Alterable makes images for email that are drawn again every time someone opens the message: countdown timers, personalized images, product blocks, local maps, polls and scratch cards. It's built for email marketers and lifecycle teams, mostly in e-commerce, who want a live countdown without a developer or an enterprise contract. Eight of its nine services can be built on the free plan, and that is the main reason to look at it.
You can find Alterable on its Huzzler product page or at alterable.com.
Who Alterable is for
Alterable is for people who send campaigns from a platform like Klaviyo, Mailchimp or HubSpot and are tired of banners that go stale. The countdown ended two days ago, the product sold out, or the "ends tonight" line has been in the template all week. Because every plan allows unlimited teams and teammates, agencies can give each client its own workspace. Developers can create timers and images from code through the REST API, or from an AI assistant through the MCP server, both from the $19 plan.
Alterable does not decide what each customer should see. You write the rules, and it renders them, so enterprise CRM teams that want software to pick content, timing and channel for every customer will find it too narrow. It works in email only. There is no SMS, push or website personalization.
What Alterable does
Countdown timers tick down in the inbox toward a fixed deadline and show an expiry message afterward. Evergreen timers start when each reader first opens the email, which suits welcome offers with a 48-hour window. Evergreen timers need the Starter plan.
Dynamic images put names, points, dates, charts or calendars into your own artwork. Alterable can change the image by location, device, weather, time of day, date or language. On Starter and above, rules can also use the hours since the reader first opened the email. Names and other fields come from your email platform's merge tags. You register the tag syntax of Mailchimp, Klaviyo or SendGrid once, and you can set a fallback for empty fields.
Dynamic products show product picks with the price and stock as they stand when the email is opened. You keep prices and stock current in Alterable, so a sold-out item can't show an old price in an email sent last week.
Local maps draw a map around the reader's city with your nearest store. They need the Pro plan, with up to 100 locations per map and CSV import. Scale removes the location limit.
Polls, surveys and scratchers turn the inbox into a one-click interaction. Each poll answer is a linked image that shows its current share of the votes. A survey click records a star rating and opens your thank-you page. Scratchers are scratch cards that reveal a prize on a page Alterable hosts.
One detail from the documentation shows how the timing works. If you change a service that is already in a sent email, the change shows at the next open. A brand-new service only reaches subscribers after you paste its snippet into a template. That makes it easy to fix an offer after the send, and it means you can't add a block to an email that already went out.
What works well
- The free plan allows real campaigns: 5,000 impressions a month, no card.
- Prices are published, and 25,000 impressions a month costs $24.
- One image tag works in any email platform.
- Evergreen timers, the API and the MCP server start at $19.
- Every plan includes separate workspaces for each client.
What to watch out for
- Email only: no SMS, push or website personalization.
- Each service in an email counts as its own impression.
- Free has integration guides only, with no email support.
- The Zapier integration is still in private beta.
Pricing
Alterable has four self-serve plans and a custom Enterprise tier. Free is $0 for 5,000 impressions a month. Starter is $19 a month for 20,000 impressions, Pro is $79 for 100,000 and Scale is $299 for 500,000. Annual billing is ten times the monthly price, so you pay for ten months and use twelve. Enterprise starts at 2.5 million impressions a month and is priced on request.
The impression count is what changes your bill. Alterable counts every image load, including repeat opens and the prefetches Apple Mail Privacy Protection makes. Each service counts on its own, so a template with a countdown, a product block and a poll uses three impressions per open. If you send that template to 10,000 people and all of them open it once, that's 30,000 impressions, or $29 on Starter ($19 plus $1 for each extra 1,000). Extra impressions cost $1 per 1,000 on Starter, $0.85 on Pro and $0.65 on Scale.
Alterable doesn't move you to a bigger plan by itself. It tells you when a higher plan would save you $5 or more a month. The free plan is never charged. Emails that were already sent keep rendering after you hit the limit, but you can't create new services until the month resets.
Some features depend on the plan. Local maps and A/B tests start on Pro. You can build critical messages, which are banners you switch on after sending, on Free, but switching them on needs Pro. Advanced analytics, with operating systems, top cities and referrers, is a Scale feature.
Alternatives to Alterable
Movable Ink is the enterprise option. Its Da Vinci product uses AI to choose content, send time and frequency for each customer, and it works in email, mobile and web. Pricing isn't published, and you start with a demo request. Our Alterable vs Movable Ink comparison goes through decisioning, channels and cost.
NiftyImages is the closest match in features. Polls, scratchers and slides start at $149 a month there, and the developer API is Enterprise-only. Our Alterable vs NiftyImages comparison lines up the plans tier by tier.