Navigating SaaS pricing structures can be tricky, but our detailed guide has all you need to know about potential Bird costs, and how it compares to alternative vendors. Plus, find out how Vertice can save you time and money during procurement with the SaaS Purchasing Platform, assisting wider value creation.

What Bird can do for you

Bird is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform offering capabilities for marketing, customer service, and payment processing. 

The solution integrates different communication channels – including email, SMS, and WhatsApp – into a unified platform, providing comprehensive tools for managing customer relationships and driving business growth. 

Here’s a closer look at its features and benefits.

Marketing

Bird’s Marketing Cloud suite is an all-encompassing solution for managing and optimizing marketing efforts across multiple channels, including email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Capabilities include custom sign-up forms to grow your lists, rich data collection to build a comprehensive view of your customer, and automated, personalized messaging based on customer activity for increasing engagement and retention.

In 2023, Bird acquired SparkPost, a leading email delivery service. As a result, it’s significantly enhanced its capabilities in this area, allowing businesses to achieve higher deliverability and more sophisticated email marketing analytics.

Customer service

Bird also provides tools for customer support and service management, with capabilities for handling customer interactions, tracking service issues, and providing timely communication across email and chat. 

The Service Cloud suite includes AI-powered self-service features, automated ticket management and assignments based on workload and skills. Organizations can also access advanced reporting and performance metrics. Summed together, Service Cloud enables faster response times, improved issue resolution, greater customer satisfaction, and increased efficiency through automation.

Payment processing

With Bird Payments Cloud, businesses can handle transactions securely and efficiently, providing an enhanced customer purchase experience leading to increased sales and lower cart abandonment rates. 

Payment processing features include one-click checkouts, the ability to collect payments within WhatsApp or SMS conversations, and tracking of customer lifecycle spending. You can create cards linked to your Bird Pay wallet, which can hold money in multiple currencies and seamlessly convert between them on the fly. 

With Bird’s comprehensive CRM platform, organizations can unify their customer communication operations within a single solution that handles marketing, service, and payments. The Bird Developers Cloud and omnichannel API provides seamless integration of email, SMS, voice, WhatsApp, and social media with other systems and third-party apps. By leveraging an all-in-one CRM suite like Bird, businesses can drive efficiency and growth while improving customer outcomes. 

Bird pricing structures and tiers

Bird pricing is straightforward and transparent. It’s calculated based on the number of contacts you’re targeting on a monthly basis — there are no additional platform fees, with all features included at no extra cost. 

Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

Bird pricing – Contact-based

Cost: from $45 per month.

Access to the Bird CRM begins at $45 per month for 3,000 monthly contacts. Email, SMS, and WhatsApp sending limits are 10x your monthly contacts, although keep in mind SMS and WhatsApp messaging may incur additional third-party fees. 

Bird does not charge for inbound SMS to 10DLC and shortcode numbers, although carrier fees may apply in the US. 

Here’s what Bird costs for different sizes of contact lists:

• 3,000 contacts (30,000 monthly sends) – $45/month;
• 10,000 contacts (100,000 monthly sends) – $100/month;
• 20,000 contacts (200,000 monthly sends) – $185/month;
• 30,000 contacts (300,000 monthly sends) – $270/month;
• 40,000 contacts (400,000 monthly sends) – $355/month;
• 50,000 contacts (500,000 monthly sends) – $440/month.

Bird pricing – Enterprise

Cost: contact sales.

For businesses with more than 50,000 monthly contacts, enterprise pricing is available with unlimited sending, global coverage for SMS and WhatsApp, advanced deliverability services, and more. 

Additional enterprise pricing benefits include role-based access control (RBAC), single sign-on (SSO), and auditing capabilities. Organizations also get deployment and data residency options for GDPR, PSD2, and CCPA compliance alongside customized support and SLAs.

Additional Bird costs to consider

Although Bird’s core pricing structure is straightforward, there are some additional costs to keep in mind. Here’s an overview:

SMS and WhatsApp fees

A major Bird benefit is the fact it doesn’t mark up carrier or third-party fees for SMS and WhatsApp messaging. However, sending via these channels will still incur small charges based on your geography. In the US, pricing is as follows:

• 10-digit long code SMS – $0.00331 per SMS;
• Shortcode SMS – $0.0039 per SMS;
• Toll-free SMS – $0.00464 per SMS;
• WhatsApp messaging – $0.025 per marketing conversation.

Phone numbers

There are extra charges for each phone number you plan to send messages from:

• 10-digit long code numbers – $0.15 per number;
• Shortcode numbers – $625 per number;
• Toll-free numbers – $0.26 per number.

Bird Inbox

Bird Inbox centralizes all CRM communications, providing a unified inbox for every channel that enhances response times and ensures consistent messaging across teams. 

Pricing is as follows:

• Up to 2 seats – free;
• 3–10 seats – $30 per seat;
• 11–25 seats – $27 per seat;
• More than 25 seats – contact sales. 

PowerMTA

Businesses needing an enterprise-grade self-hosted mail transfer agent (MTA) can use PowerMTA, a high-performance SMTP server integrated directly with Bird and optimized for high-volume senders. Pricing is available on request.

Email Analytics

If you require more detailed insights into email campaign performance, Bird provides an Email Analytics add-on offering metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and engagement levels. Pricing is available on request.

Competitive Tracker

Bird Competitive Tracker monitors competitor marketing activities and strategies, providing intelligence to help businesses keep pace and adjust their own efforts accordingly. Pricing is available on request.

Email recipient validation

With Bird’s email recipient validation, you can verify email addresses in real time to reduce bounce rates, improve deliverability, and protect your sender reputation. It costs $0.003 per email. 

Support plans

Bird offers flexible support plans tailored to meet different business needs, with additional options including technical account managers, executive sponsors, annual training hours, and support QBRs. 

Costs are as follows:

• Coach (free) – email support Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, up to 12-hour response time;
• Coach+ ($500/month) – email support Monday to Friday, 7am to 7pm, up to 8-hour response time;
• Business ($2,500/month) – 24/7 email and phone support, up to 4-hour response time;
• First Class ($5,000/month) – 24/7 email and phone support, up to 1-hour response time;
• Private (contact sales) – 24/7 email and phone support, custom SLA.

Other vendors offering marketing communications

While Bird considers itself a CRM, it typically competes with marketing communications platforms in terms of functionality. As part of your procurement operations, it’s worth considering alternative vendors to find the best solution at a price in line with your budget. 

Here are three competitor solutions and how they compare to Bird: 

Bird pricing vs Twilio

Twilio is a communications platform that excels in programmable messaging, voice, and video. It offers significant flexibility thanks to its extensive API capabilities, ideal for integrating SMS, email, and other channels into existing workflows.

Twilio pricing is pay-as-you-go, which makes it highly scalable but potentially expensive at higher volumes. It has higher SMS fees than Bird, and some functionality costs extra — Segment for CDP, and SendGrid for marketing emails, for example. With Bird, these features are included out of the box at no extra cost. 

Bird pricing vs Klaviyo

Klaviyo’s powerful email and SMS marketing platform is primarily directed at ecommerce businesses, offering deep SaaS integrations with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce alongside advanced segmentation and automation features. 

Klaviyo pricing is tiered based on the number of contacts, however it charges for contacts even if you don’t interact with them — Bird doesn’t charge for inactive profiles, so it can be cheaper. What’s more, Klaviyo doesn’t support WhatsApp and its credit-based SMS pricing can be expensive if you’re sending internationally.

Bird pricing vs Attentive

Attentive specializes in SMS marketing and automation for ecommerce brands, although it does offer email capabilities too. It’s ideal for companies looking to leverage mobile marketing to drive sales and engagement. 

Attentive pricing is based on your contact list and number of messages sent, so it can be expensive for larger campaigns. However, cost per message usually decreases with higher volumes. Bird is a better choice if you require WhatsApp or global SMS, as Attentive doesn’t support these.

Bird pricing – the Vertice verdict

Undoubtedly, Bird’s all-in-one platform is a compelling solution for organizations looking to enhance their marketing and customer service efforts. The fact there are no platform fees, with CRM and CDP functionality included out of the box, means it’s a competitive option in terms of cost, especially considering it doesn’t mark up third-party fees for SMS and WhatsApp messaging like some competitor solutions.

If you’re looking to acquire Bird, why not let Vertice assist with your negotiations? Our expert buyers lean on exclusive pricing benchmarks from over 16,000 vendors to drive down costs on your behalf, helping unlock discounts and more favorable contracts.

In addition, our SaaS Purchasing Platform provides full visibility into your tech stack, helping optimize your licenses and SaaS spend management. Want to know more? Get in touch below to see why our partners trust us with more than $3.4 billion in software spending.