Brevo was founded in 2012 in Paris as Sendinblue and rebranded to Brevo in 2023. The company serves hundreds of thousands of businesses globally and owns its own email delivery infrastructure — the Mail Transfer Agent — rather than white-labeling from Amazon SES or SendGrid. This infrastructure ownership allows Brevo to deliver better deliverability control and enables its volume-based pricing model.
Volume-based pricing is Brevo’s primary competitive differentiator in the email marketing category. Every major competitor — Mailchimp, Kit, ActiveCampaign — charges based on the number of contacts stored in the account. Brevo charges based on the number of emails sent per month and allows unlimited contacts on every plan. The practical impact is significant. A business with 50,000 contacts that sends one campaign per month to its list costs approximately $350 per month on Mailchimp’s standard pricing. On Brevo, sending 50,000 emails per month costs $29 on the Starter tier. For businesses with large lists and predictable, moderate sending frequency, Brevo is often 70 to 80 percent cheaper than contact-based alternatives.
The free plan is functional: 300 emails per day, unlimited contacts, 40+ email templates, basic automation, segmentation, and a CRM for up to 2,000 contacts. The 300-email daily limit prevents sending a single campaign to more than 300 people at a time, which makes it impractical for any list with serious volume. It works for evaluating the platform or for very early-stage businesses.
The Starter tier begins at $9 per month for 5,000 monthly emails and scales to $69 per month for 100,000 emails, with the limit being total monthly send volume rather than a daily cap. This is the right tier for businesses that need to send without daily restrictions but don’t require advanced automation or CRM features.
The Business tier (labeled Standard in some pricing breakdowns) starts at $18 per month for 5,000 emails and includes what makes Brevo genuinely useful for growing companies: marketing automation workflows with behavioral triggers, landing page builder, A/B testing, Facebook ads integration, advanced segmentation, and a full CRM with deal pipeline. The automation builder supports conditional logic, multi-step sequences triggered by email opens, link clicks, and website activity — capability that ActiveCampaign charges significantly more for at comparable contact volumes.
Transactional email — order confirmations, password resets, account notifications — can be sent through the same Brevo account alongside marketing campaigns. For businesses that previously used a separate provider like SendGrid or Postmark for transactional messages, consolidating into Brevo can reduce both cost and operational complexity.
The significant pricing cliff is between the Business tier and Brevo Plus, which begins around $1,000 per month for enterprise features. There is no intermediate tier for businesses whose needs exceed Business but don’t warrant the Plus price jump.