Customer.io

Customer.io is designed for tech companies with product-led growth strategies, making it most suitable for startups and scale-ups with technical teams who can integrate event tracking via the API. For SaaS startups building onboarding flows, churn prevention campaigns, or feature adoption sequences based on actual product usage, Customer.io delivers precision that generic email tools cannot match. The free tier with up to 12,000 messages per month is generous enough for early-stage startups to build and test their messaging workflows. However, small non-technical businesses without developers are better served by more visual platforms like ActiveCampaign.

Customer.io offers a free plan for up to 12,000 messages per month, which is genuinely useful for early-stage startups building their first lifecycle messaging workflows. The free tier includes access to email, push notifications, and in-app messages, along with the visual workflow builder and event-based triggers. This allows startups to set up onboarding sequences, feature adoption campaigns, and basic retention flows before outgrowing the free limits. Paid plans start at $100/month (Essentials) for up to 5,000 profiles with higher volume and additional features like advanced segmentation and A/B testing.

Customer.io's Essentials plan starts at $100 per month and includes up to 5,000 profiles with multi-channel messaging across email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages. The plan also includes the visual workflow builder, event-based triggers, Liquid templating for dynamic content, and A/B testing. Pricing increases based on the number of profiles and messages sent. The Premium plan at $1,000/month adds a dedicated customer success manager, premium support, data warehouse sync with Snowflake and BigQuery, and advanced features. For teams sending millions of messages, enterprise pricing with custom infrastructure and dedicated IP is available.