Every provider, ranked by monthly cost
Same volume, all providers side by side. We pick the cheapest plan each provider offers for your volume.
| Provider | Best plan | Cost / mo | Per 1k | Per year |
|---|
How email API pricing actually works
Transactional email — receipts, password resets, order updates, alerts — is priced almost entirely on volume: how many emails you send per month. Most providers combine a monthly base fee that includes a block of emails with an overage rate per 1,000 beyond it. Amazon SES is the exception: pure pay-as-you-go at about $0.10 per 1,000 with no base fee, which makes it the cheapest at almost any real scale. The trade-off is that SES is raw infrastructure — you get an API and not much else, so you build templates, suppression handling, analytics and a dashboard yourself. The managed providers (SendGrid, Resend, Postmark, Mailgun) charge more per email but hand you those tools, plus reputation management that protects your deliverability.
Free tiers change the answer at low volume
If you send only a few thousand emails a month, the cheapest option is usually free. Resend and SendGrid both include around 3,000 emails/month at no cost, which covers most early-stage apps, side projects and internal tools. At that level the right question isn't price — it's which dashboard and developer experience you prefer. SES would technically be a few cents cheaper at volume, but paying nothing on a free tier and getting templates, logs and analytics is the better deal until you grow. Try lowering the volume above and watch the free tiers win.
When a dedicated IP is (and isn't) worth it
A dedicated IP costs roughly $25–$60/month and only helps once you send tens of thousands of emails consistently. An IP earns its reputation through steady volume; a cold or low-volume dedicated IP can actually hurt deliverability compared with a well-managed shared pool. Start on shared IPs, and add a dedicated one only when your volume is high and stable enough to keep it warm — toggle the dedicated-IP option above to see how it shifts the ranking, because the add-on fee can flip which provider is cheapest.
Don't forget the rest of the stack
Email is rarely your only API bill. If you also send SMS, model that with the Twilio pricing guide, and add everything together in the API stack cost calculator to see your true monthly infrastructure cost at 1k, 10k and 100k users. Read more on the line items that surprise people in the API costs that double your bill. Choosing a provider from scratch? The API alternatives finder compares email APIs on price, free tier and setup.
Related guides
SendGrid pricing & API key guide · Resend pricing guide · Mailgun pricing guide · all email & SMS APIs