Brevo vs Drip

Two different meters: sends versus people

Brevo's pricing plans article says the email volume you select determines your pricing tier, and that the tier also sets how many contacts you can store. On the first three Starter and Standard tiers (5,000, 10,000 and 15,000 emails) that storage is 500, 1,500 and 2,500 contacts. From 20,000 emails upward the same article lists storage of up to 500,000 contacts. In practice, the 20,000-email tier is where a SaaS with a few thousand users starts: $32 on Starter or $69 on Standard.

Drip's pricing page states the opposite principle: cost is based on the number of active people in your account and the volume of emails you send during the month. The slider is the practical guide, because it shows unlimited sends at every band we read up to 30,000 people and a send ceiling of 12 per person at 40,000 and 50,000 people. If your list only grows when real users sign up, the people meter tracks growth in a predictable way. If your list includes thousands of dormant sign-ups, it charges you for all of them.

The difference matters most for a B2B SaaS because the audience is usually two lists mixed together: a small group of paying accounts who get product notices, and a larger group of trials and ex-trials who get a few nudges. Brevo prices the activity, so the dormant group costs almost nothing. Drip prices the headcount.

Cost at 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000 contacts

All numbers below are monthly-billing readouts from the Brevo and Drip sliders on 2026-10-07, and each Brevo figure is Standard, the plan with automation for unlimited contacts. The send assumptions are stated so you can swap in your own.

At 2,500 contacts receiving up to six emails a month (15,000 sends), Brevo Standard is $49 and Drip is $39. Drip is $10 a month or $120 a year cheaper, the only size in this comparison where it leads on price.

At 5,000 contacts with four emails each (20,000 sends), Brevo Standard is $69 and Drip is $89: $828 against $1,068 a year, a $240 gap for Brevo.

At 10,000 contacts with three emails each (30,000 sends), Brevo Standard is $79 and Drip is $154: $948 against $1,848 a year, a $900 gap. If the same list got five emails each (50,000 sends), Brevo Standard becomes $97, or $1,164 a year, and the gap is still $57 a month.

At 25,000 contacts with two emails each (50,000 sends), Brevo Standard is $97 and Drip is $369: $1,164 against $4,428, a $3,264 annual difference. At 50,000 contacts with two emails each (100,000 sends), Brevo Standard is $139 and Drip is $699: $1,668 against $8,388, a $6,720 difference.

Brevo's Starter plan undercuts even those Standard figures ($39 at 30,000 emails, $56 at 50,000), but Starter's automation is limited to 2,000 contacts and A/B testing is listed only from Standard, so it suits newsletters more than lifecycle programs.

• Sources: the Brevo pricing page slider and the Drip pricing page slider, both read on 2026-10-07 in monthly billing.
• Brevo's yearly toggle takes 10% off its plans (Standard at 5,000 emails reads $16.17 a month on yearly billing against $18 monthly); that moves Brevo further ahead and is not included in the totals above.
• Taxes are added at checkout on both vendors; Brevo's help article says its listed prices exclude taxes.

Where Drip becomes the cheaper bill

Because Drip does not meter sends, there is a frequency at which its flat price wins. At 10,000 people Drip is $154. Brevo Standard reads $97 at 50,000 emails, $139 at 100,000 and $179 at 150,000, so Drip overtakes Brevo somewhere between 10 and 15 emails per person per month. A SaaS that sends a daily digest or in-app activity summaries to every user lands on that side of the line; one that sends a monthly newsletter and a few lifecycle emails does not.

At 25,000 people the picture is lopsided in Brevo's favour: Drip's $369 is already more than twice Brevo's $179 at 150,000 emails (six per person). Brevo's page offers no Standard readout above 150,000 emails in the stops we read, so a heavier program there needs a live quote, and Professional begins at $499.

The other place Drip wins is at the very bottom. Under 2,500 people its $39 band beats Brevo Standard's $49, and Brevo's free plan caps you at 300 sends a day, which is a hard wall during a launch week.

Stripe, product events and API limits

Drip has the more direct billing connection. Its Stripe help article has you register a Drip webhook in Stripe and grant read-only access. From then on every Stripe event creates or updates the person, records a Drip event and updates lifetime value on charges. In a workflow you pick Stripe as the provider and choose an event. Drip's integration page lists examples such as subscribing someone to a campaign when a payment attempt fails and tagging a subscriber when a payment completes. The same help article warns that the integration does not pull historical data.

Brevo's Stripe page describes a different route: a Brevo API v3 key plus Zapier or n8n templates, with a customer data platform that ingests Stripe charges, checkout sessions, cardholders, cards and coupons. That works, but a failed-payment email depends on a middle layer you also have to monitor.

For events your own product emits, both tools take a name and properties for a person. Drip's developer reference records an event from an email or Drip ID, an action name, a properties object and an optional timestamp, and caps individual calls at 3,600 an hour with a batch endpoint of 50 requests an hour for up to 1,000 records each. Brevo's rate limit table gives POST /v3/events 10 requests a second and 36,000 an hour on the general tier (20 a second and 72,000 an hour on Professional), and its tracker endpoint accepts an email, an event name, properties and an eventdata object. At 600 events a minute Brevo leaves more room than Drip's 60 a minute, a difference that only shows if your app fires events per click.

• Pick Drip's Stripe route if failed payments, trial starts and plan changes are your triggers and nobody on the team wants to maintain a Zapier account.
• Pick Brevo's API route if your backend already sends webhooks and you can post to /v3/events yourself.

What Brevo bundles, and what it keeps for Professional

The Free plan on Brevo includes email and SMS campaigns, transactional email and transactional SMS, the drag-and-drop editor, basic reporting, outbound webhooks and multi-channel automation for up to 2,000 contacts. The same help article lists free sales tools on every plan: one pipeline, 50 open deals, meeting scheduling, live chat and forecasting. A small SaaS can run onboarding mail, receipts and a sales pipeline from one login before it pays anything.

Several things a growing team asks for are gated. One custom object, contact scoring, inbound webhooks, AI segmentation, WhatsApp campaigns and ten seats are listed on Professional, from $499 a month. A dedicated IP is a $251 per year add-on available only on Professional and Enterprise. If your roadmap needs an account-level object or a dedicated IP for deliverability control, the realistic Brevo price is $499, not $79, and at that point Drip's $154 to $369 range looks cheaper for similar needs.

For deliverability and compliance, Brevo publishes a data processing agreement at its legal pages, while the pricing material does not state a hosting region. Drip's pricing page gives neither, so request its agreement during the trial.

Drip's ecommerce assumptions, read honestly

Drip's own FAQ answers the obvious question directly: you do not need a store, but the product is built for ecommerce and you get the most from it with one. The pricing page lists prebuilt playbooks for welcome series, abandoned cart and win-back, one-click integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and 90-plus more apps, and revenue traced to the email that earned it, counted in orders. For a SaaS those are mostly dead weight: there is no cart, and revenue sits in Stripe subscriptions rather than orders.

What does carry over is the behaviour model. Dynamic segments follow browsing, buying, returning and going quiet, and the Events API lets your product play the role of the store: a 'Created project' or 'Invited teammate' event becomes the equivalent of 'Viewed product'. Teams that already think in events find that comfortable; teams that want ready-made trial, onboarding and renewal templates will rebuild them from scratch.

Lifetime value is a built-in profile field in cents, which can hold a customer's total paid revenue if you import it, and the Stripe integration updates it from charges.

Moving from Drip to Brevo

1. In Drip, open People, then Active, filter the list to the group you want and choose Actions, Export to CSV. Drip's export guide says a link arrives by email and the file contains tags, custom fields, lifetime value and status. Run one export for subscribed people and one for unsubscribed.
2. Create the matching attributes in Brevo before you import so columns map cleanly; Brevo's guide to creating an import file notes that exact attribute names in the header row are matched automatically, though matching is not mandatory.
3. Check your target tier first. If you load 8,000 contacts into an account on the 10,000-email tier, which stores 1,500, Brevo upgrades you automatically to the next tier. Choose the plan that stores your full list before you import.
4. Import the unsubscribed file through Brevo's import flow with the option to blocklist the imported email contacts ticked on the final step, so those people never receive a campaign.
5. Rebuild Drip workflows in Brevo Automation (Standard if more than 2,000 contacts will enter them), and replace Stripe-triggered ones with Zapier or API calls.
6. Authenticate the sending domain in Brevo, send a test to your own addresses, and only then cut your product's event calls over to the new endpoint.

Moving from Brevo to Drip

1. Export contacts from Brevo following its export guide, and keep unsubscribed and blocklisted people out of the file you upload to Drip.
2. Format the CSV the way Drip's import guide describes: an email column as the key, lowercase, underscore-separated headings for built-in fields, a tags column with comma-separated values, one column per custom field, and lifetime value in cents. A single upload is limited to 200,000 rows on accounts created after June 2, 2020.
3. Expect an approval step. Drip's guide says list imports are subject to approval, and asks whether you have consent and recent engagement, so remove contacts that have not opened anything in six months.
4. Connect Stripe through the webhook route above, then recreate each Brevo automation as a Drip workflow. Brevo's multi-channel steps (SMS, WhatsApp) have no equivalent unless you use Drip's SMS.
5. Move transactional mail somewhere else first. Because Drip's page does not document a relay, keep password resets and receipts on Brevo's SMTP or on a dedicated transactional sender.