Quick answer
Privy's Email + SMS plan starts at $30 a month for up to 1,500 mailable contacts, with unlimited email sends and 250 SMS credits included each month (Privy pricing). The Displays plan, for pop-ups only, starts at $24 a month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews and does not include email or texting. Above 1,500 contacts the Email price rises in published steps and is billed on the highest mailable count your account reaches in each cycle. The 250 included credits expire 30 days into each period, so texting above the included allowance needs a paid package or top-up (Privy billing help). These terms apply to accounts activated on or after 8 July 2025.
When the job is personal follow-up after a shopper leaves a cart, Zobi handles recovery and the replies that follow. You can keep Privy for the capture and email work you want, and evaluate the recovery thread separately.
Privy pricing comes in two plans: the full program or pop-ups only
This guide covers Privy the ecommerce marketing app at privy.com, used by Shopify, BigCommerce and Wix stores for pop-ups, email and text messages. It is unrelated to the wallet infrastructure company at privy.io, which shares the name.
Privy now sells two plans (Privy billing help). The Email + SMS plan gives full access to Privy's Displays, Email and SMS products. The Displays plan gives access to the Displays tool only, for growing a list, running on-site announcements and showing offers. On the pricing page, the live calculator showed the Email + SMS plan at $30 a month for 0 to 1,500 mailable contacts, with the SMS add-on at 250 monthly credits for $0, so a total of $30 (Privy pricing). The Pop-Ups and Displays Only card showed a starting price of $24 a month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews.
The choice between them is a choice about where your email lives. If your email and flows already run in another platform, the Displays plan prices only the pop-ups. Privy says contacts collected by Displays sync automatically to your Shopify, BigCommerce or Wix account and to select third party platforms, Klaviyo among them. If you want pop-ups, email campaigns, flows and texting in one account, the Email + SMS plan is the one to price. If you are deciding where email should live in the first place, our Klaviyo alternatives guide compares email platforms you might pair with Privy's Displays plan, and abandoned cart SMS covers how to build the cart texts themselves.
How Privy's Email price rises with mailable contacts
The Email + SMS plan is priced on the number of mailable contacts in your account plus the SMS credits you subscribe to. Email sends are unlimited at every tier. Privy's billing article publishes the scale: $30 for up to 1,500 contacts, then $15 for every 500 contacts up to 2,000, $15 for every 1,000 contacts up to 25,000, $30 for every 5,000 up to 100,000, $60 for every 10,000 up to 500,000, and $300 for every 50,000 above that (Privy billing help).
| Mailable contacts | Monthly price | How the figure is reached |
|---|---|---|
| 1,500 | $30 | First tier |
| 2,000 | $45 | $30 plus one $15 step of 500 |
| 5,000 | $90 | $45 plus three $15 steps of 1,000 |
| 10,000 | $165 | $45 plus eight $15 steps of 1,000 |
| 25,000 | $390 | $45 plus twenty three $15 steps of 1,000 |
| 50,000 | $540 | $390 plus five $30 steps of 5,000 |
| 100,000 | $840 | $390 plus fifteen $30 steps of 5,000 |
| 200,000 | $1,440 | $840 plus ten $60 steps of 10,000 |
Every row includes unlimited email sends and the 250 monthly SMS credits. Paid SMS packages are extra. Privy's pricing calculator gives the exact figure for your count.
Two billing rules shape what you pay in a month when the list moves. Privy bills on the highest number of mailable contacts your account reaches in each billing cycle. If the list crosses into a higher tier, you are charged the new tier, prorated, for the rest of that cycle. If the count falls below a tier limit, the account moves down automatically, with no notification and nothing for you to do. A pop-up that adds 1,500 contacts during a sale therefore shows up on the invoice in the same cycle, and a list clean afterwards brings the price back down on its own.
Privy SMS pricing: 250 included credits and three different expiry rules
Every Email + SMS plan includes 250 SMS credits a month. Above that you buy a monthly SMS credit subscription, which renews each month, or a one-time top-up. Privy says the credits a message uses depend on where the recipient is (US or Canada), how many characters the message has, and whether it is an MMS with an image, and its pricing page has a tool that estimates how many credits you need from your contacts, their location, how often you send and the kind of messages you plan (Privy billing help).
The pricing page says credits roll over to the next billing period. The billing article narrows that by credit type, and the difference matters for a store that texts unevenly through the year.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| The 250 included monthly credits | Expire 30 days from the start of your subscription period, so they usually do not carry into the next month |
| Paid monthly SMS packages | Expire 60 days from the start of the subscription period, so unused credits can roll into the next cycle once before expiring |
| One-time top-ups | Expire 60 days from the date of purchase |
Running out has an operational cost as well as a financial one. Without enough credits, SMS and MMS campaigns cannot be sent, and SMS or MMS steps inside automated flows will not send either. That includes cart reminders. You can buy a top-up from the Plans and Billing page on any tier, or move to a larger package. A mid-cycle upgrade is charged pro rata for the rest of the cycle, and the extra credits arrive as soon as payment goes through.
What your next Privy invoice will actually include
Privy's billing article explains how charges land (Privy billing help). Card payments are taken immediately for the first invoice, and later plan changes show up on your next billing date, although upgraded features are available at once. Two kinds of change are charged mid-cycle instead: SMS credit tier upgrades, which are prorated, and contact autoscaling into a higher tier, which is prorated for the rest of the cycle. Privy bills in US dollars by Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover, and gives 14 days' notice by email of pricing changes.
The pricing page headline says Privy has no annual contracts (Privy pricing), and monthly billing is the default. Annual billing is available as a discount for paying upfront, and the billing article attaches firm conditions to it: annual subscriptions are not refunded, and an annual plan cannot be cancelled or closed until its renewal date. For monthly plans, a charge can be refunded within ten days of the initial charge, reviewed case by case. Uninstalling the app or closing your store does not cancel Privy, so cancel the plan or close the account when you stop using it.
The trial is 15 days with no card required. During it, Displays has no feature or traffic limits and Email has a send limit of 100 people a day. When the trial ends without an upgrade, displays are deactivated and active flows stop triggering, which is worth knowing before you point a live cart flow at a trial account. To set Privy's texting costs against other tools, see our SMS marketing pricing comparison and the guide to cart abandonment software for Shopify.
Accounts activated before 8 July 2025 are on different Privy plans
Privy changed its subscription model on 8 July 2025, and its help center keeps the two sets of terms apart. Accounts activated before that date are covered by a separate billing article describing the earlier Convert Only, Starter and Growth plans, where Growth priced texting on mailable plus textable contacts (Privy billing for earlier accounts). Accounts activated on or after 8 July 2025 use the Email + SMS and Displays plans described in this guide.
If you are already a Privy customer, check your activation date before comparing your invoice with the current pricing page. Prices and plan names quoted from the earlier plans, including in older reviews, do not describe what a new account pays today.
How list growth and SMS top-ups affect a Privy bill
Consider a store with 4,000 mailable contacts on Email + SMS. Applying the published scale gives $75 a month: $45 for the first 2,000 plus two $15 steps. That includes unlimited email and the 250 monthly SMS credits.
If the list grows to 5,000 mailable contacts, the same scale gives $90 a month. Crossing a contact tier mid-cycle creates a prorated charge, so keep the date of the change beside the two prices. Check the live calculator for counts between the complete bands rather than assuming how a partial band is rounded.
Keep the SMS budget separate. Included credits expire after 30 days from the period start, paid monthly packages after 60 days from that start, and top-ups after 60 days from purchase. A top-up for a holiday campaign has its own expiry date; it does not extend the life of the included credits. Record the credit mix and the date each expires before planning another send.
The remaining operating decision is who handles the shopper who replies to the cart text with a product or delivery question.
When the Privy plan covers capture and campaigns, and the conversation needs an owner
Privy's Shopify page describes the program it sells: pop-ups and displays to grow the list, Shopify events such as product views, cart activity and purchases to trigger campaigns and automations, and pre-built flows to recover carts and cross-sell after purchase (Privy for Shopify). Pricing that plan answers how much it costs to capture shoppers and reach them. It does not settle who carries on the conversation when a shopper writes back about sizing, delivery or a discount, and that conversation is often where the abandoned order is won or lost.
Zobi is built for that conversation. Zobi texts shoppers like someone from your team. Its concierge reads the cart and writes the message, and you approve it before it goes out, on iMessage where possible and on RCS, SMS, WhatsApp or email when needed. Replies come back into the same thread, where Zobi answers with the cart, the last reply and past orders in view. The same thread then handles the where is my order question, the reorder nudge before a customer drifts, and the add-on that finishes the setup (how Zobi works).
Keep Privy Displays for pop-ups and list growth, or Email + SMS for those jobs plus your email campaigns. Bring Zobi in when the job is running recovery and shopper conversations that the pop-up and email program starts but does not finish. If shoppers rarely reply to your texts, the Privy plan alone may be enough. If they do, take one recent abandoned checkout and compare how the reply would be handled. Texting any shopper needs their consent, whichever tool sends the message.
Apply to have Zobi run your shopper conversations. Free to apply.
Sources
Privy Help, 2025 Billing, Payments, and Refunds
Privy Help, Billing, Payments, and Refunds (accounts activated before 8 July 2025)
Review how Zobi handles shopper conversations for your store.
Start growing revenueAbout the author
Rene Siller is Head of New Bets at Zobi and oversees the research side of the site.