Brevo's Free Plan: What It Actually Includes (and Its Limits)

Brevo's free plan lets you send up to 300 emails a day once your account is approved for sending, store up to 100,000 contacts, and use its full transactional API and SMTP relay — all with no credit card to sign up, according to Brevo's own pricing page. The catches: only 2,000 contacts can be inside an active automation at once, and every email you send carries a "Sent with Brevo" sticker that only a paid plan removes. For a newsletter to a few hundred people or personal cold outreach within normal sending limits, that's usually plenty. Here's exactly where the free plan holds up and where it runs out, checked against Brevo's current pricing this month.

What exactly is included in Brevo's free plan?

Brevo's free plan isn't a time-limited trial — it's a permanent tier you can stay on indefinitely. As of November 2026, it includes:

The contact storage figure comes straight from Brevo's own machine-readable pricing catalog: the Free plan's marketing-contacts entry lists an included quantity of 100,000 at $0. That's a generous number for a free tier — most competitors cap free contact storage in the low thousands — but it's a storage limit, not a sending limit. You can hold 100,000 contacts and still only email 300 of them a day.

How many emails can you send per day on the free plan?

300 a day, but only after Brevo manually approves your account for sending. Brevo's pricing page FAQ states it plainly: "When you create an account, you will automatically have a Free plan to upload your contacts. Once we approve your account for sending, you can start sending up to 300 emails per day." New accounts can't send anything until that approval lands, which Brevo uses to screen for spam and compliance before letting fresh accounts loose on other people's inboxes.

300 emails a day works out to roughly 9,000 a month if you used every send, but you shouldn't come close to that for personal outreach. If you're sending individually written cold emails rather than a bulk newsletter, a daily cap in the low dozens is what keeps your domain's reputation intact — see cold email deliverability best practices for what Google and Yahoo actually enforce on volume and spam rate. For that kind of use, 300/day is a ceiling you're unlikely to hit, not a constraint.

Does the free plan include the Brevo logo on your emails?

Yes. Every email sent from a free Brevo account includes a "Sent with Brevo" sticker, and there's no free-plan setting to turn it off. Removing it requires a paid plan: Brevo's pricing catalog lists a "Remove Brevo logo" add-on at $12/month (USD) on the Starter plan, with the cheapest Starter base plan itself starting at $9/month for a 5,000-email tier. On the Standard plan and above, the logo doesn't appear at all — it's bundled into the plan rather than sold as a separate add-on.

If you're sending transactional or cold outreach email rather than a marketing newsletter, this matters less: the sticker shows up on Brevo's campaign and marketing emails, and recipients of a one-to-one email you wrote yourself are reading your message, not browsing a template with a visible logo bar the way they would in a newsletter.

Can you use Brevo's API and SMTP relay on the free plan?

Yes, on every Brevo plan including Free. Brevo's pricing FAQ confirms: "All Brevo plans give you access to transactional email features, including RESTful APIs, SMTP, outbound webhooks, unlimited log retention, and more." That means you can connect Brevo as an SMTP relay from your own app, script, or sending tool on the free tier — you're not limited to using Brevo's own web interface to compose and send.

This is the detail that makes Brevo useful as infrastructure rather than just a marketing tool: a side project, a cold-outreach script, or a tool like Larvabot can authenticate with Brevo's SMTP credentials or API key and send through it directly, while still counting against the same 300-email daily cap and needing the same account approval as sending through Brevo's own interface.

Is Brevo's free plan enough for personal cold outreach?

For most solo founders and freelancers, yes. Personal cold outreach — researched, individually written emails to a specific person — should already be capped well under 300 a day for your own domain reputation's sake, so Brevo's daily limit isn't the bottleneck. The real question is whether you need automation (sequences, follow-ups, scoring) at any real scale: once more than 2,000 contacts have entered your active workflows, Brevo's free plan stops letting new ones in, though contacts already moving through a sequence keep going.

For the rest of a free cold-outreach stack — finding addresses, verifying them, and tracking what happens after you send — see free cold email outreach tools, which covers Brevo alongside the finders and verifiers you'd pair it with. Larvabot uses Brevo the same way described above: it sends the emails you approve through your own connected Brevo account and domain, in small daily batches, rather than running its own bulk sending infrastructure (how that connection works).

When should you upgrade from Brevo's free plan?

Three situations are the real triggers, not the 300-email cap itself:

1. You're running marketing campaigns, not personal outreach, and the "Sent with Brevo" sticker looks unprofessional on a branded newsletter. Upgrade to Standard (which removes it by default) or add the $12/month logo-removal add-on to Starter.
2. You've got more than 2,000 contacts actively moving through automations at once. Standard and above remove that cap entirely.
3. You need a dedicated sending IP for volume and reputation reasons that go beyond what a shared IP on Free supports — this only matters once you're sending real marketing volume, not founder-scale cold email.

If none of those apply yet, the free plan's actual constraint for a solo operator is the approval step and the 300/day ceiling, and neither should bind you if you're sending the way personal outreach is supposed to work: to specific people, in small batches, not as a list blast.

Frequently asked questions

Does Brevo's free plan require a credit card?

No. Brevo's own pricing FAQ says you only need an email address and your organization's name to sign up — no payment details required to use the free plan.

How long does Brevo's free plan last?

Indefinitely. It's not a trial; Brevo's free plan is a permanent tier you can stay on as long as you want, with no automatic expiration or forced upgrade.

Why can't I send emails right after signing up for Brevo's free plan?

New accounts need manual approval before sending starts. Brevo screens new accounts to check for spam and compliance issues before letting them send to other people's inboxes — once approved, you get the full 300 emails/day allowance.

Can I remove the "Sent with Brevo" branding without upgrading my whole plan?

Only partially. The Starter plan (from $9/month) offers a separate $12/month add-on to remove the logo; Standard plans and above remove it as a built-in feature with no separate add-on charge.

Does Brevo's free plan limit how many contacts I can store?

Yes — up to 100,000 stored contacts, per Brevo's pricing catalog. That's separate from the 2,000-contact cap on how many can be actively moving through automations at once, and separate again from the 300-email daily sending cap.

Is Brevo's API available on the free plan, or only on paid plans?

It's available on every plan, including Free. You get full access to Brevo's RESTful API, SMTP relay, outbound webhooks and log retention without upgrading — you're just still bound by the same 300-email daily send limit as sending through Brevo's own dashboard.