How much does Omnisend cost in 2026?
Omnisend prices on contacts, publishes a 65-step slider, and does something almost no competitor does: it gives every feature to every plan, including the free one. The catch is not in the feature matrix, it is in the definition of a billable contact, and for an ecommerce store that definition can be two or three times larger than the subscriber list you think you are paying for. This page reproduces the price curve, explains what counts, and covers the SMS pricing change of May 2026 that split Omnisend’s customer base in two.
Everything below was read from omnisend.com/pricing and Omnisend’s own help centre on 21 August 2026. Prices are in USD and exclude VAT; Omnisend charges cards in USD regardless of where you are.
Omnisend pricing at a glance
| Plan | Entry price | Contacts | Email allowance | SMS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 250 sendable | 500 /month | Not available |
| Standard | From $16 /month | Scales on a slider | Contacts × 12 | Not available |
| Pro | From $59 /month | Scales on a slider | Unlimited, fair use | Add-on, from $0.007 |
The prices you see on the pricing page are probably not the ones you will pay. Omnisend defaults the page to “Pay 3 months upfront (save 30%)”, which shows Standard at $11.20 and Pro at $41.30. Those are introductory prices, available once, on your first upgrade only, for three months. The standing monthly prices are $16 and $59. Every figure in the grid below is the standing monthly price.
The unusual part: every plan gets every feature
Omnisend’s own feature comparison table is remarkably short, and that is deliberate. Automation, campaigns, unlimited segmentation, forms, the email builder, sales and performance reports, Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match all appear on the Free plan. Omnisend states plainly that the only limitations on Free are 500 emails a month to 250 contacts.
That makes Omnisend one of the very few platforms in this category where you are buying volume rather than capability. The genuine tier differences are these:
| Free | Standard | Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email sends per month | 500 | Contacts × 12 | Unlimited |
| Web push notifications | 500 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Omnisend logo on emails and forms | Present | Removable | Removable |
| SMS and MMS | No | No | Paid add-on |
| Personalized Content | No | Paid add-on | Included |
| Personalized Sending Time | No | Paid add-on | Included |
| Dedicated Account Expert | No | Plans over $400 /month | Plans over $400 /month |
Note the last row: the dedicated Account Expert is not a Pro benefit, it is a spend benefit. It applies to Standard and Pro equally, and only above $400 a month. The same threshold governs the dedicated Onboarding Manager.
The contact price grid
The slider has 65 positions running from 250 contacts to 150,000. Here are eighteen of them at standing monthly prices, with the Standard email allowance derived at twelve times the top of each band.
| Contacts | Standard /month | Pro /month | Standard emails /month | Standard per 1,000 contacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 250 | $16 | $59 | 3,000 | $64.00 |
| 501 – 1,000 | $20 | $59 | 12,000 | $20.00 |
| 1,001 – 1,500 | $25 | $59 | 18,000 | $16.67 |
| 2,001 – 2,500 | $44 | $59 | 30,000 | $17.60 |
| 3,001 – 3,500 | $56 | $75 | 42,000 | $16.00 |
| 4,501 – 5,000 | $81 | $90 | 60,000 | $16.20 |
| 6,001 – 6,500 | $106 | $125 | 78,000 | $16.31 |
| 9,001 – 10,000 | $132 | $150 | 120,000 | $13.20 |
| 11,501 – 12,000 | $175 | $242 | 144,000 | $14.58 |
| 15,001 – 16,000 | $228 | $372 | 192,000 | $14.25 |
| 21,501 – 23,500 | $276 | $398 | 282,000 | $11.74 |
| 28,001 – 29,000 | $331 | $494 | 348,000 | $11.41 |
| 35,001 – 37,500 | $363 | $594 | 450,000 | $9.68 |
| 55,001 – 60,000 | $500 | $855 | 720,000 | $8.33 |
| 80,001 – 85,000 | $750 | $1,160 | 1,020,000 | $8.82 |
| 105,001 – 110,000 | $1,040 | $1,450 | 1,320,000 | $9.45 |
| 130,001 – 135,000 | $1,300 | $1,740 | 1,620,000 | $9.63 |
| 145,001 – 150,000 | $1,456 | $1,914 | 1,800,000 | $9.71 |
Above 150,000 contacts the self-serve slider stops and the price becomes a conversation with sales.
Where Pro stops being expensive
Pro is flat at $59 from 250 contacts all the way to 2,500, while Standard climbs from $16 to $44 across the same range. The two converge and then diverge again in a way that is worth reading carefully.
| Contacts | Pro premium over Standard | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | +$43 (3.7x) | Pro is hard to justify |
| 2,500 | +$15 (1.3x) | Cheapest point to buy Pro |
| 5,000 | +$9 (1.1x) | Near parity |
| 10,000 | +$18 (1.14x) | Still close |
| 16,000 | +$144 (1.63x) | The gap reopens sharply |
| 37,500 | +$231 (1.64x) | Pro costs a clear premium |
| 150,000 | +$458 (1.31x) | Narrows again at the top |
Between roughly 3,000 and 12,000 contacts, Pro costs very little more than Standard-$9 to $18 a month at several points, and buys unlimited email instead of a twelve-sends-per-contact cap, plus the two personalisation features that are otherwise paid add-ons. If you sit in that band and you send more than twelve emails per contact per month, Pro is close to free money. Outside that band the premium is real and worth calculating.
What Omnisend actually counts as a billable contact
This is the single most important section on this page, and none of it is on the pricing page. Omnisend’s help centre defines a billable contact as subscribers plus non-subscribers, and spells out exactly who a non-subscriber is.
You are billed for people who never opted in. Omnisend’s published list of billable non-subscribers includes customers who placed an order without ticking the marketing box, people who abandoned a cart or browsed products, anyone who created an account in your store without subscribing, and any contact imported from a file with no opt-in date. Only unsubscribers-people who actively opted out, are excluded. Omnisend’s stated reasoning is that non-subscribers can still receive order confirmations and cart reminders, so they consume platform resources.
For an ecommerce store this is not a rounding error. A shop with 8,000 marketing subscribers and 20,000 past customers who never ticked the box is billed on 28,000 contacts, which on Standard is $331 a month rather than the $106 the subscriber count would suggest. Omnisend acknowledges the effect directly in its own FAQ, under the heading “Why is my price increasing even though my subscriber count is stable?”
Two mitigations exist and both are worth knowing:
- Unsubscribing inactive contacts genuinely lowers the bill, because unsubscribers are excluded. Omnisend suggests this itself as a cost management tip. Note the timing: cleaning updates your tier at the next billing cycle, not immediately.
- Fixed-tier pricing exists but is in beta and unadvertised. Omnisend’s FAQ says you can “ask support about fixed tier pricing”, which lets you pay for a chosen contact reach instead of your total billable count, and comes with an unlimited contact list. The minimum tier you may select is set by your subscriber count. If your billable total is inflated by abandoned carts or bot signups, this is the conversation to have.
On the reassuring side, Omnisend does not double count. A contact in ten segments is one contact, and a person subscribed to both email and SMS is one contact, not two.
Three separate limits, not one
Omnisend’s documentation is explicit that plans carry three distinct ceilings, and hitting any one of them stops you.
| Limit | What it governs | Free / Standard / Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Billable contacts | Your tier and monthly price | 250 max / scales / scales |
| Email credits | Emails sendable per cycle | 500 / contacts × 12 / unlimited |
| Contact reach (beta) | Unique contacts messageable per cycle | Fixed-tier plans only |
Running out of email credits on Standard does more than block campaigns. Omnisend’s documentation states that when you exceed the limit, “you cannot send campaigns, and contacts who trigger automations will be canceled from workflows until your cycle renews or you upgrade”. That second clause is the dangerous one: a customer who abandons a cart while you are out of credits is not queued, they are removed from the workflow. The revenue that automation would have recovered is simply gone, and no retroactive upgrade brings it back. If you run recovery flows on Standard, watch the credit balance the way you would watch a payment gateway.
The contact reach limit is separate from credits and can bite independently. Omnisend’s example: a tier allowing 11,500 contacts a month, already used on 12,300 unique contacts through earlier campaigns, blocks further sending even with credits in hand.
SMS, and the line drawn on 4 May 2026
Omnisend changed its SMS commercial model on 4 May 2026, and the change is not retroactive. Which side of that date you subscribed on determines what SMS costs you.
| Plan | Subscribed before 4 May 2026 | Subscribed on or after |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | SMS credits included, equal to your subscription price ($59 plan = $59 of credits) | No included credits; volume-priced add-on from $0.007 |
| Standard | Can buy an SMS Credits Subscription from $10 /month | SMS not available at all |
| Free | Only if an SMS subscription was already active | SMS not available at all |
Legacy SMS pricing is lost permanently on downgrade or cancellation. Omnisend states that if a legacy Pro customer downgrades to Standard or Free, included credits stop immediately, and on returning to Pro the new rules apply. Cancelling entirely has the same effect: “You cannot return to legacy pricing.” Omnisend’s own suggested workaround for a temporary pause is to freeze the account instead, which costs $50 plus VAT as a one-off charge.
The volume-based SMS rates
For accounts on the new model, SMS is a separate subscription with tiered rates. These were read from the live calculator for United States recipients.
| Monthly SMS spend | Messages included | Rate per SMS |
|---|---|---|
| $10 | 1,111 | $0.0090 |
| $50 | 5,882 | $0.0085 |
| $400 | 47,059 | $0.0085 |
| $5,000 | 625,000 | $0.0080 |
| $13,000 | 1,857,143 | $0.0070 |
| $30,000 | 4,285,714 | $0.0070 |
The advertised “starting at $0.007” is therefore the rate at roughly $13,000 a month of SMS spend, not the entry rate. A realistic small sender pays $0.009. Rates vary by destination country; MMS is available for United States and Canada recipients only, while plain SMS is global.
SMS credits expire after 60 days. Unused credits roll into the following 30 days and then lapse: Omnisend’s example is that September credits carry into October but expire before November. Buy for the month you are in, not the quarter. And note that an SMS subscription bills separately from the email plan, so you will see two charges per cycle rather than one.
Billing mechanics worth reading before you sign up
Omnisend’s billing has several behaviours that are documented but not obvious, and they compound.
Your cycle is 30 days, not a month
Omnisend bills every 30 days from your upgrade date, not on the first of the month. Over a year that is 12.17 billing cycles, not 12. On a $228 Standard plan that is roughly one extra $228 charge every six years, which is trivial, but it also means your billing date drifts earlier through the calendar and your “monthly” budget line will occasionally show two charges in one calendar month.
Your tier moves on its own
Omnisend adjusts your billing tier automatically each cycle as the list grows or shrinks. Its documentation is direct about the implication: “Even without manually importing contacts, your list can grow from organic signups via forms, checkout, or integrations, which will increase your monthly cost.” You are notified before an upgrade, but the mechanism is automatic rather than opt-in.
Mid-cycle upgrades are forced at the moment of sending
If you import contacts and then try to send to more than your tier allows, Omnisend blocks the send and prompts you to upgrade there and then. You must confirm the charge before the campaign goes out. The charge is prorated against days remaining, and Omnisend’s worked example is: paid $70 for Standard fifteen days ago, roughly $35 of credit left, upgrading to a $105 tier costs about $70 today and restarts the cycle.
A prorated upgrade gives you prorated email credits. Omnisend states this explicitly: because you paid part of a cycle’s price, “you receive a prorated number of email credits (not the full tier amount)”. Upgrading on day 25 to send a large campaign buys you five days’ worth of credits, not a month’s. Plan the upgrade around the send, not the other way round.
The free plan lets you upload everything and send to almost none
Omnisend allows unlimited contact uploads on the Free plan but caps sending at 250. Its documented workaround is that you must build a segment of 250 or fewer to send at all, upload 300 and 50 people simply never receive the campaign, with no error. That is a reasonable design, but it means the free tier’s real constraint is a manual segmentation step rather than a soft ceiling.
Add-ons and unpriced items
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SMS credits | $0.007 to $0.009 per SMS | Pro only on current pricing; billed as a separate subscription |
| Personalized Content | Not published | Standard add-on, priced by your contact tier; included on Pro |
| Personalized Sending Time | Not published | Standard add-on, priced by your contact tier; included on Pro |
| Account freeze | $50 plus VAT, one-off | Preserves legacy SMS pricing that cancelling would destroy |
| Migration | $0 | Lists, segments, flows and templates moved in about five days |
| Dedicated Account Expert | Included above $400 /month | Standard and Pro alike; a spend threshold, not a tier |
The two personalisation add-ons are the only unpriced items, and Omnisend says their cost scales with your billable contact tier and that the interface will offer a Pro upgrade instead whenever that would be cheaper. That is a fair mechanism, but it does mean a Standard user cannot budget for them in advance.
The free migration is worth taking seriously as a commercial term. Omnisend commits to moving lists, segments, flows and templates at no charge in about five days, on read access to your existing account, and separately offers a dedicated Onboarding Manager above $400 a month. Migration cost is one of the larger hidden expenses in changing ESP, and removing it changes the switching calculation.
Seven things that catch people out
- Non-subscribers are billable. Abandoned carts, past customers who never opted in, and imports without an opt-in date all count. Only unsubscribers are excluded.
- The advertised prices are the three-month introductory ones. $11.20 and $41.30 become $16 and $59 after three months, once, on your first upgrade only.
- SMS is Pro-only for anyone who signed up after 4 May 2026, and legacy SMS terms are destroyed permanently by a downgrade or cancellation.
- Running out of email credits on Standard cancels contacts out of live automations, not just campaigns. Recovery flows stop recovering.
- Prorated upgrades give prorated credits. Upgrading late in a cycle to send a big campaign may not buy enough credits to send it.
- List cleaning takes effect next cycle, so a purge on day two of a cycle saves nothing for 28 days.
- SMS credits expire after 60 days and bill as a second charge separate from your email plan.
Who Omnisend is priced for
Omnisend is built for ecommerce, priced for ecommerce, and its billing model reflects that: it charges you for the whole customer database because it expects to be messaging the whole customer database through order confirmations and cart recovery. If that is what you are doing, the price is coherent. If you only wanted a newsletter tool, you are paying for capability you will not use on people you will not email.
The flat feature set is a real advantage and rare in this market. A business on the $16 Standard plan gets the same automation engine, segmentation and forms as one paying $1,456, which makes Omnisend unusually safe to start small on. The corresponding weakness is that there is no cheap high-volume tier: past 150,000 contacts you leave self-serve entirely.
Good fit: Shopify and ecommerce stores with an active customer base and a real cart-recovery programme; teams between roughly 3,000 and 12,000 contacts, where Pro costs barely more than Standard and removes the sending cap; anyone switching platforms, given the free migration.
Poor fit: publishers and newsletters with large lists and low commerce intent, who pay ecommerce prices for a broadcast tool; stores with a huge tail of one-time buyers who never opted in, unless they negotiate fixed-tier pricing; anyone who needs SMS on a budget tier, which is no longer possible on new accounts.
How to size an Omnisend plan in four steps
- Count billable contacts, not subscribers. Add every past customer, abandoned cart and unopted import to your subscriber number before you read the slider. This is usually the difference between a right answer and one that is two tiers low.
- Work out your sends per contact per month. Under twelve and Standard’s allowance is fine. Over twelve and you need Pro regardless of price.
- Check where you sit against the 3,000 to 12,000 band. Inside it, Pro costs $9 to $18 more than Standard and removes the cap; outside it the premium is substantial.
- If your billable count is inflated by non-subscribers, email support about fixed-tier pricing before you subscribe. It is in beta and not advertised, and it is the only published route to paying on reach rather than total contacts.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Omnisend cost?
Standard starts at $16 a month and Pro at $59, both for up to 250 contacts, scaling on a 65-step slider to $1,456 and $1,914 at 150,000 contacts. There is a genuinely free plan at $0 for 500 emails a month to 250 contacts. First-time subscribers who pay three months upfront get 30% off for those three months only, which is where the widely quoted $11.20 and $41.30 figures come from. All prices are USD and exclude VAT.
Why is my Omnisend bill higher than my subscriber count suggests?
Because Omnisend bills on subscribers plus non-subscribers. Non-subscribers are people who placed an order without ticking the marketing box, abandoned a cart, browsed products, created a store account without subscribing, or were imported from a file with no opt-in date. Omnisend’s reasoning is that these people can still receive order confirmations and cart reminders. Only contacts who actively unsubscribed are excluded from billing. For an ecommerce store the billable count is routinely two or three times the marketing list.
Is the Omnisend free plan actually usable?
More than most. Omnisend gives Free plan users every feature of the paid plans, automations, unlimited segmentation, forms, the email builder, reports, Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match, and limits only the volume: 500 emails a month, 250 contacts, 500 web push notifications, and the Omnisend logo on emails and forms. You may upload unlimited contacts but must build a segment of 250 or fewer to send, and anyone outside that segment silently receives nothing.
Should I choose Standard or Pro?
It depends on where you sit on the slider and how often you email. Standard caps sending at twelve emails per contact per month; Pro is unlimited subject to fair use, and includes the Personalized Content and Personalized Sending Time features that Standard charges for as add-ons. Between roughly 3,000 and 12,000 contacts the Pro premium is only $9 to $18 a month, which makes it very easy to justify. Below 2,500 contacts Pro costs up to 3.7 times Standard, and between 15,000 and 40,000 it runs about 1.6 times, so the calculation is worth doing rather than assuming.
How many emails do I get on the Standard plan?
Twelve times your billable contact count per billing cycle. Omnisend’s own example is 3,000 contacts giving 36,000 emails a month. If you exhaust it, campaigns are blocked and, importantly, contacts who trigger automations are cancelled out of those workflows until the cycle renews or you upgrade. That means an abandoned cart occurring while you are out of credits is not delayed, it is dropped, and upgrading later does not recover it.
Can I get SMS on the Standard plan?
Not if you subscribed on or after 4 May 2026. Omnisend restricted SMS to the Pro plan from that date. Accounts that subscribed before it keep legacy terms: Standard users can still buy an SMS Credits Subscription from $10 a month, and legacy Pro users keep included credits equal to their subscription price. Those legacy terms are lost permanently if you downgrade or cancel. Omnisend states you cannot return to legacy pricing, which is why it suggests freezing the account instead, at a one-off $50 plus VAT.
What does SMS actually cost on Omnisend?
Between $0.007 and $0.009 per message for United States recipients, on a tiered volume subscription. Reading the live calculator: $10 buys 1,111 messages at $0.0090, $50 buys 5,882 at $0.0085, $5,000 buys 625,000 at $0.0080, and the advertised $0.0070 rate arrives at around $13,000 of monthly spend. So the headline “starting at $0.007” describes a high-volume tier, not the entry price. Credits expire after 60 days, rolling over one period only, and the SMS subscription bills separately from your email plan.
Does deleting contacts reduce my Omnisend bill?
Unsubscribing them does, but not straight away. Unsubscribers are excluded from billing, so Omnisend itself recommends segmenting inactive contacts and unsubscribing them as a cost management measure. The change applies at your next billing cycle rather than immediately, so a purge early in a cycle saves nothing for up to 30 days. Omnisend does not double count: a contact in many segments, or subscribed to both email and SMS, is billed once.
Can I stop my price rising automatically as my list grows?
There is an unadvertised option. Omnisend’s tier moves automatically each cycle with your billable contact count, including growth from organic signups you did not import. Its FAQ says you can contact support about fixed-tier pricing, currently in beta, which lets you pay for a chosen contact reach instead of your total billable count and comes with an unlimited contact list. The minimum tier available to you is set by your subscriber count, so it caps the damage from non-subscribers rather than from real growth.
Does Omnisend charge for migration from another platform?
No. Omnisend commits to moving lists, segments, flows and templates at no charge in about five days, on read access to your existing account. Accounts spending over $400 a month also get a dedicated Onboarding Manager and Account Expert, note that this threshold applies to Standard and Pro alike, so it is a spend benefit rather than a tier benefit. Smaller accounts can still submit a migration request through the website.
Continue reading about Omnisend
Pricing is one part of the evaluation, and with an ecommerce platform the integration surface usually matters more. For connection details, authentication and sending behaviour, see the SMTP settings, API and integrations tabs on this platform. The alternatives tab compares Omnisend against the other platforms competing for the same Shopify and ecommerce audience.
Sources. All figures on this page were read from omnisend.com/pricing and from Omnisend’s help centre articles “Omnisend Pricing Plans 2026” and “Understand Your Omnisend Paid Plan Charges” on 21 August 2026, in USD excluding VAT. Every price in the contact grid was read individually from the live slider in standing monthly mode rather than interpolated, and the SMS rates were read from the live SMS calculator for United States recipients. Prices change; where a figure here disagrees with the vendor’s page, the vendor’s page is correct and we would be glad to be told.
This review follows our email infrastructure testing methodology. We disclose affiliate relationships in our editorial independence policy.
