Attentive’s Top Agency Partners Are Quietly Defecting to Klaviyo SMS

Something is shifting inside the agency ecosystem that powers SMS marketing for mid-market and enterprise DTC brands — and Attentive’s leadership is reportedly aware of it. According to sources close to the matter, a cluster of high-volume Shopify and DTC-focused agencies that built significant practices around Attentive’s platform are quietly redirecting new client work toward Klaviyo’s SMS layer, which the Boston-based company has been aggressively expanding since its Q4 2025 product overhaul.

The defections — if that’s the right word — are unconfirmed by any of the parties involved. But the pattern is consistent enough that multiple agency operators described similar dynamics when contacted independently by Ecommerce Times in late May.

Which agencies are allegedly moving away from Attentive?

No agency has made a public announcement, and none would speak on the record. But sources familiar with the situation point to at least three agencies in the $5M–$20M revenue tier — including one reportedly based in Austin and another with a significant presence in the UK — that have downgraded their Attentive certifications or stopped pursuing new Attentive-led engagements entirely. A sixth agency, described by one source as “a top-10 Attentive partner by managed spend,” is allegedly in active conversations with Klaviyo about a formal partnership tier upgrade.

The agencies in question are not household names, but their collective managed SMS spend reportedly exceeds $40 million annually. For a platform like Attentive, which built much of its growth through agency referrals and co-selling arrangements, that kind of quiet churn in the partner layer is significant.

“The math just changed. When you can run email and SMS inside Klaviyo and get a unified attribution view, the case for keeping two platforms becomes really hard to make to a CFO,” said one agency founder who asked not to be identified. “Attentive is a great product, but we’re spending a lot of time justifying the extra line item.”

💡 Article Summary

Key Insights

1

Which agencies are allegedly moving away from Attentive?

2

What’s driving the consolidation pressure on Attentive?

3

How is Attentive responding internally?

4

Is Klaviyo actively poaching Attentive’s agency partners?

5

What does this mean for DTC brands currently on Attentive?

Source: Ecommerce Times

What’s driving the consolidation pressure on Attentive?

Industry observers point to several converging forces. Klaviyo’s SMS product, which lagged Attentive significantly as recently as 2024, has reportedly closed much of the gap in core deliverability, segmentation, and flow-building capabilities. Klaviyo’s Q1 2026 product release included what the company called “unified behavioral triggers” — a feature that lets merchants fire SMS and email from a single event condition, reducing the engineering overhead that previously made multi-platform stacks unwieldy.

Meanwhile, Attentive has been navigating its own internal turbulence. Sources close to the company say there was meaningful leadership churn in its partnerships organization in early 2026, with at least two senior partner managers departing in Q1. Attentive has not commented publicly on internal staffing, and the departures are unconfirmed.

The platform consolidation argument is also being driven from the merchant side. DTC brands facing customer acquisition costs that have climbed past $80–$120 for many Shopify-native businesses are scrutinizing their martech stacks with unusual intensity. For a brand doing $5M in annual revenue, paying separately for Klaviyo email and Attentive SMS can represent $3,000–$8,000 per month in combined platform fees — a number that looks increasingly hard to defend when Klaviyo’s SMS tier is available at a meaningful discount for existing email customers.

• Klaviyo SMS pricing for existing email customers reportedly runs 15–25% below standalone Attentive contracts at comparable list sizes, per agency sources
• Attentive’s AI Journeys feature, launched in late 2025, has received mixed reviews from agency operators who say the output quality varies significantly by vertical
• Klaviyo’s data science team has reportedly been prioritizing SMS deliverability improvements specifically to close the gap with Attentive’s historically stronger carrier relationships
• At least one major Shopify Plus merchant — reportedly in the home goods vertical and doing over $30M in annual revenue — migrated from Attentive to Klaviyo SMS in Q1 2026, according to a source familiar with the account

How is Attentive responding internally?

Sources describe Attentive’s leadership as privately concerned but publicly composed. The company, which was valued at $10 billion in its 2021 funding round and has been navigating a more challenging growth environment since, is understood to be doubling down on enterprise account retention and its AI-driven personalization roadmap as a differentiation strategy.

Brian Long, Attentive’s CEO and co-founder, has not commented publicly on the agency partner situation. But sources who attended Attentive’s internal partner summit in April describe a presentation that emphasized the platform’s advantages in enterprise compliance tooling, two-way conversational SMS, and what one attendee described as “an AI layer that Klaviyo just can’t match yet.”

“Attentive is not standing still. Their AI personalization stack is genuinely more advanced than most people give them credit for. But advanced and easy to sell are two different things,” said a consultant who works with both platforms and requested anonymity.

Attentive did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Is Klaviyo actively poaching Attentive’s agency partners?

Sources say yes — and that the effort is more organized than Klaviyo’s public posture suggests. Multiple agency operators described receiving direct outreach from Klaviyo’s partner development team in Q1 and Q2 2026 with what one called “unusually aggressive” co-marketing offers and revenue-share terms. One agency founder said Klaviyo offered a guaranteed minimum payout for migrating a specific number of active SMS clients before July 31.

Klaviyo president Steve Rowland has been publicly vocal about the company’s SMS ambitions, telling analysts at a March 2026 investor event that SMS and email unification represents “the single biggest retention opportunity in mid-market DTC right now.” Whether that translates to a coordinated campaign to destabilize Attentive’s agency ecosystem is a matter of interpretation — but the timing and pattern of outreach described by multiple sources is difficult to dismiss as coincidental.

“They’re not subtle about it. They showed up with a spreadsheet of our Attentive clients and asked us to walk through the migration math. That’s not partnership development, that’s competitive displacement,” said one agency founder, describing a meeting with a Klaviyo partner manager in April.

What does this mean for DTC brands currently on Attentive?

For the roughly 8,000 brands Attentive claims as customers, the short-term answer is: probably nothing immediate. Attentive remains a technically strong platform with demonstrably higher deliverability rates in certain message categories — particularly transactional and promotional flows in the apparel and beauty verticals. The company’s compliance tooling for TCPA and CTIA requirements is widely regarded as best-in-class, an important consideration for brands with large U.S. subscriber lists.

But the agency dynamic matters because many mid-market DTC brands don’t make their own martech decisions — they follow their agency’s recommendation. If the agencies that drive Attentive’s new business pipeline are systematically steering clients elsewhere, the impact on Attentive’s new logo growth will eventually show up in the numbers, even if churn among existing customers remains low.

Several brand operators reached independently described their SMS setup as an “agency decision” when asked why they had chosen their current platform — reinforcing just how much leverage agency partners carry in these segments.

Could an acquisition or strategic shift change the dynamic?

Speculation about Attentive’s strategic options has circulated in VC and M&A circles for the better part of 18 months. The company’s $10B valuation from 2021 is widely regarded as a number that no acquirer would validate at current multiples. But a recalibrated deal — particularly from a larger martech platform looking for enterprise SMS infrastructure — is reportedly not off the table.

Names floated in back-channel conversations include Salesforce, which has been vocal about strengthening its Commerce Cloud messaging layer, and HubSpot, which acquired a conversational SMS startup in late 2025. Neither company has commented on any interest in Attentive, and any acquisition talk remains firmly in the rumor category.

What’s clearer is that the battle for the SMS marketing stack in DTC commerce is entering a genuinely competitive phase after years of Attentive holding a commanding lead. Whether the agency defection trend accelerates or stabilizes likely depends on product decisions both companies make in the next two quarters — and on whether Attentive can shore up the partner relationships it reportedly knows are at risk.

For brand operators watching from the sidelines, the practical upshot is a negotiating environment that hasn’t existed before: two serious SMS platforms competing aggressively for their business. That’s not a bad place to be if your contract with either one is coming up for renewal.