Sending 100,000 emails a month through Amazon SES costs about $16. The cheapest plan from the services built for developers costs $35.
That gap is the whole story of transactional email — the sign-up confirmations, receipts and password resets an app sends — and it is why I wanted the arithmetic laid out in one place.
The comparison
Five services — Amazon SES, Resend, Mailgun, Postmark and MailerSend — priced at 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 emails a month, at month-to-month prices, including any overage a plan charges. Most of these pricing pages use a volume slider, so the agents moved each page's own slider to each volume before copying the figure, and code checked every quoted sentence against the page.
- Amazon SES is far cheapest at every volume: $0.16 per 1,000 emails on its basic tier, with no monthly fee.
- Among the plans, Mailgun and Postmark tie at $15 for 10,000 emails.
- Resend is cheapest at 50,000 and 100,000 — $20 and $35 a month. Its page shows a $90 plan for 100,000 by default; moving the slider shows the $35 one.
Why the cheapest is not the answer
SES is a bare service. You set up the sending domain, the bounce handling and the dashboards yourself inside AWS; the others hand you those. And what you are really buying is deliverability — an email that lands in spam costs more than any plan on the page.
A disclosure: this site's own email is set up on Resend. There are no affiliate links on the page. SendGrid was left out because its pricing, now on Twilio's site, would not load on the day the prices were checked; the page says so rather than guessing.
For builders, "cheapest" and "least work" are different answers. A comparison that only gives you one of them has decided the question for you.
The page this is about: What does it really cost to send your app's email? — every figure sourced to the vendor's own page, with the date it was checked.