Shopify Email Pricing: 10,000 Free Emails, Then $1 per Thousand, and Where the Cost Really Is

Shopify Email, listed under Shopify Messaging on Shopify’s help center, gives every store on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans 10,000 free emails at the start of each month, then charges $1 per 1,000 additional emails, with abandoned checkout automations always free. The meter is small. The cost sits elsewhere.

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

The price, in Shopify’s words

• “Shopify Messaging is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans.”
• “All stores on these plans have 10,000 free emails to send at the beginning of every month.”
• “You can send additional emails beyond the 10,000 free emails at a cost of $1 USD per 1,000 additional emails up to 300,000 emails.” Above that the rate steps down to “$0.65 USD per 1,000 additional emails” and, past 750,000, to “$0.55 USD per 1,000 additional emails.”
• “Emails are counted based on each individual email address that an email activity is sent to.”
• “The free 10,000 emails are shared across all email campaigns that you send in a calendar month.”
• “Any additional email costs are added to your Shopify bill for the previous month as Marketing emails.”
• “abandoned checkout automations are always free and don’t count towards the monthly limit.”

The product page adds what comes with it: “Create email and SMS campaigns with ready-made templates,” “ready-to-use automations like welcome, winback, and upsell emails,” and Sidekick to “generate on-brand copy,” plus a “recommended send time, powered by Sidekick.”

What the meter costs at your volume

The arithmetic is short. A list of 10,000 gets one full send a month free. A list of 25,000 sending one campaign a week is 100,000 emails a month, so 90,000 billable, or $90. A list of 30,000 sending twice a week is 240,000 a month, so 230,000 billable, or $230. Most automations count toward the same 10,000; abandoned checkout does not. Against a contact-metered platform, where a 25,000-profile list is priced on the profiles whether or not they are mailed that month, this is a different unit entirely. The Klaviyo version of the meter is in Klaviyo pricing, and the head-to-head is in Shopify Email vs Klaviyo.

Two things follow. First, at this price, volume is nearly free, which removes the last financial reason to send less; the bill will not tell you when a send was a mistake. Second, a per-email meter is the honest version of the category’s pricing: it charges for the activity that costs the vendor something rather than for the size of a list. Neither point is a criticism of the meter. They are the reason the meter is not where the cost is.

Where the cost is

An email program has three costs, the same three the is Klaviyo worth it test uses: the invoice, the hours a person spends building and maintaining the automations, and the revenue the program leaves unrealized. Shopify Email makes the first one small. The second is the same as on any builder: someone picks the automation template, edits it, turns it on, and comes back when the store changes. The third is the one the bill never shows, and it dwarfs the other two. A $20M brand wastes roughly $2M a year sending the wrong message to the wrong customer, from about 10–12% of GMV being email-attributable and roughly 80% of that potential wasted (Bloomreach and Mailchimp benchmarks, 2024–2025). Scale it to your GMV and set it beside the $90 above. That is the sense in which the meter is not the cost: the cheapest email tool and the most expensive one leave the same money on the table if a person is writing the rules that decide who gets what.

Who Shopify Email is right for

A store that needs campaigns and the standard automations, sends at moderate volume, and wants the whole thing inside the Shopify admin on one bill. At 10,000 free emails a month and $1 per thousand after, it is hard to spend meaningful money on it, the abandoned checkout email is free without limit, and Sidekick can generate on-brand copy, in Shopify’s words. For that store, moving to a contact-metered platform to get more automation templates is usually a worse trade than it looks, which is the argument in email marketing for Shopify.

Side by side

The quoted cells are Shopify’s words; the rest is our reading of how the product works.

• What sets the bill · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): Emails sent: 10,000 free a month, then $1 per 1,000 · Relvino: 3–7× cheaper than Klaviyo; see the pricing page
• Abandoned checkout · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): Automated email after an abandoned checkout, always free · Relvino: Decided per shopper, including whether an offer is needed
• Who builds the automations · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): You, from Shopify’s ready-to-use automations · Relvino: Nobody; guardrails are set once and the agent decides per shopper
• What decides a send · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): The campaign calendar and the automation’s trigger · Relvino: Live shopper signals, per shopper, in under 80 milliseconds
• AI · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): Sidekick generates on-brand copy and powers a recommended send time · Relvino: The decision itself: message or not, offer, channel, moment
• Where it learns · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): Not described on Shopify’s pages · Relvino: A Large Retail Model across 10K+ retailers, plus a per-merchant policy
• Time to switch · Shopify Email (Shopify Messaging): Available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans · Relvino: About 30 minutes, then a 14-day pilot

What the third cost looks like when it is addressed

Relvino runs Observe → Decide → Act on a Shopify store’s owned channels. It reads the store’s live event stream, decides per shopper in under 80 milliseconds whether a message is warranted and, if so, the offer, channel and moment, and executes across email, SMS and on-site, with 100% of flows running without a human in the loop inside guardrails set once. Fewer sends go out, not more: 80% less spam and lower send costs. The priors come from a Large Retail Model trained on 7M+ data points across 10K+ retailers and 1.78M shoppers.

The headline numbers: 2–6× ROI in 30 days and up to 10× revenue uplift year over year versus the incumbent platform. Two customer examples: Modell’s Sporting Goods, 5X ROI in just 14 days, and Terra Kaffe, 2X the revenue of standard flows. Migration takes about 30 minutes, and the proof is a 14-day pilot run beside it, so the third cost is measured on your own store rather than estimated. Pricing is on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Shopify take from a $100 sale?

Shopify's payment and transaction fees are outside this article, and they are separate from Shopify Email's meter, which charges nothing for the first 10,000 emails a month and $1 per 1,000 after that, in Shopify's words. When comparing email tools, keep the two apart: the email meter applies only to sends beyond the free allowance.

Does Shopify give a free email?

For email marketing, yes: every store on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans has “10,000 free emails to send at the beginning of every month,” shared across campaigns and most automations, and “abandoned checkout automations are always free,” per Shopify's help center. If the question is about a mailbox for your domain, that is a different product and outside this article.

Is Shopify still worth it in 2026?

For most consumer brands selling online, yes, and Shopify Email is one reason the platform's built-in tools are hard to beat on price: 10,000 free marketing emails a month is more than a modest store sends. The question worth asking is not whether Shopify is worth it but whether a person should still be writing the rules that decide which shopper gets which email. That is where the unrealized revenue in an email program sits, on Shopify Email and on every other builder.

Why is Shopify charging me $40?

Look at the line item. Marketing email overage appears as its own line, because “Any additional email costs are added to your Shopify bill for the previous month as Marketing emails,” in Shopify's words, at $1 per 1,000 emails beyond the 10,000 free. A $40 marketing-email line would mean roughly 50,000 emails sent in the previous month, which is easy to check against your campaign history.

How long does it take to migrate from Shopify Email 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 automations to rebuild; guardrails are set once and the agent decides per shopper inside them. Revenue is proven in a 14-day pilot run beside Shopify Email, so the switch is judged on measured revenue. Pricing is on the pricing page.