Is it free, and what do you need to get right on consent?

You've set up Brevo and sent your first campaign. Now two practical questions: "Does this stay free?" and "What do I need to get right, legally, about the customer data I'm collecting?" Both matter, let's take them in order.

The free plan is genuinely permanent

This is the part of Brevo that tends to surprise people in a good way: the free plan doesn't expire. It's not a trial, it's a real plan. You get 300 emails a day and room to store a list of tens of thousands of contacts.

For a small list, that's more than enough. 300 emails a day works out to close to nine thousand a month. For someone just starting out, that's not a limit, it's comfort.

The one visible catch: on the free plan, a small "sent with Brevo" signature sits at the bottom of your emails. Removing it means moving to a paid plan.

Worth noting for comparison: Brevo's pricing works differently from most competitors. Most tools charge based on how many contacts are on your list, Brevo charges based on how many emails you send per month. So if you have a large list but send relatively few emails, Brevo tends to work out cheaper.

When you'll actually need to pay

You hit the free plan's ceiling one of two ways: either 300 emails a day stops being enough, or you want that "sent with Brevo" signature gone.

As of July 2026, paid plans start around 9 dollars a month (with a package of a few thousand emails), and go up from there as your sending volume grows. Check the current numbers on brevo.com directly, tools like this update pricing and package limits often.

Consent: the part most guides skip

This part matters, because most guides don't cover it. Brevo is a European company (based in France), so your data is processed on servers outside whatever country you're emailing from.

If you're collecting a customer list, email addresses, names, that's personal data, and you're sending it to a service hosted elsewhere. That means the responsibility for how you collected it sits with you, not with Brevo. In practice that means getting explicit opt-in consent before you add anyone to your list, using double opt-in where you can (a confirmation click after sign-up), always including an unsubscribe link, never importing a purchased or scraped list, and keeping a record of how and when someone opted in.

Two frameworks are worth knowing by name, even if the specifics depend on where your subscribers live: the EU's GDPR governs how you handle the data of anyone in the EU, and the US's CAN-SPAM Act sets the baseline rules for commercial email in the US. Most other countries have their own version of the same idea. None of this is legal advice, the actual rules that apply to you depend on where your business and your subscribers are, so check the regulations that apply in your situation.

Think of it this way: Brevo is a legitimate, secure tool, the tool itself isn't the issue. The responsibility is yours: get consent from the people on your list, be upfront about what you're sending them, and make it easy for them to leave. That's not just a legal box to check, it's also what makes email marketing actually work; a list you built without consent is both a legal risk and, practically speaking, dead weight that won't perform.

This isn't legal advice, just a flag to pay attention to. If you're serious about this and building a sizeable list, it's worth getting a clear answer from a professional on what applies to your specific situation.

Summary

Brevo is one of the more comfortable email tools to use day to day: a permanent free plan, generous limits, sensible pricing. The part that needs your attention isn't technical, it's about consent: build your list the right way, and take data-protection rules seriously. The tool is solid, the responsibility is the part you have to own.

Next: automation, the real power of email marketing, and the most common mistakes.