Pricing Comparison
Email API Pricing Comparison 2026: What Every Major Provider Actually Costs
Per-email costs at 1K, 10K, 100K, and 1M sends per month — plus hidden costs that rarely appear in the headline pricing. Covers Amazon SES, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, Resend, Brevo, and tinysend.
Email API pricing is deliberately confusing. Every provider buries their costs in different plan tiers, charges for contacts separately from sends, or adds surcharges for features that should be standard. This is a straight-line comparison: what does it actually cost to send email at different volumes with each provider?
In this comparison
1. Cost by volume: what you pay at different scales
Pricing is shown as the monthly cost to send that volume, based on each provider's standard pricing in March 2026. "—" means within a free tier. Where providers have plan tiers, I've taken the plan that accommodates that volume.
| Provider | 1,000 emails | 10,000 emails | 100,000 emails | 1,000,000 emails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | $0.10 | $1.00 | $10.00 | $100.00 |
| tinysend | Free | $9.00 | $99.00 | $999.00 |
| SendGrid | Free (100/day) | $19.95 | $89.95 | $449+ |
| Postmark | $15.00 | $15.00 | $75.00 | $575.00 |
| Mailgun | $35.00 | $35.00 | $80.00 | $700+ |
| Resend | Free (3K/mo) | $20.00 | $70.00 | $970.00 |
| Brevo | Free (9K/mo) | $25.00 | $65.00 | $359+ |
SES note: SES costs above assume sending outside of EC2. If you're sending from EC2 or Lambda, the first 62,000 emails/month are free — making SES effectively $0 up to that volume.
2. Per-email cost at scale
Comparing absolute cost can be misleading when providers have different plan structures. Per-email cost normalizes the comparison:
| Provider | At 10K/mo | At 100K/mo | At 1M/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | $0.000100 | $0.000100 | $0.000100 |
| tinysend | $0.000900 | $0.000990 | $0.000999 |
| SendGrid | $0.001995 | $0.000900 | ~$0.000450 |
| Postmark | $0.001500 | $0.000750 | $0.000575 |
| Mailgun | $0.003500 | $0.000800 | ~$0.000700 |
| Resend | $0.002000 | $0.000700 | $0.000970 |
| Brevo | $0.002500 | $0.000650 | ~$0.000359 |
Amazon SES wins on raw per-email cost at every volume tier. But SES requires significant self-service infrastructure — no templates, no sequences, no built-in bounce management. You're comparing SES the raw sending service to fully managed platforms that include those features. At 1M emails/month the difference between SES ($100) and tinysend ($999) is $899/mo — but you'd need engineering time to build what tinysend provides on top of SES.
3. Pricing model breakdown
Cost per email is just one dimension. How billing works is equally important:
$0.10/1,000 emails, no monthly minimums, no base fee. Cheapest at scale. No platform features included — no templates, no sequences, no analytics dashboard. You pay for SES as infrastructure and build everything else yourself.
$1/1,000 emails, $1/10,000 contacts. Free tier of 1,000 emails/month. Includes REST API, webhooks, templates, sequences, and contact management at every tier. No plan upgrades — the price per email never changes. You can also use your own SES or Postmark account as the sending backend (BYOK).
Plans at $19.95/mo (50k), $89.95/mo (100k), $249/mo (200k), and higher. Free 100 emails/day. You buy a plan tier, not a pay-as-you-go bucket. Overages on the Essentials plan stop email delivery — you have to upgrade. Dedicated IPs are $30/mo extra.
Postmark sells "message credits" in monthly blocks. 10k credits = $15/mo, 40k = $35/mo, 100k = $75/mo, 300k = $195/mo, 1M = $575/mo. Credits roll over for 1 month. No permanent free tier — 100 test emails only at signup. Premium deliverability is the selling point.
Mailgun Flex is pay-as-you-go at $0.80/1,000 emails (no monthly minimum, but requires card). Foundation plan is $35/mo for 50k emails, Growth is $80/mo for 100k. No permanent free tier — only a 30-day 5,000-email trial.
Free tier of 3,000 emails/month. Pro is $20/mo for 50,000 emails, then $1/1,000 emails over. Business is $75/mo for 100,000 emails. No BYOK — locked into Resend infrastructure. No automation sequences on any plan.
Brevo prices by monthly email volume, not contacts (unlike competitors). Free tier: 9,000 emails/month. Starter: $25/mo for 20k, Business: $65/mo for 20k (adds automation), Brevo+ for enterprise. Contact storage is unlimited on all plans.
4. Hidden costs to watch for
Every email API has costs that don't appear in the headline pricing comparison:
5. Which is cheapest — and when it matters
$0.10/1,000 emails with no base fee beats every alternative on raw cost. The trade-off is real: no templates, no sequences, no dashboards, sandbox mode by default, and you're responsible for bounce/complaint handling. Budget 2–4 days of engineering time to set up production SES properly.
$1/1,000 emails with 1,000 free per month, no daily cap, and sequences/webhooks included. At 10,000 emails/month, tinysend costs $9 — less than Postmark ($15), SendGrid ($19.95), or Resend ($20). At 100K it's $99, competitive with Postmark ($75) and below SendGrid ($89.95) when you include SES's setup cost.
Postmark's $15/mo for 10k is more than SES or tinysend, but their deliverability reputation is the best in the industry. For transactional-critical emails (password resets, receipts, alerts) where inbox delivery is non-negotiable, Postmark's premium is worth it. At 1M emails, they're $575/mo — expensive, but you're buying consistency.
At 1M emails, Brevo is the cheapest managed platform. Their volume-based pricing advantages large senders on marketing campaigns. If you're mixing transactional and marketing email at scale and want one platform, Brevo's cost curve is hard to beat.
$20/mo for 50k is reasonable, and Resend's React Email integration and clean API make it easy to build on. The gap between Resend and tinysend widens when you factor in sequences — if you need drip automation, you'd add a tool on top of Resend, which shifts the cost calculation entirely.
Quick cost comparison at common volumes
| Volume | SES | tinysend | Postmark | SendGrid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000/mo | $0.50 | $4.00 | $15.00 | $19.95 |
| 25,000/mo | $2.50 | $24.00 | $35.00 | $19.95 |
| 50,000/mo | $5.00 | $49.00 | $55.00 | $19.95 |
| 250,000/mo | $25.00 | $249.00 | $195.00 | $249.00+ |
Prices as of March 2026. SES costs assume non-EC2 sending. tinysend shows emails only (contacts billed separately at $1/10k).
See tinysend's full pricing
$1 per 1,000 emails. 1,000 emails/month free. Includes API, webhooks, templates, sequences, and contact management — no plan upgrades required.