $3.60 floor implies. Below roughly 20,000 emails a month, though, the floor is what you actually pay.

Brevo's paid ladder goes $9, then $18, then $499. There is nothing between Standard and Professional. That is a 27 times jump from one paid plan to the next, and it is the single most consequential thing about Brevo's pricing structure.

The jump does not usually hit you on volume, because the Starter and Standard sliders run to 100,000 emails a month and beyond. It hits you on features. Contact scoring, WhatsApp, push notifications, popups, multi user access with 10 seats, AI segmentation and phone support all live on Professional and none of them exist on Standard. If your business grows into needing exactly one of those, the price of that one feature is the difference between $18 and $499.

Compare that with how the rest of the market ladders. Mailgun goes $15, $35, $90. Resend goes $20, $35, $90, $160, $350. SendGrid steps through $19.95, $34.95, $89.95, $249, $499. Every one of those gives you three or four intermediate rungs where Brevo gives you none.

The practical advice is to be honest with yourself about the Professional features before you commit to Brevo at all. If there is a realistic path where you will need multi user access or contact scoring within a year, price Professional now and decide against that number rather than against $18. And if you only need one of them, check whether a second small tool alongside Standard is cheaper than the jump, because at a $481 a month gap it very often is.

Search Brevo pricing and you will get a dozen articles quoting different numbers for the same plans. There are four concrete reasons, and knowing them lets you sanity check any figure you read, including ours.

Brevo geo prices, and the page does not tell you loudly. Requested from a European address, Brevo's pricing page renders Starter at 7 and Standard at 15 in euros. Brevo's own structured pricing data on that same page declares United States dollars and gives $9 and $18. Those are different numbers and different currencies for the same plans, so an article written from a European connection and an article written from a US one will disagree without either being wrong. Professional is the exception: it reads 499 in both, which means European buyers pay meaningfully more in real terms at that tier than US buyers do.

The prices are rendered, not published. Every figure above the plan floors comes out of an interactive configurator rather than a static table. Anyone quoting a price at 20,000 or 40,000 emails is reading a slider position at a moment in time, and Brevo can move those without touching a published document.

The contacts question has genuinely changed. Brevo built its reputation on billing by emails with unlimited contacts, and a great many articles still say exactly that. The current configurator shows a contacts figure alongside the email volume as part of what a plan includes, with Starter listed at 500 contacts. We are not going to claim a hard cap we cannot verify, but the older unlimited contacts framing no longer matches what the page displays, and that alone explains a lot of the contradiction you will find.

Add-ons get counted inconsistently. Logo removal is bundled into Standard and charged separately on Starter. Some articles quote Starter with it and some without, which moves the effective entry price by most of the plan fee again.

Brevo's SMTP relay is included on every plan, including the free one, and it draws from the same email allowance as your campaigns. There is no separate transactional product to buy and no separate transactional price list, which is unusual: SendGrid, Resend and Mailgun all split marketing and transactional into different meters.

Brevo states that all plans include RESTful APIs, SMTP, outbound webhooks and unlimited log retention. The unlimited log retention is worth flagging because most competitors cap event history at 3 to 30 days on entry plans, and it is genuinely useful when you are debugging a delivery problem weeks after it happened.

The rate limits are published in Brevo's developer documentation and they are tiered by plan:

Those send limits are generous to the point of being irrelevant for most buyers, since 1,000 messages a second is 3.6 million an hour and no plan's allowance would survive that for long. The limits that will actually bite are elsewhere: most non send endpoints are capped at 100 requests an hour on the general tier, and the contacts endpoints at 10 a second. If you are syncing a large contact database on a schedule, that is the ceiling to design around, not the send rate.

The free plan has a separate and much harder constraint: 300 emails a day, and Brevo has to approve your account for sending before it applies at all. That approval step catches people out, because the account exists and looks functional before sending is enabled.

No. Brevo prohibits purchased and scraped lists outright, on every plan, for transactional mail as well as marketing, and requires provable active opt-in for every contact. This is the strictest consent standard of any major sending platform we have documented, and it is written into Appendix 7 of Brevo's Terms of Service rather than buried in a help article.

On bought and scraped lists, the policy reads: "Lists of Contacts that have been scraped on the internet, acquired or purchased from a third-party, are likely to damage the reputation of Brevo as well as your deliverability. Therefore, the use of such lists of Contacts is strictly prohibited on our Software, whether You send transactional or marketing electronic communications."

On consent, it goes further than a simple opt-in requirement: "You must have the consent of your Contacts, and it must be active: the Contact has to check a checkbox to subscribe to your newsletter AND the registration checkbox CAN'T be pre-checked, and explicit: the Contact knows which kind of messages they will receive and for what purpose." It adds that "You must be able at any time to provide a proof of opt-in for each of your Contacts."

Read those together and the position is unambiguous. It is not enough that a prospect's address is publicly listed, or that you found it through a data provider, or that your outreach is B2B and CAN-SPAM compliant. Brevo's standard is an unchecked box that a specific human ticked, with evidence you can produce on demand. Cold outreach cannot meet that by definition.

The enforcement language is equally direct. Brevo describes a zero tolerance policy towards spam and warns that non compliance "may result in the immediate suspension or restriction of your entire account or of certain Services from your account." Note the word entire: this is an account level action, not a campaign being paused.

None of this is Brevo being unreasonable. Shared IP pools work because every sender on them keeps complaints near zero, and one prospecting campaign can degrade inbox placement for every other customer on those addresses. Every shared relay has a version of this rule. Brevo's is simply the most explicit, and it is the only one we have read that extends the purchased list ban to transactional mail as well.

If outbound prospecting is the job, the structure has to be different: your own sending domains, your own mailboxes on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, warmed properly, with volume spread across enough inboxes that no single sender stands out. That is what the right SMTP setup for cold email looks like, and it is why outbound tools ask you to bring your own mailbox instead of routing through a shared pool.

Brevo gets shortlisted against two different groups, and which one you are comparing decides whether it looks cheap or expensive.

Against contact priced marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Constant Contact, Brevo is usually the cheaper purchase, and the bigger and less frequently mailed your list is, the bigger the gap. A large list that receives one campaign a month is close to a worst case on a contact meter and close to a best case on an email meter. Brevo publishes its own comparisons against those tools, and the structural argument in them is sound even though the source is not neutral.

Against transactional email APIs like Resend, SendGrid, Mailgun and Amazon SES, Brevo is the expensive option per message by a wide margin, because you are also paying for a campaign builder, automation, landing pages and a CRM that a pure relay does not include. If all you need is an API that puts application mail on the wire, those tools are cheaper and better at that one job. We have priced them from primary sources on the Resend pricing, SendGrid pricing and Amazon SES pricing pages.

There is a third comparison people make that does not hold up, which is Brevo against cold outreach tools. They are not substitutes. Brevo will not carry outbound mail under its own policy, and outbound tools do not send broadcast campaigns to subscriber lists. If you are evaluating both, you almost certainly need to answer a prior question about which kind of sending you are doing, because the answer decides the category before it decides the vendor.

A few operational specifics that are easy to miss on the pricing page and that change how the plans behave in practice.

The monthly cycle is 30 days, not a calendar month. Brevo states that a monthly subscription period is 30 days and charges are processed at the beginning of each period. Over a year that is 12.2 billing periods rather than 12, so a monthly plan costs slightly more annually than 12 times the headline price.

Payment is card, Adyen or PayPal. There is no invoicing option described for self serve plans. Email and SMS credits are charged at the point of purchase rather than on the cycle.

No card is required to sign up. You can create an account with an email address and an organization name, upload contacts and build campaigns before paying anything. Sending, though, waits on account approval.

Cancellation is self serve and can be done from the account at any time. Brevo says data is retained if you may return, or deleted on request.

Pay as you go credits never expire. One email equals one credit. For a business that sends in bursts a few times a year, buying credits usually beats carrying a subscription through the quiet months, and it is the option most Brevo pricing articles forget to mention.

One planning note that applies whichever platform you land on. When billing is metered rather than flat, the bill moves on its own, and email is rarely the line item anyone watches. A campaign sent twice by mistake or an automation loop firing on every page view can change a $18 month into a much larger one without anybody noticing until renewal, which is a good argument for getting alerted when a subscription bill jumps rather than discovering it on the statement.