Pricing and cost
Pricing pages move. Numbers below were verified on each provider's profile date. Hidden costs (overages, dedicated IP add-ons, premium support tiers) are noted on the provider profile.
Transactional providers
| Provider | Free tier | Starts at | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resend full breakdown → | 3,000/mo permanent, capped at 100/day, one domain | $20/mo for 50,000 emails | tiered |
| Postmark full breakdown → | 100/mo developer plan | $15/mo for 10,000 emails | tiered |
| SendGrid full breakdown → | 60-day free trial only (permanent free tier was removed May 2025) | $19.95/mo for 50,000 emails | tiered |
| Mailgun full breakdown → | 100/day permanent free plan | $15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic) | tiered |
| Amazon SES full breakdown → | Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts | $0.10 per 1,000 emails | pay-as-you-go |
| Mailtrap | 4,000/mo (sending), free testing tier | $15/mo for 10,000 sending | tiered |
| Loops | 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends/mo on the Free plan | $49/mo for 5,000 contacts | subscriber-based |
| Cloudflare Email Service | Email Routing free; Email Workers on Workers Free plan | Sending: $0.35 per 1,000 messages (Workers Paid required, $5/mo) | pay-as-you-go |
| MailerSend | 500/mo permanent | $7/mo for 5,000 emails | tiered |
| Brevo | 300/day permanent | $9/mo for 5,000 emails | tiered |
| SparkPost | No permanent free tier | $30/mo on Starter plan | tiered |
| SMTP2GO | 1,000/mo permanent | $10/mo for 10,000 emails | tiered |
| Mailjet | 6,000/mo (200/day cap) permanent | $17/mo for 15,000 emails | tiered |
| Elastic Email | $0/mo test plan with limited sending only to yourself | $19/mo for Email API up to 50,000 emails/mo | tiered |
| SendLayer | Free trial up to 200 emails | $5/mo billed annually for 1,000 emails/mo | tiered |
| SendPulse | 12,000 transactional emails/mo on SMTP Basic, 50 messages/hour | $15 pay-as-you-go for 10,000 emails, or $74.85/mo monthly for Pro 100,000 | tiered |
| SMTP.com | No verified permanent free tier from accessible primary docs | Primary pricing page was inaccessible to crawler; verify manually before relying on this profile | tiered |
| Customer.io | No permanent free tier; trial only | $100/mo (Essentials) | subscriber-based |
| Mailchimp / Mandrill | 500 contacts, 1,000 sends/month | $13/mo Essentials | subscriber-based |
| Postal | Free, self-hosted | Self-hosted only | self-hosted |
| Plunk | 3,000/mo on hosted free plan | $19/mo or self-host | self-hosted |
| Cuttlefish | Free self-hosted, open source | Free self-hosted | self-hosted |
Tier-by-tier breakdowns
Every published tier transcribed from the provider's own pricing page, with effective cost per 1,000 emails and the limits the headline price does not show.
Resend pricing
8 paid tiers, free tier limits, overage rates, and add-ons. Verified 2026-08-05.
Postmark pricing
3 paid tiers, free tier limits, overage rates, and add-ons. Verified 2026-08-06.
SendGrid pricing
2 paid tiers, free tier limits, overage rates, and add-ons. Verified 2026-08-06.
Mailgun pricing
3 paid tiers, free tier limits, overage rates, and add-ons. Verified 2026-08-06.
Amazon SES pricing
4 paid tiers, free tier limits, overage rates, and add-ons. Verified 2026-08-06.
Notable pricing changes
SendGrid removed its permanent free tier. New accounts get a 60-day trial; the cheapest paid plan is $19.95/mo.
Mailgun roughly doubled its pay-as-you-go pricing. Tiered Foundation plans were less affected.
reading this as teams choosing a transactional API
Judged purely as an API. What the request contract guarantees on retry, how complete the webhook event coverage is, whether suppressions are readable and writable programmatically, and how much the message log retains when something needs debugging in production.
Applied to this page, that means weighing idempotency keys, webhook coverage, event stream, and operating track record ahead of the rest, against high-frequency programmatic sends where a missed delivery is a product failure.