Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

Billing is a trap be very careful with “Active Profiles”

I’ve used Klaviyo for some time, but their billing system around Active Profiles seriously needs to change.

What many businesses need to understand is that you can be billed based on the number of active profiles in your account not simply the number of people you are actually emailing. This can create a massive and unexpected billing problem.

For around 12 months, we were emailing approximately 16,000 users. Then, seemingly overnight, our account segments jumped to around 65,000 profiles, resulting in a charge of over $900 USD.

We had not suddenly started emailing 65,000 people.

After repeatedly trying to contact Klaviyo and getting pushed through layers of AI support and help articles, I finally managed to speak to a real person. I was told that our site appeared to have been hit by bots creating profiles and that we should contact Shopify. I was also told that the charges could be reversed.

That gave me some confidence that the issue would be resolved.

Eight days later, still nothing.

I went through the AI support process again before eventually reaching another real person. He was helpful, but there was still no clear way to get our money back, despite previously being told that a refund would be issued.

The most frustrating part is how difficult it is to simply reduce your billing plan. When your active profile count suddenly increases, you can find yourself pushed into a much more expensive tier. Yet reducing the plan again is nowhere near as straightforward as increasing it.

After a stressful back-and-forth, I eventually worked out how to clean up the account and reduce our active profiles back to approximately 16,000.

But the billing problems and charges have continued, and I am still waiting for Klaviyo’s billing team to properly resolve the issue.

For a platform dealing with business-critical marketing and potentially thousands of dollars in subscription fees, this isn't good enough.

My warning to other store owners: watch your Active Profile count very carefully. Fake checkouts, bots, spam accounts or unwanted customer profiles can potentially inflate your profile count dramatically. You could end up in a much higher billing tier without actually sending more marketing emails. Please change your billing system it's a scam trap you know it. you would be making millions from clients who know no better.and making it basically imposable to reduce usage is a joke. get better please.

Klaviyo needs to make three things much clearer: why profiles are being counted toward billing, when a customer is about to move into a significantly more expensive tier, and how to immediately reduce the plan when the increase is caused by bots or unwanted profiles.

Until this is fixed, businesses need to be extremely careful. What happened to us turned a normal monthly subscription into a very expensive and stressful billing dispute.