Omnisend Free Plan: The First Meter You Hit Is Emails, Not Contacts

Omnisend’s free plan includes 250 contacts and 500 emails a month at no cost, per its pricing page. For any store mailing its list more than twice a month, the binding limit is the 500 emails, not the 250 contacts: one campaign a week to a full free-tier list is 1,000 emails, and the plan offers an upgrade.

We build a replacement for the flow stack Omnisend belongs to, so read this as informed but interested. Every figure about Omnisend below is quoted from Omnisend’s own pricing page and homepage at the time of writing. Prices on those pages change, and the arithmetic works whether or not you ever talk to us.

What the free plan includes, in Omnisend’s words

The pricing page lists the Free plan at “$0/mo” with “No cost. No credit card required.” The limits are “250 contacts” and “500 monthly emails,” plus “500 Web Push notifications” and “24/7 support.” The homepage frames the free signup as “Full access,” describes the product underneath as workflows “for welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and more,” with AI that will “write copy, pick send times, and segment your audience,” and says “150k Brands trust Omnisend.”

Which meter you hit first

Two numbers define the plan, and a store does not reach them at the same time. The contact cap is 250. The email cap is 500 a month. Send one campaign a week to a full free-tier list and that is 1,000 emails a month, twice the cap, before a single automated message. Add a three-email welcome series for new subscribers and an abandoned-cart series, which is the whole point of an ecommerce email tool, and the 500 goes in the first week or two of any month with real traffic.

So the free plan is not really a 250-contact plan. It is free up to about two emails per contact per month. That is enough to evaluate the workflows and the rest of the product, and not enough to run a program. Omnisend’s own page says what happens next: “If you exceed your email sending limit on the Free or Standard plan, we’ll give you the option to upgrade your plan.”

What the upgrade costs

At the time of writing the pricing page shows Standard at “$11.20/mo” for “500 contacts” and “6,000 emails/mo,” and Pro at “$41.30/mo” for “2,500 contacts” with “Unlimited monthly emails” and “SMS starting at $0.007.” Both prices carry a “-30%” label on the page, so treat them as the promotional figure rather than the list price, and read the page for the current numbers. Notice what changes between tiers: Standard raises the email cap twelve-fold and the contact cap only twofold, which says which meter was doing the work.

The billing rule is worth reading twice: “You’re billed for subscribers and non-subscribers who received automated messages.” A non-subscriber who received an automated message counts toward the bill. The list that sets the price is not the list you think of as your subscribers; it is your subscribers plus every non-subscriber the automations touched.

Is the free plan a good deal?

For a store that is testing whether email works at all: yes. Klaviyo’s free plan, in Klaviyo’s words, covers “Up to 250 profiles” and “500 emails/month,” the same two numbers, so the two free tiers are the same size and differ in what surrounds them. For a store with traffic, the free plan is a two-week trial with no end date, and the decision it is really asking you to make is about the meter you will be on afterwards: contacts, with sends capped on Standard and unlimited on Pro. That meter grows with every successful pop-up, whether or not the added contacts ever buy, which is the mechanism behind a rising email bill on any contact-priced plan; the Klaviyo version of it is in Klaviyo pricing, and the wider comparison is in Klaviyo vs Omnisend.

Free plan, paid plans and the alternative, side by side

• Price shown · Omnisend Free: $0/mo · Omnisend Standard and Pro: $11.20/mo and $41.30/mo, both labeled -30% at the time of writing · Relvino: 3–7× cheaper than Klaviyo; see the pricing page
• Contacts · Omnisend Free: 250 · Omnisend Standard and Pro: 500 and 2,500 · Relvino: See the pricing page
• Emails · Omnisend Free: 500 a month · Omnisend Standard and Pro: 6,000 a month, then unlimited · Relvino: See the pricing page; each send is decided per shopper
• Who builds the flows · Omnisend Free: You, in the workflow builder · Omnisend Standard and Pro: You, in the workflow builder · Relvino: Nobody; guardrails are set once and the agent decides per shopper
• What sets the bill · Omnisend Free: Free · Omnisend Standard and Pro: Contacts, including non-subscribers who received automated messages · Relvino: See the pricing page
• Time to start · Omnisend Free: Signup, no credit card required · Omnisend Standard and Pro: Not stated on the pricing page · Relvino: About 30 minutes, then a 14-day pilot

What a program looks like when the meter is not the number that matters

The free plan trains a store to think in two units, contacts and sends, because those are what the meter counts. The number that decides whether email is working is a third one: what each shopper produced against what it cost to reach them. Relvino decides per shopper on that third number. It runs Observe → Decide → Act on the store’s owned channels, watching live shopper signals and deciding per shopper in under 80 milliseconds whether a message is warranted at all, and if so the offer, channel and moment. The result is fewer sends, not more: 80% less spam and lower send costs, with 100% of flows running without a human in the loop inside guardrails set once.

The priors come from a Large Retail Model trained on 7M+ data points across 10K+ retailers and 1.78M shoppers. Against Omnisend the figure is 5× ROI in 30 days; the headline numbers are 2–6× ROI in 30 days and up to 10× revenue uplift year over year versus the incumbent platform. Two customer examples: Sulina Shop, 4X ROI, and POV Beauty, 2X fewer emails, same revenue. Migration takes about 30 minutes and the proof is a 14-day pilot run beside the current tool. The other options are in Omnisend alternatives and cheaper alternatives to Mailchimp; pricing is on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, Mailchimp or Omnisend?

Judge them on their own pages rather than on feature lists. Omnisend's homepage describes workflows for welcome, abandoned cart and post-purchase, its pricing page adds SMS starting at $0.007 on Pro, and its free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Mailchimp's homepage shows its Standard plan from $20.00/mo and describes generative AI features. On both, a person still runs the program: Omnisend's homepage has you build the workflows, and Mailchimp's says you review and approve AI-generated content before sending, so the better one is the one whose tools and integrations fit your store. Neither homepage describes deciding per shopper whether to send at all; the wider field is in cheaper alternatives to Mailchimp.

How to send 1000 emails for free?

Not in one month on Omnisend's free plan: the cap is 500 monthly emails, per its pricing page, and Klaviyo's free plan caps at 500 emails a month as well, in its own words. Sending 1,000 free emails on either of those free tiers means two months; a Shopify store can instead use Shopify Messaging's 10,000 free emails a month (see Shopify Email pricing). Either way, a free tier is an evaluation allowance rather than a program. If the goal is revenue rather than volume, the better question is which 500 of those 1,000 emails were worth sending, which is what a per-shopper decision answers.

Is Omnisend any good?

By the evidence on its own pages, it is a complete ecommerce email and SMS builder: workflows for welcome, abandoned cart and post-purchase, AI that writes copy, picks send times and builds segments, 24/7 support on all three listed plans including free, and a claimed 150k brands. Its limits are the category's limits rather than its own: a person builds the workflows, and the bill rises with contacts. For a store whose growth is limited by the quality of who-gets-what decisions rather than by capture, that ceiling is the thing to evaluate.

What are the best free email subscriptions?

If the question is free email marketing plans for a store, Omnisend's and Klaviyo's free tiers are the same size: both cover 250 contacts or profiles and 500 emails a month, in their own words. On both free tiers the email cap is the one a store reaches first, so the plan to price is the paid one above it, and the meter it bills on, which in Omnisend's case includes non-subscribers who received automated messages, is the number to read before choosing.

How long does it take to migrate from Omnisend to Relvino?

About 30 minutes for the technical cutover: connect the Shopify store, point the sending domain, connect SMS, and shopper data ingests automatically. Nothing is rebuilt because there are no workflows to rebuild; guardrails are set once and the agent decides per shopper inside them. Revenue is proven in a 14-day pilot run beside Omnisend, so the comparison is made on your own numbers rather than on a pricing page. Pricing is on the pricing page.