Brevo Review 2026

What is Brevo?

Three hundred emails a day, every day, with space for 100,000 stored contacts: that one free-tier rule is why so many Indian founders end up researching Brevo email marketing pricing and free plan limits before they pick a newsletter tool. Brevo, the French company known as Sendinblue until its May 2023 rebrand, charges mainly for how many emails you send rather than how many people sit on your list. For a D2C brand with 40,000 old buyers and a small active segment, that decides the bill.

The figures below come from Brevo's pricing page, its official price list, its help centre and its developer docs. Prices are monthly unless stated.

Living with the Brevo free plan: 300 emails per day

The Free plan has no expiry date. According to Brevo's help article on Free plan limits, you get 300 sends per day, storage for up to 100,000 contacts, one user, basic statistics and a "Sent with Brevo" sticker on every email. Unused sends do not roll over to tomorrow.

Schedule a campaign to 1,200 people and only 300 receive it that day; the rest wait until you requeue the send manually. Transactional mail shares the same 300, and once you hit the limit up to 1,000 extra transactional emails sit in a retry queue, and anything beyond it is not delivered.

Automation is allowed on Free, but only 2,000 unique contacts can enter your active workflows. The sales side is capped too: one pipeline, 50 open deals, one connected inbox and one calendar. A/B testing, landing pages, popups, push notifications, WhatsApp, dedicated IPs and phone support are all missing from Free.

For a personal blog, an early SaaS waitlist or a college society, those limits are generous. A shop that sends order confirmations plus a weekly offer will outgrow them within weeks.

Brevo email marketing pricing and free plan, side by side

Brevo's official price list shows rupee figures alongside dollars, which is rare among email tools. These are the entry tiers at 5,000 emails a month:

The catch sits in the small print. On Starter and Standard, the 5,000-email tier only lets you store 500 marketing contacts, 10,000 emails allows 1,500, and 15,000 allows 2,500. From 20,000 emails a month the contact ceiling jumps to 500,000. Go over the cap on one of the first three tiers and Brevo moves you up automatically, at the higher price. Yearly billing saves 10%: $97 or ₹6,750 for Starter, $194 or ₹14,526 for Standard.

Professional is priced in two parts. The price list shows a $350 (₹31,339) base plus a recurring block of 150,000 email credits, and Brevo's plans article rolls that into a single "from $499" figure. Branding is murkier on Starter. The pricing page puts "No Brevo logo" in the Starter column, yet the plans help article and the price list treat logo removal there as a paid add-on ($9 a month per the help article). Standard and above send without the badge, so confirm this at checkout if a clean footer matters.

Brevo still sells prepaid email credits for irregular senders. They cover marketing and transactional mail, never expire and come in packs from 5,000 to one million emails. Some readers remember a Business plan; in the current line-up that middle slot is called Standard.

Transactional email over SMTP and the Brevo API

There is no separate transactional subscription any more. Every plan, Free included, gets the REST API, transactional email SMTP relay, outbound webhooks and unlimited log retention, and those messages draw from the same email allowance as your campaigns.

For developers, the Brevo API authenticates with API keys or OAuth 2.0 (including a machine-to-machine flow). Official SDKs cover Node.js, Python and PHP, and Brevo's verified GitHub organisation also publishes Go, Ruby, Java and C# clients plus a CLI. The rate-limit page lists 1,000 requests per second for the send-email endpoint on all plans, doubled on Professional. There is a sandbox mode for testing.

Brevo SMS marketing price in India: credits, sender IDs and send windows

Brevo has no SMS subscription. You buy credits in packs of 100, and they never expire. How many credits one message uses depends on the destination country and the message length, so the per-message rupee cost for Indian numbers comes from the calculator on Brevo's pay-as-you-go page rather than a fixed public rate card. That calculator gives no stable, citable India figure, so this page does not quote one.

India-specific rules still matter. Brevo's SMS help article lists a 10 am to 9 pm local-time window for marketing SMS to Indian numbers on the DND register. Its general guidance says transactional texts are usually exempt, without naming India. Brevo also makes sender ID registration mandatory for each country you text, and TRAI's DLT registration of headers and templates applies on top, which that article does not cover. SMS campaigns work on every plan, Free included, which makes a small OTP or delivery-alert test cheap to run.

Brevo WhatsApp campaigns sit behind the Professional plan

This is the part many Indian sellers miss. WhatsApp credits are sold only on Professional and Enterprise, so the cheapest way to run WhatsApp broadcasts through Brevo starts around $499 a month before message costs. Credits are prepaid, never expire and are not bundled into any subscription.

Per-message cost depends on the recipient's country and whether the template is marketing or utility. Meta switched WhatsApp Business billing to per-message pricing in July 2025. Brevo's WhatsApp help page adds that since 1 October 2026, service replies and utility templates sent inside an open 24-hour window are charged at the recipient country's utility rate, while marketing template prices did not change. If WhatsApp is your main channel and email is secondary, a dedicated WhatsApp BSP is likely to cost less than Professional.

Building a first welcome workflow in Automations

Open Automations, then Workflows, and click Create an automation. Pick a pre-built template such as the welcome message, or build from a blank canvas with triggers, actions and rules. Drag an email step in, set a delay, add a condition (did the contact open?) and activate. Brevo's help centre recommends a simple welcome flow as the first build, so you learn the editor before anything with many branches.

The email templates drag and drop editor handles layout, and contact segmentation by attributes, list membership or behaviour feeds those marketing automation workflows. Remember the Free plan's 2,000-contact ceiling inside automations. Standard is the tier the pricing page lists with unlimited multi-step workflows, so check the Starter limits before relying on long sequences.

Brevo CRM, chat and the Aura agents beyond email

The Brevo CRM handles pipelines and deals, with tighter limits on Free (one pipeline, 50 open deals). Brevo chat, inside the Conversations module, combines live chat, a chatbot and a shared inbox for WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and email, with a free mobile app on Android and iOS. Landing pages, push notifications, loyalty programmes and a set of AI agents branded Aura round it out.

That breadth suits a five-person team that wants one login, at the cost of crowded menus.

Brevo vs Mailchimp for a list bigger than its engagement

Mailchimp charges by contacts, and unsubscribed contacts count toward billing. Its Free plan stops at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, and its pricing page shows Essentials at $13 and Standard at $20 for 500 contacts, framed as first-12-month prices. Brevo's free tier is far roomier (300 a day against 500 a month).

On paid tiers, Brevo's $9 and $18 entry tiers also cap you at 500 contacts, so both tools land near the same price for a tiny list. The gap opens when you store tens of thousands of contacts but email them lightly. From the 20,000-email tier upward Brevo lets you keep 500,000 contacts, whereas Mailchimp keeps raising the bill with each contact band. Mailchimp has the easier editor and deeper store integrations; Brevo has native SMS, WhatsApp, a sales CRM and rupee pricing. MailerLite is the third name to check, with 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month free and paid plans from $12.

GDPR, EU servers and who processes your subscribers' data

Brevo's security page says its servers are in the EU, it holds ISO 27001 certification and its practices support GDPR, CASL and CCPA. Multi-factor login and IP allow-listing are available. Under the privacy policy Brevo is a processor for your contact data and you are the controller, and it states it does not sell personal data. It also says data may be transferred to the United States and India, which matters if your clients ask where processing happens. The policy says nothing about training AI on customer lists; the website chatbot runs on OpenAI.

Commercial use is the whole point of the product. New accounts go through an approval step before sending is enabled, so import only contacts who opted in.

Where Brevo frustrates paying users

• The 500-contact cap on the cheapest Starter and Standard tiers surprises people who chose Brevo for its big-list reputation.
• Shared sending IPs on lower plans mean your inbox placement depends partly on other senders; a dedicated IP is listed under Enterprise.
• Phone support starts at Professional; Free and Starter get email support, Standard priority email.

Paying from India: rupee prices, cards and GST

Brevo's price list carries INR amounts for Starter, Standard and Professional, and a group company, Brevo CRM Solutions Private Ltd., operates in India, where founder Armand Thiberge started the business in 2012 alongside France. Brevo's payment help page lists credit and debit cards (no prepaid cards) and PayPal, which is closed to new admin accounts. SEPA and ACH debits are limited to European and US accounts. It does not mention UPI, so check the currency shown at checkout. Listed prices exclude tax; Brevo adds the rate for your billing location at checkout, which for an Indian business means GST.

A sensible first week: authenticate your sending domain on a free account, import opted-in contacts only, build one welcome workflow and test on a 300-person segment. If the daily cap starts to pinch, Starter at ₹625 is a low-risk next step.