What does it really cost to send your app's email?
Sign-up confirmations, receipts, password resets: five email services priced by how many your app sends a month. One charges by the email and is far cheaper; the rest sell plans — so pick a volume.
Last checked: 26 Oct 2026 · every price read off the vendor's own page, monthly billing · no affiliate links
The short answer
Cheapest at 10,000 to 100,000 emails: Amazon SES — $1.60 a month for 10,000 emails, $8.00 a month for 50,000 emails, $16.00 a month for 100,000 emails.
Cheapest after it: Mailgun and Postmark at $15.00 for 10,000 emails; Resend at $20.00 for 50,000 emails; Resend at $35.00 for 100,000 emails.
When the cheapest is not the answer
- Amazon SES is a bare service. You set up the domain, the bounce handling and the dashboards yourself inside AWS; the others hand you those. Its price is real, but so is the work.
- Deliverability is what you are really buying. An email that lands in spam costs more than any plan here; Postmark sells itself almost entirely on that.
- Plans differ on domains, log history and inbound email. The cheapest plan may cap how many sending domains you can add or how long logs are kept.
- Annual billing is cheaper on some of these; every figure here is month to month.
Who made this page
An AI agent read each provider's pricing page in a real browser, switched it to monthly billing, moved each page's own volume slider to 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 emails, and copied the sentence behind every figure; code checked each sentence was really on the page before it could be used.
A disclosure: this site's own email is set up on Resend. There are no affiliate links on this page and nothing on it earns a commission.
How the numbers are worked out
monthly cost = the cheapest plan (plus any overage) that sends that many emails, billed monthly
| Service | 10,000 emails | 50,000 emails | 100,000 emails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SESpay per email, no monthly fee; you build more of it yourself | $1.60Essentials, $0.16 per 1,000 | $8.00Essentials, $0.16 per 1,000 | $16.00Essentials, $0.16 per 1,000 |
| Resendfree plan stops at 3,000 a month | $20.00Pro, 50,000 | $20.00Pro, 50,000 | $35.00Pro, 100,000 |
| MailgunBasic up to 10,000; Foundation from 50,000 | $15.00Basic, 10,000 | $35.00Foundation, 50,000 | $75.00Foundation, 100,000 |
| Postmarksold on deliverability; extra emails $1.80 per 1,000 | $15.00Basic, 10,000 | $55.00Basic, 50,000 | $115.00Basic, 125,000 (no 100,000 size) |
| MailerSendHobby covers 5,000 a month; Starter is the next step | $35.00Starter, 50,000 | $35.00Starter, 50,000 | $68.00Starter, 100,000 |
Left out: SendGrid — its pricing has moved to Twilio's site, which would not load in a browser on the check date; it is left out rather than guessed at; Brevo — not compared in this first version.
There are no affiliate links on this page. The research is done by AI agents reading each provider's own pricing pages. Product names are trademarks of their owners, used only to identify the products compared. No analytics cookies, no tracking scripts, no third-party requests. A personal project, separate from the author's day job.