Email Tools

SendGrid alternatives: which one is cheapest at your volume?

Published 2026-10-27 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

SendGrid alternatives start at $10 per month for 10,000 emails, and Amazon SES bills $0.16 per 1,000. SendGrid's own entry price is $19.95 per month with 100 free emails a day, per Twilio's August 2026 pricing page. At 50,000 emails a month, verified quotes run from $8 (Amazon SES) to $35 (Mailgun).

Key facts

What matters

Twilio's pricing page lists SendGrid paid plans from $19.95/month plus a 100 emails/day free tier, and sendgrid.com/en-us/pricing now redirects to Twilio's SendGrid page after the site merge.
Resend Pro is $20/month for 50,000 emails, $0.40 per 1,000, which is 43% cheaper per email than Mailgun's $0.70 at the same volume.
Amazon SES has no monthly fee on its Essentials plan but charges $0.16 per 1,000 emails, so 50,000 sends cost $8.00 before you count the deliverability work you take on.
At 100,000 emails, Resend Pro plus $45 of overage costs $65, less than the $90 Scale plan on price alone.
Postmark and Mailgun both start at $15/month for 10,000 emails, so at small volume the decision is about log retention and inbound handling, not price.

What SendGrid charges in October 2026

Twilio's pricing page, marked current as of August 2026, gives SendGrid one line: start free with 100 emails/day, and paid plans start at $19.95 per month. The page does not say how many emails that $19.95 buys.

The vendor's own pricing URLs no longer answer the question either. sendgrid.com/pricing/ redirects to sendgrid.com/en-us/pricing, and that address returns a 301 to twilio.com/en-us/sendgrid, a page announcing that the two companies merged their websites. It carries "View Pricing" buttons but no tier table. SendGrid's marketing pages say the platform delivers more than 200 billion emails a month, which is the kind of number that belongs in a pitch, not a price list.

That is why the alternatives below matter more than usual. You cannot compare a per-email cost you can't see. Every number in this article was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 27 October 2026, and the effective rate column is arithmetic on those published pairs, not an estimate.

The table below uses each vendor's entry paid tier and the volume included in that price. Rates per 1,000 emails are computed as monthly price divided by included emails, so they are comparable even where the tiers sit at different volumes.

Resend: $20 for 50,000 emails, with a 100/day cap on free

Resend's free plan is $0 for 3,000 emails a month, but the cap that actually binds is 100 emails a day, and you get 3 custom domains. Pro costs $20 per month for 50,000 emails with extra sends billed at $0.90 per 1,000. Scale costs $90 for 100,000 emails, raises custom domains to 1,000, and unlocks the dedicated IP add-on at $30 per month for accounts sending more than 3,000 emails a day.

Here is the part the pricing page does not spell out. At exactly 100,000 emails on Pro, you pay $20 plus 50,000 extra emails at $0.90 per 1,000, which is $45, for a total of $65. The Scale plan at the same volume is $90. The extra $25 buys domains and IP eligibility, not a lower per-email rate, and Resend states that overage is charged automatically for paid subscriptions. If you need neither add-on, the cheaper path is to stay on Pro.

Watch the add-on stack: extra domains are $20 per month per 100 domains, single sign-on is $150 per month on Scale, inboxes are $1 each after three free, and automation runs bill at $0.0015 beyond the 10,000 included.

Postmark: $15 at 10,000 emails and a free tier with no overage

Postmark's free Developer plan is 100 emails a month for testing, and the page is explicit that no overages are allowed on it, so it cannot carry production traffic. At 10,000 emails a month the paid tiers are Basic at $15.00, Pro at $16.50 and Platform at $18.00, with extra emails at $1.80, $1.30 and $1.20 per 1,000 respectively.

The ladder moves on operational features rather than volume, which is why the price steps are $1.50 apart instead of doubling. Dedicated IPs start at $50 per month per IP and require 300,000 emails a month, and custom activity retention starts at $5 per month. If you send transactional mail only, Basic is the tier to price first.

At $1.50 per 1,000 emails, Postmark is three times Resend's rate at 50,000 volume. That premium has to be paid for by something other than arithmetic, and for most buyers that something is deliverability handling and log visibility.

Mailgun: $15 for 10,000, and Foundation's first month is free

Mailgun lists Basic at $15 per month for 10,000 emails with one custom sending domain and one day of log retention. Foundation is $35 per month for 50,000 emails, free for the first month and then billed at $35, and Scale is $90 per month for 100,000 emails with dedicated IP pools and SAML single sign-on.

That one-day retention on Basic is the line to read twice. If you debug delivery problems by searching logs, the cheapest tier gives you a 24-hour window, and the jump to Foundation is really a jump to usable observability as much as to more email.

Foundation at $0.70 per 1,000 is the most expensive of the three verified 50,000-email quotes here, behind Resend at $0.40 and Amazon SES at $0.16. What you get for the gap is SMTP relay plus REST APIs on one account without building reputation management yourself.

Amazon SES: no monthly fee, $0.16 per 1,000, and you own deliverability

Amazon SES now sells three plans. Essentials has no monthly platform fee and charges $0.16 per 1,000 emails for the first 10 million a month. Pro adds $105 per account per region per month and charges $0.22 per 1,000. Enterprise adds $500 and charges $0.23 per 1,000. Tier rates apply marginally: from 10 million to 100 million emails the rates are $0.14, $0.17 and $0.18 per 1,000, and above 100 million they fall to $0.11, $0.12 and $0.13.

AWS states that new accounts, and new account and region combinations, with no metered SES activity since 1 June 2025 start on the Essentials plan from 21 July 2026. If you have been quoting an SES price from an old blog post, the plan structure you land on may not be the one you read about.

The structural point is that Pro and Enterprise cost more per email and add a monthly fee. They are not volume discounts, they are purchases of isolation and capacity. Essentials at 50,000 emails is $8.00, roughly one-fifth of Resend Pro for the same volume, and that gap is paid for in engineering time: bounce and complaint handling, suppression lists, domain authentication and IP warming are yours to run.

Mailjet, SMTP2GO, and what the free tiers really allow

Mailjet's free plan covers 6,000 emails a month with a 200 emails/day cap and 1,000 contacts. Essential is $19 per month for 15,000 emails with no daily sending limit, which works out to $1.27 per 1,000.

SMTP2GO's free plan covers 1,000 emails a month. Starter is $10 per month for 10,000 emails, or $100 billed yearly, with 30 days of email reporting. At $1.00 per 1,000 it is the cheapest paid entry point in this comparison, and the only one under $15.

Both are reasonable when your ceiling is a few thousand emails a month and you would rather not adopt a developer-first API. Mailjet also carries campaign tooling, so it doubles as a newsletter sender if you are consolidating vendors.

Every free tier here quotes a monthly volume, and three of them also cap the day. Those caps are the difference between a free plan that works and one that fails on launch day.

SendGrid: 100 emails a day. There is no stated monthly total, so the daily cap is the whole allowance.
Resend: 3,000 a month with 100 a day. A 2,000-recipient password reset campaign cannot leave on a single day, because the daily ceiling stops at 100.
Mailjet: 6,000 a month with 200 a day, so the daily cap tops out at 6,200 over a 31-day month and rarely binds.
Postmark: 100 emails a month for integration testing, with no overages allowed. It is a sandbox, not a free tier.
SMTP2GO: 1,000 emails a month on the free plan.

For a product that sends a verification email per signup, 100 a day supports roughly 100 signups a day. That is enough for a beta and not enough for a launch, which is why most teams end up on a paid plan within weeks rather than months.

Add-on costs and which SendGrid alternatives fit your volume

Entry prices hide the items that decide real bills, and the add-on lists are where these vendors differ most.

Resend: extra domains $20 per month for 100 more, dedicated IPs $30 per month for accounts above 3,000 emails a day on Scale, single sign-on $150 per month on Scale, inboxes $1 each beyond three, automation runs $0.0015 beyond 10,000.
Postmark: dedicated IPs from $50 per month per IP and only at 300,000 emails a month, custom activity retention from $5 per month, both restricted to Pro plans and above.
Mailgun: Basic keeps one day of log retention, so anyone who troubleshoots delivery from logs is pushed to Foundation at $35 per month regardless of volume.
Amazon SES: Essentials has no platform fee, while Pro adds $105 per account per region per month and Enterprise $500, before the per-email rate rises to $0.22 and $0.23.

Read together, the add-on lists show what each vendor is optimising for. Resend charges for multi-tenant infrastructure, Postmark charges for reputation control at high volume, Mailgun charges for observability, and SES charges a flat platform fee for accounts that need isolated sending infrastructure.

Under 3,000 emails a month: Resend's free plan, if you can live with 100 emails a day. Mailjet's free tier holds 200 a day and 6,000 a month.
Around 10,000 a month: SMTP2GO Starter at $10, then Postmark Basic or Mailgun Basic at $15. Resend Pro at $20 covers five times the volume for $5 more.
Around 50,000 a month: Resend Pro at $20, Mailgun Foundation at $35, or Amazon SES at $8 if you will run your own reputation work.
100,000 and up: Resend Pro plus overage at $65 for 100,000, or SES Essentials where the marginal rate drops to $0.14 and then $0.11 per 1,000.
Dedicated IPs or EU data handling required: price the add-ons first. Resend's IP add-on is $30 per month above 3,000 emails a day, Postmark's starts at $50 per IP at 300,000 emails a month, and SES bundles infrastructure into its Pro and Enterprise plans.

One migration note that costs nothing to follow: keep both providers configured for a week, authenticate the new sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC before the cutover, and shift 10% of traffic first. Deliverability problems show up in the first thousand sends, not the first hundred thousand.

At a glance

Provider	Free tier	Entry paid plan	Emails included	Cost per 1,000
SendGrid	100 emails/day	$19.95/mo	not published	not published
Resend	3,000/mo (100/day)	$20/mo Pro	50,000	$0.40
Postmark	100/mo, no overage	$15.00/mo Basic	10,000	$1.50
Mailgun	none listed	$15/mo Basic	10,000	$1.50
Amazon SES	none	$0/mo Essentials	pay per 1,000	$0.16
Mailjet	6,000/mo (200/day)	$19/mo Essential	15,000	$1.27
SMTP2GO	1,000/mo	$10/mo Starter	10,000	$1.00

SendGrid alternatives: entry paid plan, included volume, and computed cost per 1,000 emails (verified 27 October 2026)

FAQ

Is SendGrid still the cheapest option for 10,000 emails a month?

No. Twilio lists SendGrid paid plans from $19.95 per month without stating the included volume, while Postmark Basic and Mailgun Basic both cover 10,000 emails for $15.00 and SMTP2GO Starter covers the same volume for $10.

Which SendGrid alternative has the best free plan?

Mailjet gives the most free volume at 6,000 emails a month with a 200/day cap. Resend offers 3,000 a month but caps sends at 100 a day, and Postmark's free tier is testing only at 100 emails a month with no overage allowed.

Does Amazon SES charge $0.16 or $0.10 per 1,000 emails?

The published rate on the Essentials plan is $0.16 per 1,000 emails for the first 10 million a month, dropping to $0.14 and then $0.11 at higher marginal tiers. Pro and Enterprise plans charge $0.22 and $0.23 per 1,000 plus monthly platform fees.