Published 2026-08-14 · reference numbers from our tracked API price registry, verify before budgeting
We track email API pricing daily for this site's price-change alerts, and the number that keeps standing out is this: Amazon SES sends an email for $0.10 per 1,000. SendGrid's entry plan works out to $0.399 per 1,000 for the exact same action. That's a 4x premium before you've written a line of code. Mailgun and Postmark are worse — 15x SES, per-1,000, on their entry tiers. None of this is a special deal or a promo rate. It's what's on the pricing pages today, pulled from our own tracked registry.
Every provider quotes a flat monthly price for a bucket of emails. Divide the price by the bucket and you get the real per-email rate — the number that actually matters once you're past the free tier:
| Provider | Entry plan | Included / mo | Price | Effective $/1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | Pay-as-you-go | unlimited | $0.10/1,000 | $0.10 |
| SendGrid | Essentials | 50,000 | $19.95/mo | $0.399 |
| Resend | Pro | 50,000 | $20.00/mo | $0.400 |
| Mailgun | Basic | 10,000 | $15.00/mo | $1.50 |
| Postmark | Entry | 10,000 | $15.00/mo | $1.50 |
Prices from our tracked registry, checked 2026-08-14. Report outdated price →
Put in dollars instead of rates, the gap is bigger than it looks. At 50,000 emails a month, SendGrid and Resend both bill you roughly $20. The same 50,000 emails through SES cost $5 — a 75% saving, every month, forever. At 10,000 emails a month, Mailgun and Postmark bill $15; SES bills $1. That's a 93% saving for identical delivery.
Because SES is not a product — it's a pipe. Amazon gives you an SMTP endpoint and an API call. Everything else you'd expect from an "email API" is something you build yourself: a template editor, open/click tracking, a bounce and complaint dashboard, suppression list management, DKIM/SPF/DMARC guidance, and a support line when your sending reputation tanks for no obvious reason. SendGrid, Mailgun, Resend and Postmark charge the 4-15x premium for exactly that tooling, bundled and maintained.
Resend is the clearest case: its entire pitch is "SES-grade deliverability with a developer experience that doesn't make you want to quit." $20/mo for 50,000 emails is the price of not building a template renderer and a webhook handler for bounces yourself. Postmark's pitch is narrower and sharper — transactional-only sending with deliverability tuning aggressive enough that they'll throttle or reject you for sending bulk marketing through it. That focus is why teams pay $1.50/1,000 for it instead of shopping for the cheapest per-email rate.
Before any of this matters, check whether you need a paid plan at all. SendGrid gives 100 emails/day free, forever — no expiry. Resend gives 3,000/mo (100/day) free. Amazon SES's free tier is 3,000 messages/mo for your first 12 months only, after which it drops straight to the $0.10/1,000 pay-as-you-go rate. Postmark's free plan is 100/mo with zero overage — hit 101 and delivery stops until the next billing period, it doesn't auto-upgrade you. A side project doing password resets and welcome emails can very plausibly run on a free tier indefinitely and never see this table at all.
Per-email, Amazon SES is 4-15x cheaper than every managed alternative we track — that gap is real and it's in the providers' own pricing pages, not a rumor. What you're actually buying above the SES floor is templates, analytics, bounce handling and deliverability tuning someone else maintains. Below a few thousand emails a month, take the free tier and skip this decision entirely. Above roughly 100,000/mo, run the exact numbers for your volume in the email API cost calculator — the saving from switching to SES starts to look like real budget, not rounding error.
Compare the guides: SendGrid · Mailgun · Resend · Postmark · all email & SMS APIs · what 100,000 SMS actually costs.
Figures are reference estimates (August 2026) pulled from our own tracked price registry and change without notice — always confirm on each provider's official pricing page before budgeting.