Brevo Review 2026: A Free Plan That Goes Far, Paid Plans Priced by Emails, and Contact Caps, Suspension Rules and Two September Incidents to Weigh
Brevo (Sendinblue until May 2023) sends email campaigns, transactional email, SMS and WhatsApp from one account, with automation, a free CRM and an MCP server for ChatGPT and Claude. The Free plan stores up to 100,000 contacts but sends only 300 emails a day. Paid plans are priced by monthly email volume: Starter from $9 and Standard from $18 a month on monthly billing, Professional from $499. The catch on the cheapest tiers is a contact cap: 500 contacts at 5,000 emails, 1,500 at 10,000 and 2,500 at 15,000, with an automatic upgrade when you pass it. Fees are not refunded, a second deliverability suspension is final, and in September 2026 Brevo published write-ups of two security incidents.
There are no affiliate links in this review. Every Brevo link goes straight to brevo.com, its help center or its status page.
| Made by | Brevo SAS, Paris; founded 2012; Sendinblue until May 4, 2023 |
| What it is | Email, SMS and WhatsApp marketing with automation, transactional messaging, a free CRM and an MCP server |
| Plans | Free (300 a day); Starter from $9; Standard from $18; Professional from $499 a month, monthly billing |
| Priced by | Emails per month; contacts capped on the three lowest Starter and Standard tiers |
| Best for | Small businesses that send to large lists a few times a month and want email, SMS and transactional mail in one place |
Brevo is a strong value pick for businesses that mail big lists a few times a month, as long as you budget for the contact caps on the low tiers, keep your list clean, and read its September 2026 security write-ups before you hand it your audience.
“Customers trust us with access to their audiences, and in this case we failed to protect it.”
That sentence is Brevo's own, from its write-up of the September 10, 2026 incident in which an attacker used a flaw in its SAML single sign-on to get into 138 customer accounts. It is a rare, plain admission, and it frames the trade-off well. Brevo's pricing is built around how many emails you send rather than how many contacts you store, which has long made it a favourite for people with large, rarely mailed lists. Its Free plan stores up to 100,000 contacts. In the platforms we priced for this review (Mailchimp, MailerLite and ActiveCampaign), the cost of a 10,000-contact list mailed four times a month was lowest on Brevo Starter and tied with MailerLite Comfort on Brevo Standard.
Three things temper that. First, the lowest Starter and Standard tiers now cap contacts at 500, 1,500 and 2,500, so the advertised $9 really means "up to 500 contacts". Second, Brevo polices deliverability hard: it can suspend sending on a hard bounce rate above 2%, an unsubscribe rate above 1% or a complaint rate above 0.2%, a second suspension cannot be reactivated, and your subscription keeps running meanwhile. Third, fees are not refunded. Add two security incidents in one week of September 2026, and Brevo is a tool to choose with eyes open, not on price alone.
One account, priced by emails per month, with SMS and WhatsApp bought as prepaid credits and a sales CRM sold as a separate package.
Brevo's pricing page groups everything into five marketing plans. What you pay on Starter, Standard and Professional is set by the monthly email volume you choose (marketing and transactional together). On the three lowest Starter and Standard tiers, that volume also sets how many contacts you may store. SMS works on every plan through prepaid credits; WhatsApp credits are sold only on Professional and Enterprise. Sales tools (pipelines, chatbot, phone) are a separate package with their own seats, and everything else, from extra seats to a dedicated IP, is an add-on.
A new name in 2023, new plans with contact caps from October 2025, a EUR 500 million round, and a hard September 2026.
If you knew Brevo as Sendinblue, the core idea is the same: pay for sending, not for storage. What changed is the packaging. Brevo's Terms say the current plans apply to accounts opened from October 1, 2025; earlier subscribers keep their former plans. Those plans introduced contact limits on the lowest Starter and Standard tiers. Then, in December 2025, Brevo announced a EUR 500 million funding round and unicorn status, and in September 2026 it disclosed two separate security incidents in five days.
A large, well-funded European vendor whose scale figures are its own, with one big independent review sample to check them against.
Brevo says it has more than 600,000 customers and operates in 180 countries, and its December 2025 release states that “Brevo will surpass €200 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) in 2025, with a double-digit EBITDA margin.” Those are vendor numbers: a customer is an account, not an active sender, and ARR is a forecast in a press release, not audited revenue. The same release says the US now generates 24% of all new revenue. The homepage shows a 4.5 rating next to a G2 logo; G2's own page is not quoted in this review.
The independent signal is Trustpilot, covered in the next section. The only Brevo-published apps in the US App Store are companion apps for its inbox and phone features: “Conversations by Brevo” holds a 3.4 average from just 8 ratings, far too few to mean much, and “Brevo Phone” has none. There is no mobile app for building campaigns.
Most reviewers like the value and the free plan; the angry minority writes about suspensions, support and complexity.
On Oct 26, 2026 the Trustpilot profile for brevo.com showed a TrustScore of 3.8 from 7,247 reviews, 725 of them in the past 12 months, with 76% five-star and 13% one-star. Read the sample with two labels in mind. Trustpilot marks Brevo as a company that “Asks customers to review”, explaining that “This company invites their customers to review, whether positive or negative”; invited reviews tend to lift scores. And Brevo “Replied to 97% of negative reviews”. The same page lists peers: MailerLite at 4.1 (about 3,000 reviews), ActiveCampaign at 2.7 (about 1,000) and Intuit Mailchimp at 2.5 (about 2,000). G2, Capterra and Reddit are not quoted here.
Moved from Mailchimp's free plan: “Brevo ticks all of our boxes and is much more generous to free users”.
“Brevo is the best value mailing list manager out there”
“A day after I signed up with them, I received an email telling me my account had been suspended due to spam.”
On support: “They never fully understand my issue, and just tell me to do exactly what I'm trying to solve.”
“Useful features. Complicated to get around however. Not very intuitive.”
Says “the onboarding process is riddled with questionable dark patterns”, starting with a negatively phrased newsletter opt-out.
Brevo answers many of these. To one suspended customer it wrote that “accounts may be suspended when our system detects unusual activity that unfortunately impacts our shared IP addresses”, linking its suspension help article. On Hacker News, mentions are mostly developers using Brevo for transactional mail. One builder found that “It is actually brevo rewriting all my links and adds tracking. Will change to Amazon SES very soon.” (item 49025318, Jul 23, 2026). Another, choosing an EU stack, reported “No deliverability issues on the major email operators (Google, MS365) at all, decent delivery speed.” (item 48271526, May 25, 2026), while a third called it “okay as an email service provider but they could be way better” (item 47085600, Feb 20, 2026). A self-hoster who tried several relays, Brevo among them, suspected low tiers share IPs “where they're also playing wack-a-mole with spammers” (item 46749767, Jan 25, 2026). The September supply-chain incident drew its own thread (item 49745830, Sep 17, 2026).
“It is actually brevo rewriting all my links and adds tracking.”
“No deliverability issues on the major email operators (Google, MS365) at all, decent delivery speed.”
“Brevo is okay as an email service provider but they could be way better.”
The patterns. Praise centres on value, the free plan, the editor and a transactional API that just works. Frustration centres on support quality, account suspensions (some within a day of signing up), a busy interface and link tracking that rewrites URLs by default. Treat link tracking as a setting to check, and treat the suspension stories as a reason to read the rules before importing a list.
Free for 300 emails a day, then Starter and Standard priced by monthly emails, with contact caps on the first three tiers that decide what you really pay.
Free
300 emails a day, up to 100,000 contacts
- 1 user, “Sent with Brevo” sticker on every email
- Automations for up to 2,000 contacts
- Transactional email and SMS credits
- Email support
Starter
a month at 5,000 emails and 500 contacts; $8.08 yearly. $82 at 100,000 emails
- No daily limit, 1 user
- Logo removal is an add-on ($12 a month)
- Automations still capped at 2,000 contacts
- Contact caps: 500, 1,500, 2,500, then 500,000
Standard
a month at 5,000 emails and 500 contacts; $16.17 yearly. $89 at 40,000 emails
- Unlimited automation, A/B tests
- No Brevo logo, 1 landing page
- Up to 3 seats ($12 each extra)
- Same contact caps as Starter
Professional
a month at 150,000 emails; $449.08 yearly. Up to 10 million emails
- 2 million contacts, 10 seats
- WhatsApp credits, push, popups
- Phone support, dedicated IP add-on
- Enterprise above that, custom price
The headline prices hide the most important rule. Below the plan cards, the “Customize your plan” calculator shows what each email tier includes. At 5,000 emails a month, Starter includes 500 contacts. At 10,000 it is 1,500, at 15,000 it is 2,500, and only from 20,000 emails does the limit jump to 500,000. Standard follows the same ladder up to 500,000 emails; Professional includes 2 million contacts at every tier.
Brevo's help center spells out what happens at the limit: on the first three tiers you get warnings, and “If you reach or exceed that limit, we will automatically upgrade your plan to the next tier.” Its own example is a Starter account going from 1,500 to 1,501 contacts. “The cost of your subscription will increase accordingly.” On monthly billing that step is $17 to $25 (+47%), and the next is $25 to $32 (+28%).
Swipe sideways to see every column.
| Emails a month | Contacts allowed | Starter monthly | Starter yearly | Standard monthly | Standard yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 500 | $9 | $8.08 | $18 | $16.17 |
| 10,000 | 1,500 | $17 | $15.25 | $35 | $31.50 |
| 15,000 | 2,500 | $25 | $22.50 | $49 | $44.08 |
| 20,000 | 500,000 | $32 | $28.75 | $69 | $62.08 |
| 40,000 | 500,000 | $46 | $41.42 | $89 | $80.08 |
| 60,000 | 500,000 | $65 | $58.50 | $104 | $93.58 |
| 100,000 | 500,000 | $82 | $73.75 | $139 | $125.08 |
| 250,000 | 500,000 | not offered | not offered | $249 | $224.08 |
| 500,000 | 500,000 | not offered | not offered | $429 | $386.08 |
USD per month. Yearly is the per-month equivalent of the annual price. Professional starts at $499 ($449.08 yearly) for 150,000 emails and 2 million contacts and reaches $4,543 at 10 million emails. Selected tiers; the slider also has 30,000, 50,000, 80,000, 150,000 and 350,000.
The Free plan: generous storage, slow sending
Free stores up to 100,000 contacts, which is what made Brevo famous. Sending is the bottleneck: 300 emails a day, campaign and transactional combined. Per the help center, “if you send a campaign to more than 300 recipients, only 300 contacts will receive it on the scheduled day”; you then requeue it by hand each day. A 2,000-contact newsletter therefore takes seven days to reach everyone. Every Free email carries the “Sent with Brevo” sticker, automations accept at most 2,000 contacts, and you cannot schedule tomorrow's campaign once today's 300 are used.
Add-ons, credits and a price that differs between pages
Logo removal on Starter is $12 a month on the pricing calculator ($10.80 on yearly billing) and in the machine-readable pricing file, but the help center lists it at $9 a month. Expect the pricing page figure at checkout. A dedicated IP costs $251 a year on Professional, “charged immediately for a year”, and Brevo recommends it only if you send at least three campaigns a week to 3,000 or more contacts or over 100,000 emails a month. Pay-as-you-go email credits, which the pricing page says carry “No expiration date.”, run from $32 for 5,000 to $1,600 for 1 million.
Four setups priced line by line: Brevo is cheap once you send at volume, and less of a bargain when a small list forces you up the contact ladder.
These are worked examples on published prices as of Oct 26, 2026, for invented but typical senders, on monthly billing unless noted. Taxes are excluded. Competitor plans count different things (contacts or subscribers, with send limits), so read the comparison as directional.
Swipe sideways to see every column.
| Setup | Cheapest Brevo fit | Per month | Per year | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Shop with 2,000 contacts, 2 newsletters plus receipts (about 4,500 emails) | Starter 15k tier (2,500 contacts) + logo removal | $25 + $12 = $37 | $444 | 4,500 emails fit the $9 tier, but 2,000 contacts do not. Free would take 7 days per newsletter |
| B. 10,000 contacts, weekly newsletter (about 40,000 emails) | Starter 40k + logo, or Standard 40k for unlimited automation | $58 or $89 | $696 or $1,068 | Starter automations stop at 2,000 contacts; 8 sends a month (80,000) would make Standard $119 |
| C. 50,000 contacts, weekly (about 200,000 emails) | Standard 250k tier | $249 | $2,988 | Phone support, WhatsApp and a dedicated IP need Professional: $599 at this volume |
| D. Seasonal sender: 10,000 contacts, two big sends a year (20,000 emails) | Pay-as-you-go credits | none | $95 once | A Starter 20k plan kept all year is $384; subscribing only for two months is $64 if you cancel in time |
Logo removal at the pricing-page rate of $12 a month. Yearly billing would cut plan prices by about 10%.
How does setup B compare elsewhere? On the same day, MailerLite Comfort for 10,000 subscribers was $89 a month (100,000 emails), Mailchimp Essentials for 5,001 to 10,000 contacts was $110 a month after an introductory $93.50 for 12 months, and ActiveCampaign Starter for 10,000 contacts was $149 a month billed yearly. Among those four vendors, Brevo Starter is the lowest price for this list, and Brevo Standard matches MailerLite Comfort, though MailerLite allows more than twice as many sends for the money.
What the numbers say. Brevo's model rewards big lists mailed occasionally and punishes small lists that grow. A 2,000-contact shop pays $25 a month on Starter for email volume it does not use, because the contact cap, not the sending, sets the tier; MailerLite Comfort for 2,500 subscribers was $33 with its logo already removed, close to Brevo's $37 once Brevo's logo is gone. From 20,000 emails up, where the cap jumps to 500,000, Brevo's per-email pricing pulls ahead, and at 50,000 contacts Standard's $249 compares with $319 for MailerLite Comfort, $385 for Mailchimp Essentials and $609 billed yearly for ActiveCampaign Plus.
No refunds, deliverability suspensions that can become permanent, credits that the Terms say expire, and free accounts deleted after four months of inactivity.
Read these before you pay, and before you import a list. Brevo's Terms of Service carry the version date October 1, 2025; the help center articles below were current on Oct 26, 2026.
1. Refunds: essentially none
The Terms say subscriptions cannot be cancelled before the end of the term “and We will not provide refunds for any prepaid or unused fees.” The help center adds: “Brevo does not provide refunds for used and unused credits, except in cases when:” there is a technical error by Brevo or a user is not qualified to send from its shared IPs, and it “cannot refund any unused months” when the account was suspended, compromised or you forgot to cancel. Add-ons are stated plainly: “Add-ons are non-refundable.” If your account is closed for breaching the Terms, prepaid fees and unused quotas are not refunded either.
2. Suspensions: the rule most likely to hurt a new account
Brevo checks campaigns sent in the last 24 hours and samples campaigns sent to new contacts: if engagement from a random subset looks bad within one to three hours, “the campaign and account are suspended.” Negative results include a hard bounce rate above 2%, an unsubscribe rate above 1% or a complaint rate above 0.2%. A first suspension can be lifted by working through the Deliverability Center; after that, “If your account is suspended again, we won't be able to reactivate it.” Meanwhile, “Your subscription will keep running even though your account or campaigns have been suspended.” Accounts can also be suspended right after sign-up when Brevo's system detects an anomaly, which matches the Trustpilot review quoted above.
3. Credits: “never expire” on one page, twelve months in the Terms
The pricing FAQ says “PAYG credits do not expire” and the add-ons article says “Prepaid credits never expire and can be used at any time.” for both email and message credits. The Terms say something different for SMS and WhatsApp: each credit “remains valid only for a duration of twelve (12) months from its date of your purchase”, and when exchange rates or supplier prices change, Brevo “might immediately apply with retroactive effect the new Ratio to You”, meaning the number of credits a message uses can rise after you bought them. Buy message credits for the next few campaigns, not for the year. Separately, monthly email quotas on a plan reset every month, even on yearly billing.
4. Free accounts are deleted after four months unused
“Free plan accounts that are not used for 4 months will be automatically deleted. All data will be permanently lost and cannot be restored.” Brevo sends reminders 30, 15, 7 and 1 day before; logging in, or running automations or transactional email, resets the clock. The cancellation article repeats it: after downgrading you must “log into Brevo every four months”. The Terms set a looser outer limit, allowing termination after “six (6) months or more” without a login, and also say Brevo “may suspend, limit, or terminate the free Services for any reason at any time without notice.” Plan for four months, and export your contacts.
5. Renewal, price changes, liability and leaving
Subscriptions renew automatically. On Professional, “the notice of non-renewal must be given in writing, and the minimum notice period of non-renewal is fifteen (15) calendar days”, and a yearly Professional plan can only be cancelled through a support ticket; cancelling a plan does not cancel a dedicated IP either. Brevo may change prices on your subscription's anniversary with at least 30 days' notice. Its liability “will not exceed the price that You paid for the Services giving rise to the liability in the six (6) months preceding the first incident out of which the liability arose”, and on Free it is limited to the service-level remedies. US customers are bound by Delaware law and AAA arbitration under the country-specific terms. Data export is available throughout a subscription.
6. The contact cap, as the Terms write it
The Terms confirm the pricing page: Starter and Standard are each “subject to a limit of five hundred thousand (500.000) Contacts”, the contact allowance scales with the email volume you pick, and Brevo may raise your tier automatically when you exceed it. They add a limit to that safety net: “There is no more automatic upgrade once your Subscription has reached 20,000 emails.”
7. Where Brevo's own pages disagree
| Topic | What the pages say |
|---|---|
| Logo removal on Starter | Pricing calculator and pricing file: $12 a month ($10.80 yearly). Help center add-ons article: $9 a month. |
| SMS and WhatsApp credit expiry | Pricing FAQ and help: credits never expire. Terms, Appendix 1: valid for twelve months from purchase. |
| Free account deletion | Help center: after 4 months unused. Terms 3.4: after six months or more without a login. |
| Contact tiers | Pricing page and plans article: 500, 1,500, 2,500, 500,000. Quotas article: “500, 1,500, or 500,000”, leaving out the 2,500 tier. |
| Sales Advanced price | Help center: $64 a month. Pricing calculator and pricing file: $65. |
| Hosting location | Help center: OVH in France and Germany, Google Cloud in Belgium. Terms sub-processor list: OVH with servers in France, Google Cloud in Belgium. |
Match your situation to one line.
A drag-and-drop editor and multistep automation on every plan, with the useful automation limits starting at Standard.
The heart of Brevo is the campaign editor and the automation builder. Every plan, Free included, gets the drag-and-drop editor, templates, reusable sections, forms and an AI content assistant (Aura). Automation is on every plan too, but on Free and Starter only 2,000 unique contacts can enter your active automations; Standard and above are unlimited. Standard adds A/B testing, send-time optimisation, advanced reports (click heatmaps, geography, device) and removes the Brevo logo. Professional adds contact scoring, AI segmentation, product recommendations and an analytics studio.
Brevo's help center embeds short official tutorials. This one shows the pre-designed sections in the email editor, the quickest way to build a branded newsletter without starting from a blank canvas:
“Insert and customize pre-designed sections”, official Brevo YouTube channel (@brevo_official), embedded in the help article “Save time designing your emails with pre-designed sections”.
The automation builder is where Standard earns its higher price. A typical first workflow is a welcome series for new subscribers; Brevo's help article on welcome messages embeds this walkthrough of a three-email ecommerce welcome series:
“How to Set Up an Effective 3-Email Welcome Series Automation for your Ecommerce Store”, official Brevo YouTube channel (@brevo_official), embedded in the help article “Welcome message - Send welcome emails to onboard new contacts”.
Platform quotas matter at scale. On Free, Starter and Standard, the new automation editor processes up to 6,000 trigger events and 3,000 steps a minute (10,000 and 6,000 on Professional), and accounts can hold 10,000 email campaigns and 150 scheduled campaigns at once. Accounts with more than 10 million email events lose events older than 24 months by default, per the quotas article.
Get approved, authenticate your domain, import only opted-in contacts, then size the plan by contacts, not emails.
An illustrative sequence built from Brevo's pricing FAQ and help center, Oct 26, 2026, not a record of a JAVIS campaign.
SMS on every plan and WhatsApp on Professional, both through prepaid credits priced by destination, with WhatsApp about 29% above Meta's US list rate.
SMS and WhatsApp run on credits. On Oct 26, 2026 the pay-as-you-go calculator priced credits at $10.90 per 1,000 ($0.0109 each). A US SMS uses 1 credit, so 1,000 US texts cost $10.90; the same 1,000 texts cost $43.60 to the UK (4 credits each), $49.05 to France (4.5) and $81.75 to India (7.41, rounded up to a 7,500-credit pack). Brevo notes that credit use per message also depends on message type, length and characters.
WhatsApp credits are sold only on Professional and Enterprise. For 1,000 US or Canada marketing messages, the calculator showed 2.957 credits each, or $32.23 (sold as a $32.70 pack). Utility messages used 0.4 credits each, $4.36 per 1,000. Meta, which sets WhatsApp's own per-message rates, lists North America at $0.025 per marketing message and $0.0034 per utility message from October 1, 2026, which is $25.00 and $3.40 per 1,000. Brevo's credits therefore cost about 29% more than Meta's list rate for marketing and about 28% more for utility. Meta also gives free windows (for example replies inside the customer service window), so actual Meta charges can be lower.
To send WhatsApp campaigns you link a WhatsApp Business account to Brevo first; the help article for that step embeds Brevo's own setup walkthrough:
“How to set up your WhatsApp campaign in Brevo”, official Brevo YouTube channel (@brevo_official), embedded in the help article “Part 1: Link your WhatsApp Business account to Brevo”.
A draft-only connector for ChatGPT and Claude, a full read-write MCP server for developers, and API rate limits that tighten on the general tier.
Brevo now ships three AI routes. The official ChatGPT plugin and the Claude connector work on all plans and, per Brevo, read campaigns, contacts and segments and create drafts: they “Never sends, schedules or deletes.” The MCP server, used from Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and similar tools with an MCP token, can also send campaigns and transactional email and create CRM deals, and Brevo warns that “It has full read and write access, so store the token like a password.” If you connect it to Claude, our Claude MCP connectors guide explains how connector permissions work, and the Claude Code setup guide covers the terminal route.
Beyond AI, Brevo's integrations page lists more than 150 tools, including Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, Make and n8n. If you already automate with one of those, our reviews of Zapier, Make and n8n price the other side of the connection.
API limits. The transactional send endpoint is generous on every plan (1,000 requests per second, 3.6 million an hour), and contacts endpoints allow 10 per second. The catch is the catch-all row: on the general tier, which covers Free through Standard, “All other endpoints” are limited to 100 requests an hour, and all other /smtp endpoints to 300. Professional doubles most of these (advanced tier); Enterprise gets the extended tier. Excess requests return a rate-limit error, so batch and cache rather than poll.
| Endpoint group | General (Free to Standard) | Advanced (Professional) |
|---|---|---|
| Send transactional email | 1,000 per second | 2,000 per second |
| Contacts | 10 per second | 20 per second |
| Send transactional SMS | 150 per second | 200 per second |
| All other endpoints | 100 per hour | 200 per hour |
From developers.brevo.com/docs/api-limits, Oct 26, 2026. Enterprise gets higher, extended limits.
EU hosting and ISO 27001 on paper, two serious incidents in September 2026 in practice, and write-ups that are unusually candid about both.
Incident 1, September 10, 2026. Brevo's write-up says an attacker created an account, enabled SAML single sign-on and invited real Brevo users into it; a scoping flaw then gave the attacker access to every organization those users could reach. “6 of those accounts were used to send phishing emails to the contacts stored there, and for 43 accounts they exported the contacts.” 93 of the 138 accounts showed no meaningful activity. Brevo closed the route at 8:30 AM UTC, signed out every user and says it is contacting affected customers directly. Because the phishing went out through Brevo, “These messages were sent through legitimate infrastructure, so they passed the usual email authentication checks and looked genuine.”
Incident 2, September 14, 2026. Four days later, an attacker used a compromised Cloudflare API key to deploy a Worker that injected a malicious script into pages of brevo.com and sibforms.com and into three JavaScript files that customers embed on their own sites. For about five and a half hours, selected visitors saw a fake “verify you are human” page telling them to paste and run a command, a technique called ClickFix; on WordPress sites with a Brevo widget, the script also tried to install a plugin when an administrator was logged in. Brevo says “Brevo's application at app.brevo.com was not affected.” Its root cause is blunt: “A long-lived Cloudflare API key with full account permissions was stored in application source code and was obtained by the attacker.” and “Our investigation indicates the key was first misused in late August 2026.”
What should a customer do with this? Both write-ups list concrete fixes (scoping SSO per organization; moving keys into a vault with rotation and alerting), and the second tells WordPress site owners who loaded Brevo scripts on September 14 to check for plugins installed that day. If you use Brevo, turn on two-factor authentication, review API and MCP keys, and treat any unusual email sent from your account as a reason to open a ticket. The status page also shows a steady run of smaller service incidents in October 2026, including delayed transactional delivery on October 5 and 14 and elevated public API errors on October 19.
Data and compliance. Per the help center, “The hosting servers on which Brevo processes and stores its databases are all located within the European Union”, with OVH in France and Germany and Google Cloud in Belgium, and data copied at least three times in two locations. The Data Processing Agreement sits inside the Terms; its sub-processor list includes Cloudflare (USA and EU servers), Zendesk, SMS carriers such as Twilio and Sinch, and AI providers. The Terms state “Brevo is currently ISO 27001:2022 certified.” One clause deserves attention if you feed it customer data: “Brevo may use Content and Usage Data to enrich and train its AI Features for the sole purpose of improving the performance of the Services provided to You”, in particular for fraud and spam prevention. JAVIS has not reviewed Brevo's certificates.
Businesses with large lists and modest sending, transactional senders, and anyone who wants email plus SMS in one EU-hosted account.
- Lists of 10,000 or more contacts mailed a few times a month
- Shops that want receipts, newsletters and SMS in one place
- Developers who need a transactional email API with a free tier
- Teams that prefer EU data hosting
- Occasional senders who can use pay-as-you-go credits
- Claude or ChatGPT users who want draft-only AI access to campaigns
- Small but growing lists on a tight budget (the contact caps bite)
- Old or purchased lists that may bounce
- Anyone who needs refunds or easy exits from a yearly plan
- WhatsApp-first marketers below Professional pricing
- Teams that need phone support below $499 a month
- Buyers who want a long incident-free security record
Likely plan by work pattern: a hobby list fits Free; a newsletter with under 2,500 contacts fits Starter with logo removal; a shop running welcome and cart flows fits Standard; a team needing WhatsApp, phone support or a dedicated IP fits Professional.
Nine things to check before you rely on it.
500, 1,500 and 2,500 contacts at 5,000, 10,000 and 15,000 emails, with automatic upgrades.
No refunds for prepaid or unused fees, credits or add-ons, with narrow exceptions.
2% bounces, 1% unsubscribes or 0.2% complaints can suspend you; a second suspension is final.
SSO flaw reached 138 accounts; a leaked key let attackers inject scripts for about 5.5 hours.
Only 2,000 contacts can enter automations on Free and Starter.
Help says credits never expire; the Terms give SMS and WhatsApp credits twelve months.
Unused Free accounts are deleted after four months, data included.
Professional only, and credits run about 29% above Meta's US marketing list rate.
Email-only support below Professional; reviewers describe slow, scripted answers and a busy interface.
Priced from each vendor's page on Oct 26, 2026 for a 10,000-contact list; the plans count different things, so they are not like-for-like.
Swipe sideways to see every column.
| If you need | Tool | Price for 10,000 contacts | Sends included | What stands out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lowest price for a big list mailed a few times a month | Brevo | $46 / $89 a month (Starter / Standard at 40,000 emails) | Whatever tier you buy | Pay per email; SMS and transactional in the same account |
| Simple newsletters and automations with generous sends | MailerLite | $89 a month, $80.10 yearly (Comfort) | 100,000 a month | Logo removal included; Free for 250 subscribers |
| The best-known brand and a big template library | Mailchimp | $110 a month (Essentials) after $93.50 for 12 months | 100,000 a month | Free only under 250 contacts; overages apply above limits |
| Deep automation and CRM-style journeys | ActiveCampaign | $149 a month billed yearly (Starter) | 100,000 a month | 10x contact limit in sends; Plus $189 adds cross-channel |
None of these competitors has a JAVIS review yet. For lists under 2,500 contacts, compare Brevo's capped tiers ($25 plus $12 logo removal) with MailerLite Comfort ($33) and Mailchimp Essentials ($45 for 1,501 to 2,500 contacts).
Brevo or MailerLite for a growing list?
This is the comparison most small senders make. Brevo is cheaper once you pass about 20,000 emails a month and do not need many sends per contact; MailerLite gives more sends per dollar and includes logo removal, and its pricing does not jump at 1,501 contacts. If you also want SMS and a transactional API in the same account, Brevo does more.
| Question | Brevo | MailerLite |
|---|---|---|
| 2,000 contacts, own branding | $37 (Starter 15k + logo) | $33 (Comfort 2,500) |
| 10,000 contacts, 40,000 emails | $58 Starter or $89 Standard | $89 (Comfort, 100,000 emails) |
| 50,000 contacts, 200,000 emails | $249 (Standard 250k) | $319 (Comfort, 500,000 emails) |
| SMS and transactional API | Yes, same account | Separate Transactional pricing tab |
Monthly billing, USD, Oct 26, 2026. MailerLite lists transactional email and SMS under a separate “Transactional” tab on its pricing page.
This review has no affiliate links.
Every Brevo link here goes straight to brevo.com, its pricing page, its Terms of Service, its help center or its status page, without tracking parameters. The score, the drawbacks and the alternatives would be the same either way.
How this review was put together: Brevo's public pricing page (every tier of every plan, both billing options), its machine-readable pricing file, the pay-as-you-go calculator for email, SMS, WhatsApp and dedicated IPs, the Terms of Service, help center articles, developer docs, status page write-ups, press releases and help-center videos; Meta's WhatsApp pricing page and rate card; the Mailchimp, MailerLite and ActiveCampaign pricing pages; Trustpilot; and Hacker News, all as of Oct 26, 2026. JAVIS did not create a Brevo account or send email, so nothing here describes deliverability, editor speed or support response times from our own use. Screenshots show public pages only.
Connecting Brevo to AI, automating around it, or comparing other marketing tools? These reviews cover the tools next to it.
Each card opens a published JAVIS review, routed by where you are.
Questions people ask before committing
Is Brevo free?
Yes. The Free plan stores up to 100,000 contacts and sends 300 emails a day, with a “Sent with Brevo” sticker on every email, one user and automations for up to 2,000 contacts. Free accounts unused for four months are deleted.
Is Sendinblue the same as Brevo?
Yes. Sendinblue renamed itself Brevo on May 4, 2023. Accounts opened from October 1, 2025 are on the current Free, Starter, Standard, Professional and Enterprise plans; older subscribers keep their former plans, per the Terms.
How much does Brevo cost for 10,000 contacts?
It depends on emails, not contacts, once you are past 2,500 contacts. Sending about 40,000 emails a month costs $46 on Starter ($58 with logo removal) or $89 on Standard, monthly billing, as of Oct 26, 2026. Yearly billing saves about 10%.
Why did Brevo upgrade my plan automatically?
On the first three Starter and Standard tiers your email volume sets a contact limit (500, 1,500 or 2,500). If you reach it, Brevo moves you to the next tier and the price rises; the Terms say there is no automatic upgrade once a subscription reaches 20,000 emails.
Can I get a refund?
Generally no. The Terms rule out refunds for prepaid or unused fees, the help center allows exceptions only for a technical error by Brevo or a user not qualified for its shared IPs, and add-ons are non-refundable.
Why would Brevo suspend my account?
Brevo can suspend sending after negative campaign results (for example hard bounces above 2%, unsubscribes above 1% or complaints above 0.2%), an anomaly at sign-up, a compromised account or a Terms breach. A second campaign-related suspension cannot be reactivated, and the subscription keeps running.
Is my data safe with Brevo after the September 2026 incidents?
Brevo says its data is hosted in the EU and that it is ISO 27001:2022 certified. In September 2026 it disclosed an SSO flaw that reached 138 accounts and a script injection on its websites and embeddable scripts; its write-ups list the fixes. Turn on two-factor authentication and review your API and MCP keys.
Where this came from, and when.
Every price, limit, rule and rating in this review comes from the pages below, all as of Oct 26, 2026 unless another date is given. Expand for the full list, the scoring method and what the review does not cover.
Show sources, scoring method and scope
Pricing: brevo.com/pricing (every slider tier for Starter, Standard and Professional, monthly and yearly), brevo.com/pricing/see-all-features, brevo.com/pricing.md (generated Sep 29, 2026 from Brevo's public pricing catalogue) and brevo.com/pricing/pay-as-you-go (email, SMS, WhatsApp and IP tabs, US destinations), Oct 26, 2026.
Terms: Brevo Terms of Service, version of October 1, 2025: sections 3.4, 4.1 to 4.7, 6.7, 9.2, 14, 15, Appendix 1 (pay-as-you-go, plans), Appendix 2 (country-specific terms) and Appendix 3 (Data Processing Agreement and sub-processors).
Help center: “About Brevo's pricing plans”, “FAQs - What are the limits of the Free plan?”, “What are the different quotas applied in Brevo?”, “Customize your plan with add-ons”, “Why have my account or email campaigns been suspended?”, “Reactivate your email campaigns after a suspension”, “Do you have a refund policy?”, “About the deletion of inactive Free plan accounts”, “Cancel your subscription”, “Data storage location”, “Where can I find the Data Processing Agreement (DPA)?”, “My account has been compromised, what should I do?”, “Comply with Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft's requirements for email senders”, “Troubleshooting - Issues with Brevo SMTP” and dedicated IP articles.
Developer docs and AI: developers.brevo.com/docs/api-limits; brevo.com/ai/email-mcp; brevo.com/integrations.
Status and company: status.brevo.com write-ups “Attacker gained access to client accounts” (Sep 10, 2026) and “Security Incident - ClickFix” (Sep 14, 2026) and the incident history; Brevo press releases of May 4, 2023 and Dec 4, 2025; brevo.com/company/about.
Video: three videos from the official Brevo YouTube channel (@brevo_official), each embedded in a Brevo help article: SDwfvm-TGM4 (pre-designed sections), iRLwKl96Mtw (welcome series automation) and gwfR8U004_w (WhatsApp setup).
Independent evidence: Trustpilot profile for brevo.com (TrustScore 3.8, 7,247 reviews, star split, invitation and reply labels, recent reviews), Oct 26, 2026; Hacker News items 49025318, 48271526, 47085600, 46749767 and 49745830; US App Store results for Brevo's companion apps. G2, Capterra and Reddit are not quoted.
Competitors and third-party fees: mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing (501 to 1,500, 1,501 to 2,500, 5,001 to 10,000 and 40,001 to 50,000 contacts), mailerlite.com/pricing (2,500, 10K and 50K subscribers), activecampaign.com/pricing (2,500, 10,000 and 50,000 contacts) and Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform pricing page and USD rate card effective Oct 1, 2026, all as of Oct 26, 2026.
Images: screenshots of public pages taken on Oct 26, 2026, mostly at 1280 by 800 pixels; product illustrations inside them are the vendors' own. The Trustpilot screenshot was taken on Oct 26, 2026 at 949 by 949 pixels. JAVIS charts and diagrams are labelled as such and computed from the prices above. Related cards use JAVIS's own featured images.
JAVIS Fit Score (67/100): an editorial composite scored out of 20 on five criteria. Price clarity 13: every tier is public and even published as a machine-readable file, but the contact caps sit inside a calculator, and help pages disagree with the pricing page on logo removal and credit expiry. Capability 17: email, SMS, WhatsApp, automation, transactional API, free CRM and an MCP server; minus WhatsApp and phone support locked to Professional and a 2,000-contact automation cap below Standard. Independent evidence 12: Trustpilot 3.8 from 7,247 reviews but with review invitations and a 13% one-star share, mixed developer comments on Hacker News, recurring suspension and support complaints. Terms, data and security 9: no refunds, final second suspensions, four-month deletion of Free accounts, a six-month liability cap and two security incidents in September 2026; offset by EU hosting, a DPA, ISO 27001 and candid write-ups. Cost and fit 16: the lowest price we found for large lists among the four vendors priced, with a free tier that stores 100,000 contacts; minus the contact-cap ladder for small lists. It is judgment, not a measurement.
What this review does not cover: inbox placement and deliverability in practice, editor and automation speed, support response times, the Sales CRM, Conversations, loyalty and wallet products in depth, Enterprise contract terms, local-currency pricing outside USD, and the Trustpilot review texts beyond those quoted.
