Published 2026-05-07 · reference prices, verify before budgeting
Transactional email — confirmations, password resets, receipts — is cheap until you scale, then the per-thousand price matters. Here's the lay of the land.
SendGrid: 100 emails/day free forever, paid from ~$20/mo. Feature-rich, reliable.
Resend: ~3,000 emails/month free, clean modern API — a favourite for new projects.
Amazon SES: ~$0.10 per 1,000 emails — by far the cheapest at scale, but bare-bones (you build the rest).
Postmark: premium deliverability for transactional mail, priced higher but worth it if inboxing matters.
At low volume, any free tier covers you. At high volume, SES wins on raw price — nothing beats $0.10/1,000. The catch is SES gives you a pipe, not a platform: no templates UI, basic analytics, and you manage your own sending reputation. If your time is worth more than the price gap, Resend or SendGrid pay for themselves.
Prototype on a free tier, ship on Resend or SendGrid, and only move to SES when your monthly bill would otherwise cross into the hundreds. Always verify your domain (SPF/DKIM) or everything lands in spam — the cheapest email is the one that actually gets delivered.
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Reference estimates. Not affiliated with any provider.