Kit (ConvertKit) vs Klaviyo — first 90 days of a 5,000-list migration

Client runs a paid newsletter, 5,000 subscribers, no ecommerce. They were on Klaviyo because the previous operator set it up. Paying $100 monthly for features they never touched. We moved the whole list to Kit in February. 90 days of data below.

Why Klaviyo wasn't right

Klaviyo is a commerce email tool. Flows triggered on cart, browse, post-purchase. Customer lifecycle automation that depends on Shopify or BigCommerce data flowing in. None of that applies to a paid-newsletter operator with a Substack-style content product.

At 5,000 contacts on Klaviyo's email-only plan, the bill was $100 monthly. The platform was running maybe 12% of its surface area. The other 88% was a museum.

Templates assumed a product. The metrics dashboard led with "revenue per recipient". The flow builder defaulted to event triggers that didn't exist for this client. Every weekly send required navigating around features that weren't relevant.

Why Kit fit

Kit is built for the creator. Subscribers, tags, sequences. The mental model maps directly to how a paid-newsletter operator already thinks about their list.

At 5,000 subscribers on Kit's Creator Pro plan, the bill is $29 monthly. About 71% cheaper than Klaviyo for this client.

The send composer is faster too. Less chrome between you and writing the email.

The migration itself

We exported a clean CSV from Klaviyo: email, first name, subscribe date, tag list. Kit's importer accepted it on the first try. 4,847 active subscribers imported. About 153 were flagged as suppressed in Klaviyo (unsubscribes, bounces, complaints) and we moved those into Kit's suppression list separately to preserve compliance state.

Total elapsed migration time, including DKIM/SPF/DMARC reauthorization on the new sending domain: 4 hours. Most of that was waiting for DNS propagation.

We sent a low-stakes "we moved" email through Kit on day 2 to warm the IP and identify any deliverability problems early. Open rate landed at 41%, in line with the client's Klaviyo baseline (38 to 44% on weekly sends).

Deliverability over 90 days

Inbox placement, measured via a third-party seed-list test (8 inboxes across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, ProtonMail), held above 95% on every weekly send. Klaviyo had been around 96 to 98% at the same volume. The 1 to 2 percentage point gap is real but small enough that subscriber-side variance dominates.

Spam complaint rate stayed under 0.05%. Bounce rate stayed under 0.4%. Both inside healthy ranges.

Kit's bounce handling and automatic suppression has been quiet, which is what you want from it.

Where Klaviyo is genuinely better

Visual flow builder. Klaviyo's flow canvas is the most mature in the category. Branching, conditional splits, time-of-day delays, profile-property checks. Kit's automation is sequence-and-rule based. Capable but linear. If your business depends on multi-step branching automation, Klaviyo wins.

Segmentation depth. Klaviyo can build a segment off arbitrary event combinations (purchased X, didn't purchase Y, opened email Z, browsed but didn't buy in 14 days). Kit's segmentation is tag-and-form based. For commerce, Klaviyo's segmentation is a multi-x lift in capability.

Reporting attribution. Klaviyo's revenue attribution to email is opinionated and consistent. Kit's product-revenue reporting via integrations is fine but lighter.

The uncomfortable answer

For non-ecommerce, non-flow-heavy users, Klaviyo's premium is paying for capability you will not use. The flow builder is genuinely better. If you don't have a 12-step branching cart-abandonment flow, that better doesn't matter. You're paying for a museum.

For Shopify ecommerce above $50K monthly: stay on Klaviyo. The flows pay for themselves.

For paid newsletters, course creators, coaches, podcasters, anyone whose primary business is content not commerce: Kit. Cheaper, faster, and you'll actually use the surface area.

The unexpected finding

Send time on weekly broadcasts dropped from about 14 minutes on Klaviyo to under 6 minutes on Kit. Most of that is the composer not the rendering. Operator productivity is real money over a 12-month cadence.

What we charged

$1,100 flat for migration, DNS reauth, segmentation rebuild, and 30 days of monitoring. Client recouped the project cost from the platform-fee delta in roughly 16 months. They recouped it in productivity (composer speed) faster than that.