Someone has to run Klaviyo. The question is who, and every answer has a price that is larger than the number on the quote.
Here is what each option costs, what is missing from the headline figure, and how to work out which one your store can actually justify.
What does a Klaviyo agency cost per month?
Most specialist retention agencies charge $2,000 to $6,000 a month, with the middle of that range being typical for a store doing $50k to $500k a month. Below $2,000 you are usually buying a campaign calendar and not much else. Above $6,000 you are usually paying for a named strategist and a design team.
A common variant is a percentage of email-attributed revenue, somewhere between 5% and 15%, sometimes with a floor. It sounds aligned. It is worth reading carefully: attributed revenue in Klaviyo counts anyone who opened or clicked within the attribution window and then bought, which includes a lot of people who were going to buy anyway.
What the retainer usually does not include: the Klaviyo subscription itself, design work past a certain volume, and the SMS side. Ask which of the three are extra before you sign.
What does a Klaviyo freelancer cost?
$1,000 to $3,000 a month for ongoing work, or $75 to $150 an hour for project work. A strong freelancer is the best value in this list on a pure quality-per-pound basis.
The cost that does not appear on the invoice is capacity. One person has a ceiling, takes holidays, and gets busy with their other clients in Q4 when you need them most. Freelancer arrangements tend to work well for six months and then quietly stop working, usually right when the store grows.
What does it cost to hire someone in-house?
An email or retention marketing manager runs $55,000 to $85,000 a year in the US, and roughly £35,000 to £55,000 in the UK. Add 20% to 30% for employment costs and you are at $70,000 to $110,000 all-in, or $6,000 to $9,000 a month.
That number buys you something the others do not: someone who only thinks about your brand. It also buys a hiring process of two to three months, a ramp of another two, and a single point of failure who can resign.
The honest threshold is around $200k a month in revenue. Below that, a full-time salary is hard to justify against what email can plausibly add.
And doing it yourself?
Free, and it is what most stores under $100k a month actually do.
The cost is the work that does not get done. Campaigns get sent because they have a deadline. Flows do not have a deadline, so they lose every week to the thing that does. That is why the stores running email themselves are almost always the stores with 85% of email revenue coming from campaigns and a welcome sequence that is one email long.
We wrote about that split here.
The comparison, in one place
| Monthly | Ramp | Capacity ceiling | What you keep if it ends | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | $2,000–$6,000 | 2–4 weeks | Their retainer tier | The emails already sent |
| Freelancer | $1,000–$3,000 | 1–2 weeks | One person | The emails already sent |
| In-house | $6,000–$9,000 all-in | 3–5 months | One person | Nothing, they leave with it |
| Yourself | $0 | none | Whatever is left after everything else | Everything, in theory |
| AI, built for you | Build fee, then a flat monthly | 2–3 weeks | No practical limit on volume | The machine itself |
The cost nobody quotes: what you own at the end
Every option above except the last one is rented. You pay monthly, work gets produced, and if you stop paying you keep the emails that already went out and nothing else. The templates live in someone else's account. The reasoning that produced them lives in someone else's head.
That is not a scandal, it is just how services work. But it is a real cost and it is worth pricing, because it is the reason the third year with an agency costs the same as the first even though the hard work happened at the start.
This is the part we deliberately built differently. What a Nahhda client gets is the machine itself, handed over onto their own computer with the files and the documentation, running on their own Klaviyo and their own AI subscription. Two fees to us, no percentage of sales, and the thing keeps working if we stop.
So which one should you pick?
Roughly, by revenue:
- Under $50k a month. Do it yourself, and build flows before campaigns. Nothing on
this list pays for itself yet.
- $50k to $200k a month. A freelancer, or a machine. This is the band where the work
is too big to squeeze in and too small to justify a salary.
- $200k a month and up. An in-house owner, with an agency or a machine doing the
production underneath them. At this size the bottleneck stops being strategy and becomes throughput.
The wrong question is which is cheapest. The right one is which still produces work in month nine, when the launch calendar is full and nobody has looked at the abandoned checkout flow since it was built.
If you want to know what your own numbers say, that is a 15-minute conversation and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.