Since February 2025, Klaviyo bills you for every active profile in your account — not just the people you actually email. If your list has been growing for a few years, a big slice of what you pay for every month is contacts who haven't opened, clicked or bought anything in six months or more. We call them ghosts.
The fix is boring and completely legitimate: it's the workflow Klaviyo's own help docs recommend. Almost nobody runs it. Here it is, step by step, plus the two traps that quietly eat the savings.
Go to Account → Billing → Usage. That's your billable profile count — the number your tier is priced on. Now ask: how many of those have engaged in the last 180 days? For most stores the answer is 60–80%. The remaining 20–40% is dead weight you pay for monthly.
| Billable profiles | Approx. tier | After removing 30% ghosts | Saved / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $150/mo | ~$110/mo | ~$480 |
| 25,000 | $400/mo | ~$300/mo | ~$1,200 |
| 50,000 | $720/mo | ~$460/mo | ~$3,100 |
One documented case: an account suppressed 120k inactive profiles and cut its bill by 41%.
Create a segment with ALL of these conditions (this mirrors Klaviyo's own "active profile management" recipe):
Review the resulting list. Export a CSV if you want a record. Exclude VIP segments if you have them.
Send the segment one last "do you still want to hear from us?" email. Wait a week or two. Anyone who opens or clicks drops out of the segment automatically. Everyone else has confirmed they're a ghost.
Open the segment → Manage Segment → Suppress current members. Two things to know:
This is the part everyone misses. Klaviyo auto-upgrades your plan when your list grows, but after a cleanup it will happily keep charging the old tier. You must either:
Skip this step and the whole exercise saved you nothing. This is also why savings quietly evaporate months later: the list grows, auto-upgrade fires, nobody re-runs the cleanup.
Mailbox providers read "lots of recipients who never open" as a spam signal. Cutting ghosts improves open rates and inbox placement — it's the same list hygiene every deliverability consultant charges to recommend. The bill savings are just the part you can measure in dollars.
Deadweight runs this exact audit read-only and replies with one number: what you're overpaying per month. Free. If it's under $19/mo, we'll tell you not to bother.
Get your free audit →