Brevo is free for up to 300 email sends per day and 100,000 stored contacts. Paid Starter begins at $9 a month and Standard at $18, with the exact price set by a monthly email tier and add-ons. On the first paid tiers, that email tier also sets a contact cap, so either more sends or more contacts can raise the bill.
The word “contacts” describes records stored; “sends” counts delivered email attempts against an allowance. One campaign to 1,000 people uses 1,000 sends, not one. On Free, 300 can receive the campaign on the scheduled day and the rest need a later requeue or a paid upgrade. This daily shape matters as much as the monthly total.
Free is limited by the busiest day, not the average month
Brevo's Free plan has no subscription charge and its help centre says it includes 300 email sends each day. Unused sends expire at the daily reset; they do not accumulate. A small business that emails 200 people on ten separate days can stay inside the daily cap, while another that sends one 800-person newsletter on one day cannot finish that campaign immediately on Free. Both might send roughly the same monthly volume, but their peak-day demands differ.
Brevo says Free can store up to 100,000 contacts. That large storage figure is easy to mistake for a campaign allowance. If a bakery has 2,400 customer records and sends one weekly menu to all of them, it needs 2,400 sends on the chosen day. The Free plan's 300 daily sends would spread one full campaign across at least eight days if each day's quota were available and the campaign were requeued to the remaining recipients. A week-long stagger is unsuitable for a menu whose stock changes tomorrow.
Brevo's help page explains that a campaign to more than 300 recipients reaches only 300 on the scheduled day; to reach the rest, you resend it with the Requeue option, up to 300 a day, after the quota resets. Once the day's 300 sends are used, you cannot schedule a campaign in advance for the next day either. Transactional messages behave differently: after the daily limit, up to 1,000 more are held in a retry queue, and anything beyond that queue is not delivered. A business using Brevo for order confirmations should test what happens at a peak, because a delayed marketing message is inconvenient while a delayed receipt can confuse a customer. Keep the two streams visible in the usage report.
Free also has a branding footer and limited automation capacity. Brevo lists a limit of 2,000 unique contacts entering active automations on Free; that is separate from the 100,000 stored-contact maximum. If a café imports 6,000 addresses but only 1,500 enter a welcome sequence, storage is not the blocker. Once 2,000 unique contacts have entered active automations, no more can enter, although people already inside keep moving through the workflow; Brevo emails the account at 80% and again at the limit. Count which people actually enter workflows, not merely how many names exist in the address book.
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Buy nowPaid tiers pair send volume with a contact ceiling
Brevo's current help centre shows Starter from $9 a month and Standard from $18 for the first tier. Both start at 5,000 monthly email sends and a 500-contact storage cap. The next published tier is 10,000 sends with up to 1,500 contacts, then 15,000 sends with up to 2,500 contacts. From 20,000 sends upwards, both plans allow up to 500,000 stored contacts; Starter's tiers run to 100,000 monthly sends and Standard's to 500,000. Always use the live calculator for the chosen volume rather than assuming the starting price covers a large list.
| Plan and tier | Monthly sends | Stored contacts | Buying implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 300 per day | Up to 100,000 | Peak-day cap controls campaigns |
| Starter or Standard, first tier | 5,000 | Up to 500 | Starting advertised price applies here |
| Starter or Standard, second tier | 10,000 | Up to 1,500 | More contacts and sends |
| Starter or Standard, third tier | 15,000 | Up to 2,500 | Watch automatic contact upgrade |
| Higher selected volume | 20,000 or more | Up to 500,000 | Quote the exact volume and price |
Paid Starter removes the Free daily sending cap, while the chosen monthly email volume remains finite. Standard adds marketing automation with no contact limit, A/B testing, advanced reporting with click heatmaps, send-time optimisation and one landing page, and it drops the “Sent with Brevo” logo. The selection should be driven by the task: if the business only needs larger campaigns, Starter may be enough; if it requires the named Standard features, compare their value separately. Paying Standard solely because a business has 2,000 contacts may be unnecessary if the relevant Starter tier supports that list and the simpler feature set suffices.
There is a counterintuitive point: Free permits a large contact store, but the entry paid tiers impose small contact caps tied to sends. A shop with 4,000 dormant records could move from Free to the cheapest Starter tier for one urgent campaign and discover that its list exceeds the 500-contact paid allowance. Clean the list and preview the selected tier before upgrading. Do not delete valid records simply to fit a plan without retaining an approved export and checking consent records.
Build a sending forecast from your calendar
For a main worked example, assume an illustrative bicycle repair shop has 1,200 opted-in contacts. It plans two newsletters to all 1,200 people, one service reminder to 400 and 600 transactional emails in a month. The calculation is 2 × 1,200 + 400 + 600 = 3,400 sends. A 5,000-send tier has room for 1,600 more messages, but its 500-contact cap is too small for the 1,200 stored records. The shop must consider at least the 10,000-send, 1,500-contact tier even though it expects fewer than 5,000 sends.
Now add a peak month with a third newsletter to the whole list. The forecast becomes 4,600 sends, still inside 5,000 but still above its contact ceiling. If the list grows from 1,200 to 1,501, the 1,500-contact tier is no longer enough. Brevo says an early paid account reaching or exceeding its contact cap is automatically moved to the next tier, with an increased subscription price. The owner should therefore watch the contact count before a large import, not only the email campaign calendar.
Write the forecast on one sheet: active contacts today; expected new sign-ups; planned campaigns; audience per campaign; automated messages; transactional messages; peak-day volume; monthly total; and the selected tier's contact cap. For the shop, fill the first row as “1,200 contacts, 100 expected additions, two full-list newsletters, 400 reminders, 600 receipts, 3,400 sends”. The contact forecast is 1,300, so the 1,500-contact tier has 200 records of headroom. If expected growth is 350 instead, the owner should price the next tier now.
Separate volume from value. Sending a third newsletter because the tier has unused credits is not automatically sensible. If an extra email causes unsubscribes or weakens attention to important messages, the unused capacity has no commercial value. Use a baseline of opens, clicks, enquiries and orders relevant to the business. The email-marketing AI tutorial focuses on the work after the sending budget is understood.
Six small examples show where the quote changes
A bakery keeps 400 customer contacts and sends a 300-person weekend note every Friday. Its busiest day uses exactly 300 sends. Free may cover the pattern if no other Brevo email is sent that day, but one automated birthday message or test email could push it over. The owner should schedule with margin or choose a paid tier for reliability. The 100,000-contact storage figure is irrelevant to this immediate decision.
A café has 900 contacts and sends one monthly event notice to 900 at once. Free would send only 300 on the first day, so the event notice arrives too late for part of the audience unless requeued over subsequent days. The 10,000-send tier has a 1,500-contact cap and removes the daily sending restriction on Starter. That may be the lowest suitable paid shape, but the price must be read from the live calculator for that volume.
An HVAC contractor stores 1,480 contacts on the 10,000-send paid tier. A sales assistant imports 40 duplicate or stale records from a trade show, taking the stored total to 1,520. Brevo's help centre says the account can automatically move to the next tier when the cap is reached or exceeded. A contact-cleaning step before import could prevent an unnecessary upgrade. The owner should still keep genuinely subscribed contacts; the goal is accurate records, not hiding demand.
A bicycle repair shop sends appointment reminders and newsletters from the same account. A promotion uses 4,800 of a 5,000 monthly allowance, leaving only 200 for confirmations. The mistake appears when the final days' operational messages cannot be sent under the planned quota. Reserve transactional volume first, then allocate campaigns. Where sending is business critical, monitor remaining credits each week and plan an upgrade path before the last day of the cycle.
A small bakery buys a paid annual subscription but assumes all 60,000 yearly sends are immediately available. Brevo says annual billing still replenishes email credits each month on the account's billing date, and unused monthly credits expire before the next replenishment. The owner cannot use quiet months' unused allowance to fund a large seasonal campaign later. Check the exact monthly allocation and consider a larger tier for peak months.
A café drafts a promotion with AI saying “all pastries half price until midnight” when the real offer is selected items until 15:00. The wrong message may still send successfully and consume credits. The review step is to compare price, dates, products, link destination and stock restrictions with the approved offer before scheduling. The AI content approval workflow addresses this quality cost that a price calculator cannot show.
Check add-ons and billing before calculating a year
The advertised starting figure is not a guarantee for your selected list size or feature combination. Brevo's calculator lets buyers choose monthly volume and add-ons such as removing branding on Starter or additional sales capabilities. Standard includes some features that Starter presents differently. Record the base plan, send tier, contact cap, add-ons and billing frequency on one line, then screenshot or export the final quote before entering payment details. Brevo's own pages disagree on one common add-on: the help centre lists Starter's logo removal at $9 a month, while the dollar pricing page shows $10.80, so take that figure from the checkout.
Take an illustrative price comparison without inventing an unverified 10,000-send price. Scenario A is a 400-contact list sending 4,000 emails: the published Starter entry is $9 a month for 5,000 sends and up to 500 contacts. Scenario B is the repair shop's 1,200-contact list sending 3,400 emails: the 10,000-send tier is required by contact count, and its exact price must be taken from the live calculator. Scenario C is a 3,000-contact list: the first three paid tiers stop at 2,500 contacts, so it needs the 20,000-send tier, which allows up to 500,000 contacts, even if actual sends are modest.
For annual budgeting, multiply the selected monthly equivalent by twelve, then add any one-off work to clean contacts and build templates. Yearly billing takes 10% off (the dollar pricing page shows Starter at $8.08 a month instead of $9), but Brevo says yearly credits still refresh monthly and unused credits expire just before each top-up. Switching between monthly and yearly means cancelling first, with the cancellation taking effect at the end of the billing period. A team that sends heavily only twice a year should compare that schedule with Brevo's prepaid email credits, sold as one-off packs from 5,000 to 1 million emails that never expire, rather than assuming an annual discount always wins.
Be careful with region-specific pages. Brevo may display local currency or different offers based on the visitor. For this tutorial, the starting figures are the USD amounts in Brevo's English help page. Before buying, select the same currency and billing period for every scenario. Do not compare a local-currency checkout to a dollar starting price and call the difference an add-on.
Test one campaign before upgrading the whole account
A controlled test shows whether the chosen tier solves the actual problem. Build a small campaign to staff or consenting test recipients, note how many addresses are selected, and send it on a day when no other planned Brevo message consumes the allowance. Check delivery status, branding, links and the remaining quota after it runs. Then simulate the next real campaign in the planner: audience size, date, and other messages due that day. The test must use the same sending route as the real campaign; a preview email alone may not reveal what happens to a large recipient list.
For a Free-plan illustration, a bakery has 280 subscribers and sends an email to all of them at 09:00. Twenty sends remain until the reset. A team member then schedules 30 individual order confirmations through the same account. The final ten go into Brevo's transactional retry queue instead of sending at once, which may be tolerable for a newsletter but not for a confirmation a customer is waiting for. The operations check is to reserve capacity for transactional mail or move to a paid plan before a busy day. If the bakery instead sends one newsletter every few weeks and no transactional mail, the free cap may remain practical.
For a paid-tier illustration, the café has a 1,450-contact cap in its planning sheet because it selected the 1,500-contact tier. Its actual account reaches 1,490 after an event import. A second upload contains 40 contacts, including ten duplicates. If all 40 were added as new records, the account would reach 1,530 and cross the tier limit. Deduplication might leave 30 genuine additions, still reaching 1,520. The owner should review the final count, price of the next tier and whether all records have valid permission before importing. Cleaning is useful, but it cannot wish away legitimate growth.
Write a short handover instruction for anyone who imports contacts: “Check the current stored count and selected cap. Remove duplicate rows. Record source and permission. Preview the post-import count. If it will meet or exceed the cap, ask the account owner to approve the next tier before uploading.” This is more reliable than telling staff to avoid a higher bill after Brevo has already upgraded the account. Review the rule when the business changes its campaign frequency or adds another sender.
Keep contact growth and deliverability under review
A weekly dashboard can have five figures: stored contacts, newly added contacts, monthly sends used, sends planned before renewal, and the highest single-day send expected. Compare the first with the plan's contact cap and the other two with the sending allowance. On Free, peak-day sends are decisive; on paid tiers, monthly volume and contact storage are the main price drivers. Set an internal trigger when a list approaches its tier ceiling rather than waiting for the automatic upgrade email.
List hygiene has a cost effect and a quality effect. Duplicate contacts can consume storage and lead to repeated messages; old addresses can damage engagement. Remove or suppress records according to your consent and retention process, then keep a record of the change. Do not let AI guess who consented. The customer-record cleaning tutorial gives a broader routine for fixing duplicate or inconsistent entries before automation.
After each campaign, compare planned sends with actual sends and note any requeued campaign, retry queue or unexpected tier change. If the campaign was delayed, check whether the daily cap, monthly credits, contact cap or a deliverability issue caused it. Those are different remedies. A quick decision record can say: “1,300 contacts; 3,400 usual sends; 5,000 peak sends; 10,000 tier chosen for contact ceiling; review at 1,450 stored contacts.” That record makes the next bill understandable to the owner and gives staff a clear signal before importing another list.
Brevo quota questions that change the bill
Do unused Free-plan sends roll over?
No. Brevo's Free plan allows 300 email sends per day, and unused sends do not move to the following day. A campaign to more than 300 contacts reaches only 300 people that day; you resend it to the rest with Brevo's Requeue option, up to 300 a day, after the quota resets, or upgrade. Once the day's 300 are used, you cannot schedule a campaign in advance for the next day.
Can 100,000 contacts stay on Brevo Free?
Brevo says Free accounts may store up to 100,000 contacts, but the daily send allowance remains 300 and automation entry is limited separately. Storage capacity does not mean you can email all 100,000 contacts at once. Check consent and whether dormant records should remain before importing a large list.
Will Brevo upgrade my paid tier when contacts increase?
Brevo says the early Starter and Standard tiers have contact caps tied to monthly email volume. It warns users approaching those limits and automatically moves an account to the next tier when a cap is reached or exceeded. The subscription price rises accordingly, so monitor both sends and stored contacts.
Further reads
- Marketing Automation With AI: Build a Lead Follow-Up Sequence — Connect sending capacity to the lead follow-up process.
- Post-Purchase Email Flow for Online Stores: Write It With AI — Map operational emails separately from promotions.
- How to Draft Customer Email Replies With AI That Sound Like You — Improve individual replies separately from campaigns.
- How to Set a Baseline Before You Introduce AI — Measure results before changing your email process.
- How to Review an AI Tool After 90 Days: Keep, Fix or Cancel — Recheck the tier against actual usage.
- ActiveCampaign Pricing: What Starter, Plus and Pro Cost as Contacts Grow — A worked ActiveCampaign cost table at three list sizes, how to read the contact calculator, and the add-on fees that sit outside the plan price.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Brevo Help, About Brevo pricing and plans; Brevo Help, FAQs: What are the limits of the Free plan?; Brevo Help, Upgrade to a higher plan; Brevo pricing page (USD view).