Amazon SESThe cheapest way to send email at scale, and the least finished product.73.2Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $0.1/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 3,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $24.95/mo
- Pricing model
- pay-as-you-go
Email sending API providers compared Pricing Compared
- List price per thousand is the least useful number on a pricing page - **Contact-based billing:** Loops and Brevo price partly or wholly on stored contacts, not messages sent - Cheap for a weekly newsletter to a stable list, expensive for a product hoarding every signup - If contacts grow faster than sends, per-message providers win even at a higher headline rate - **Retention as an upsell:** SendGrid's activity feed keeps three days unless you buy Email Activity History - Mailgun's cheapest tier keeps one day - When a customer chases an eleven-day-old receipt, retention is the entire product - Postmark's forty-five days is the outlier and worth real money - **The dedicated IP trap:** $25 to $60 a month, and the most common way to make deliverability worse - Below roughly 100,000 a month a fresh IP never accumulates enough reputation signal - You have voluntarily left a pool someone else was policing for you - Buy one when a mailbox provider tells you to, not when the pricing page suggests it - **Free tiers keep shrinking:** Amazon's always-free 62,000 a month from EC2 is now a twelve-month allowance - MailerSend's free plan came down to 3,000 - Do not architect around a free tier
- Providers
- 13
- Fields compared
- 4
- Source confidence
- 28%
- Last verified
- 2026-06-05 (3mo ago)
- Re-verified
- every 30 days
13 tools · verified 3mo ago
Amazon SESThe cheapest way to send email at scale, and the least finished product.73.2
ResendDeveloper-first email API built around React Email components.60.9Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $0.4/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 3,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $30/mo
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
SendGridThe incumbent: enormous scale, enormous shared pool, everything bolted on.60.9Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $0.4/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 3,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $30/mo
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
SparkPostHigh-volume sender with deep analytics, now folded into Bird's platform.56.5Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $0.4/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- –
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- –
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
Scaleway TEMEU-sovereign transactional email from Scaleway, deliberately minimal.56.4Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $0.3/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 300emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- –
- Pricing model
- pay-as-you-go
MailerSendTransactional sibling of MailerLite, bootstrapped and cheap at mid volume.51.0Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $0.56/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 3,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $50/mo
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
PlunkOpen-source email console you self-host on top of your own AWS SES account.47.6Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $1/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- –
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- –
- Pricing model
- pay-as-you-go
AhaSendSmall indie transactional API competing on price and instant signup.46.1Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- –
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 1,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- ·
- Pricing model
- pay-as-you-go
BrevoEU-hosted marketing platform with a competent transactional API attached.43.7Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $1.8/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 9,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $40/mo
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
LoopsLifecycle and marketing email for SaaS, priced on contacts rather than sends.38.1Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- –
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- –
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- –
- Pricing model
- contact-based
MailtrapEmail testing sandbox that grew a production sending product.27.9Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $1.5/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 1,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- ·
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
MailgunLong-running transactional API with strong routing and inbound handling.27.6Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $1.5/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 3,000emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $59/mo
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
PostmarkTransactional-only sender with the best-policed shared IP pool in the category.22.4Pricing
- Price / 1k emails (/1k)
- $1.5/1k
- Free tier (emails/mo)
- 100emails/mo
- Dedicated IP (/mo)
- $50/mo
- Pricing model
- volume-tiers
yespartialnounknown
Sources shown beside each value · Learn how sourcing works
measured vendor-claimed community inferredExpand any row for the source, verification date, and caveat behind every cell.
Is the cheapest option the right one?
Price is one group of 4 fields out of 25. Everything else, features, limits, portability, how well any of it works for agents, is on the full email sending api providers compared comparison.
Where the pricing pages hide the money
- List price per thousand is the least useful number on a pricing page
- Contact-based billing: Loops and Brevo price partly or wholly on stored contacts, not messages sent
- Cheap for a weekly newsletter to a stable list, expensive for a product hoarding every signup
- If contacts grow faster than sends, per-message providers win even at a higher headline rate
- Retention as an upsell: SendGrid's activity feed keeps three days unless you buy Email Activity History
- Mailgun's cheapest tier keeps one day
- When a customer chases an eleven-day-old receipt, retention is the entire product
- Postmark's forty-five days is the outlier and worth real money
- The dedicated IP trap: $25 to $60 a month, and the most common way to make deliverability worse
- Below roughly 100,000 a month a fresh IP never accumulates enough reputation signal
- You have voluntarily left a pool someone else was policing for you
- Buy one when a mailbox provider tells you to, not when the pricing page suggests it
- Free tiers keep shrinking: Amazon's always-free 62,000 a month from EC2 is now a twelve-month allowance
- MailerSend's free plan came down to 3,000
- Do not architect around a free tier
How to actually decide
- Answer four questions in order and the shortlist collapses
- What are you sending? Password resets and receipts are a deliverability problem
- Weight pool quality and retention: Postmark, then Resend
- Newsletters and lifecycle mail are a tooling problem: Loops, Brevo, or Resend Broadcasts
- If it is both, buy two products and keep the streams on separate subdomains
- Mixing marketing and transactional on one domain is the most common self-inflicted deliverability wound
- How much? Under 50,000 a month, price is noise, optimise for hours saved
- Over about two million, SES's advantage justifies building the missing observability
- Plunk or a self-built console is a reasonable way to get it back
- Where does the data live? This eliminates faster than anything else
- EU-only means Scaleway TEM or Brevo; Australian means SES in Sydney or self-hosting
- Everything else is a US company with an EU region
- When do you need to be live? If today, that alone rules out SES
- Often ship on Resend behind your own interface, re-evaluate when the price gap stops being theoretical
How is this pricing data collected?
- Prices are the cheapest paid self-serve tier, in USD per thousand emails
- Annual discounts and contact-based add-ons ignored
- Free tiers are permanent free plans, not trials
- Feature cells from vendor documentation are marked vendor-claimed
- Judgement calls (pool quality, DKIM friction, warmup depth) are scored 1-5 and marked inferred
- Ladders are defined in each column's help text
- Blank cells mean we do not know, and we would rather say so
- Time-to-first-send is currently inferred or community-reported on every row
- Definition: wall-clock from clean signup to a message in a Gmail inbox not verified on the account
- The external-inbox clause excludes sandbox echo, so SES cannot pass by mailing itself
- Includes manual review, compliance holds and support tickets
- Excludes DNS propagation beyond ten minutes, so a slow registrar is not scored against the provider
- Next pass measures properly: fresh company, fresh domain per provider, scripted signup
- Receiving mailboxes we control on Gmail, Outlook and Fastmail
- Timestamp taken from the receiving server's Received header, not the vendor dashboard
- Rows move to measured as each run completes
- Rejected sandbox requests reported as a distribution, not a median, because the tail is the story
Pricing questions
Is Amazon SES actually cheaper than Resend or Postmark?
Why did my provider suspend my account after the first send?
- Almost always compliance automation, not deliverability
- New accounts mailing an unseen list trip fraud heuristics, especially free tiers at SendGrid and Brevo
- Send a small warm batch to engaged recipients first, under a few hundred a day
- Have DKIM, SPF and a DMARC record in place before the first campaign
Every tool compared on this page
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