As of November 2026, Resend pricing starts at $0 for 3,000 emails a month and $20 for 50,000. Whether that is a good deal depends on three things: your monthly volume, whether you switch on overage billing, and whether you also email a marketing list. This page puts Resend next to Mailgun, Postmark, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Mailchimp Transactional and Volanea at 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 and 500,000 emails a month. Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked in November 2026. For the general method (how providers count an email and which costs are easy to miss), read our email API pricing guide. This page sticks to the numbers.
Monthly cost at common volumes (as of November 2026)
How we priced it: the lowest monthly cost for each volume using each vendor's published plans plus its published overage rates. That means transactional sending, monthly billing, USD, before tax, and no free trials, credits or annual discounts. When stacking overage on a smaller plan beats the next plan up, we use the cheaper option and say so.
| Provider | 10,000 / mo | 50,000 / mo | 100,000 / mo | 200,000 / mo | 500,000 / mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volanea | $20 (Growth) | $20 (Growth) | $149 (Scale) | $149 (Scale) | Custom (Enterprise) |
| Resend | $20 (Pro 50k) | $20 (Pro 50k) | $35 (Pro 100k) | $125 (Pro 100k + 100k overage) | $350 (Scale 500k) |
| Mailgun | $15 (Basic) | $35 (Foundation 50k) | $75 (Foundation 100k) | $185 (Foundation 100k + 100k overage) | $400 (Scale 500k) |
| Postmark (Basic) | $15 | $55 | $115 (125k tier) | $245 (300k tier) | $455 (700k tier) |
| SendGrid Email API | $19.95 (Essentials 50k) | $19.95 (Essentials 50k) | $34.95 (Essentials 100k) | $249 (Pro 300k)* | $499 (Pro 700k) |
| Amazon SES | $1 | $5 | $10 | $20 | $50 |
| Mailchimp Transactional | $20 + Mailchimp plan | $40 + plan | $80 + plan | $160 + plan | $400 + plan |
*SendGrid's pricing page says overage "may apply" but does not publish the rate, so we priced 200,000 on the smallest plan that includes it. Essentials stops at 100,000.
What the table shows:
- Amazon SES is cheapest at every volume by a wide margin. You pay for a sending service, though, not a product. New accounts start in a sandbox: 200 messages per 24 hours, 1 message per second, and only to verified addresses until AWS approves production access. Dashboards, templates, webhooks and bounce handling are yours to build. Volanea runs on SES, so we see that trade-off daily. Our Volanea vs Amazon SES page covers it.
- At 10,000, Mailgun Basic and Postmark Basic tie at $15.
- At 50,000, SendGrid Essentials ($19.95), Resend Pro ($20) and Volanea Growth ($20) are within a nickel of each other.
- At 100,000, SendGrid Essentials ($34.95) and Resend Pro ($35) are cheapest. Volanea costs more here ($149): there is no plan between 50,000 and 200,000, and no overage to bridge the gap.
- At 200,000, Resend Pro plus pay-as-you-go overage ($125) is cheapest. Volanea Scale ($149) is the cheapest flat plan with no metered extra.
- At 500,000, Resend Scale ($350) is cheapest, then Mailgun Scale ($400).
Resend pricing in detail
Resend bills transactional sending and marketing sending separately.
Transactional plans (as of November 2026):
| Plan | Price | Emails / mo | Overage per 1,000 | Domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 3,000 (100 a day) | not available | 3 |
| Pro | $20 / $35 | 50,000 / 100,000 | $0.90 | 10 |
| Scale | $90 / $160 / $350 / $650 | 100k / 200k / 500k / 1M | $0.90 / $0.80 / $0.70 / $0.65 | 1,000 |
| Scale (higher) | $825 / $1,150 | 1.5M / 2.5M | $0.52 / $0.46 | 1,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Flexible |
The details that change the bill:
- Overage is opt-in. Resend calls it pay-as-you-go. You enable "Transactional Overages" in team settings, and extra mail is charged in buckets of 1,000 at your plan's rate. If it is off and you hit the quota, Resend notifies you and offers an upgrade.
- Each recipient counts. Every recipient of an
/emailsAPI send counts as one email against the quota. - SMTP costs the same as the API. SMTP relay is included on every plan and uses the same quota, so there is no separate Resend SMTP pricing.
- Add-ons: 100 extra domains for $20/mo on Pro and Scale. A dedicated IP is $30/mo, only on Scale and only once you send more than 3,000 emails a day. Data retention is 30 days on Free, Pro and Scale.
- Marketing is priced by contacts, not sends. The free marketing tier covers 1,000 contacts. Pro marketing runs from $40/mo for 5,000 contacts to $650/mo for 150,000. Broadcasts don't use your transactional quota, but they can only go to contacts you have stored.
So, is Resend free? Yes: 3,000 emails a month with no time limit. The limit that bites first is usually 100 emails a day, which a launch-day signup spike can use up by lunch. See Volanea vs Resend for a feature-level comparison, or Resend alternatives if you are shopping around.
Mailgun pricing plans
Mailgun's plans as of November 2026:
| Plan | Price | Emails / mo | Overage per 1,000 | Log retention | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 a day | not listed | 1 day | 1 |
| Basic | $15 | 10,000 | $1.80 | 1 day | not unlimited |
| Foundation | $35 / $75 | 50,000 / 100,000 | $1.30 / $1.10 | 5 days | Unlimited |
| Scale | $90 / $215 / $400 | 100k / 250k / 500k | $1.10 / $0.90 / $0.75 | 30 days | Unlimited |
| Scale (higher) | $550 / $700 / $1,250 | 750k / 1M / 2.5M | $0.60 / $0.50 / $0.40 | 30 days | Unlimited |
Mailgun cost per email works out to $1.50 per 1,000 on Basic, $0.75 on Foundation 100k, and $0.70 on Scale 1M. Other line items:
- Free plan and trial. The free plan allows 100 emails a day, one custom sending domain, one API key, one inbound route and one user. The pricing page gives it no end date. Foundation and Scale are free for the first month.
- Domains. Basic includes 1 custom sending domain; Foundation and Scale include 1,000.
- Dedicated IPs. One is included with Foundation 100k and Scale. Extra IPs cost $59 per IP per month.
- Email validation is a separate charge. $1.20 per 100 for the first 5,000, then $0.80, $0.50, $0.35 and $0.25 per 100 in higher bands. Scale includes the first 5,000 validations.
Volanea vs Mailgun covers features, and Mailgun alternatives covers who should switch.
Postmark pricing
Postmark's pricing page starts every paid plan at 10,000 emails and computes larger tiers with a volume slider. The tier prices below come from that slider, as of November 2026:
| Volume tier | Basic | Pro | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $15 | $16.50 | $18 |
| 50,000 | $55 | $60.50 | $66 |
| 125,000 | $115 | $126.50 | $138 |
| 300,000 | $245 | $269.50 | $294 |
| 700,000 | $455 | $500.50 | $546 |
| 1,500,000 | $775 | $852.50 | $930 |
Overage starts at $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic, $1.30 on Pro and $1.20 on Platform, and drops a little at higher tiers. The free plan is 100 emails a month with no overage, and it doesn't expire. Plans cap users (Basic up to 4, Pro up to 6, Platform unlimited) and sending domains (5, 10, unlimited). Activity retention defaults to 45 days. On Pro and up you can extend it to 365 days, from $5/mo. Dedicated IPs start at $50/mo per IP, for senders of 300,000+ emails a month on Pro or higher. DMARC monitoring is from $14/mo per domain. More: Volanea vs Postmark and Postmark alternatives.
SendGrid pricing
SendGrid's transactional pricing is its Email API plans. As of November 2026:
- Free trial: 100 emails a day for 60 days, no card required. The pricing page presents this as a trial, not a permanent plan.
- Essentials: $19.95/mo for 50,000, $34.95/mo for 100,000. One teammate, 3 days of email activity history, no dedicated IP.
- Pro: $89.95/mo for 100,000, $249 for 300,000, $499 for 700,000, $799 for 1.5M and $1,099 for 2.5M. Includes 1 dedicated IP, up to 1,000 teammates, 2,500 email validations and 7 days of activity history.
- Premier: custom pricing.
Marketing Campaigns is a separate product, priced by stored contacts and email volume. Basic starts at $15/mo and Advanced at $60/mo, and the smallest Basic limit listed is 5,000 contacts and 15,000 emails. See Volanea vs SendGrid and SendGrid alternatives.
Amazon SES pricing
SES charges per use with no plans (as of November 2026):
- Outbound: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, plus $0.12 per GB of attachments.
- Inbound: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, plus $0.09 per 1,000 incoming 256 KB chunks.
- Dedicated IPs: $24.95 per IP per month (standard). Managed dedicated IPs are $15 per account per month plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails up to 10M.
- Virtual Deliverability Manager: $0.07 per 1,000 emails up to 10M.
- Free tier: new AWS customers get up to $200 in Free Tier credits that can cover SES.
Mailchimp Transactional (Mandrill) pricing
Mailchimp Transactional, formerly Mandrill, sells blocks of 25,000 emails. A block costs $20 for the first 20 blocks (up to 500,000 emails), then $18, $16, $14 and $12, falling to $10 per block above 4M emails. It is an add-on: you need a Mailchimp Standard or Premium plan (or a legacy Monthly plan), and Essentials doesn't qualify. Unused emails in a block don't roll over. A dedicated IP is $29.95/mo, and new users get up to 500 free sends to a verified domain. That required marketing plan is the cost that catches people out. More in Volanea vs Mandrill.
Free tiers side by side
| Provider | Free allowance (as of November 2026) | Time limit |
|---|---|---|
| Volanea | 1,000 credits a month, 1 verified domain, no card | None (resets monthly) |
| Resend | 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, 3 domains | None |
| Mailgun | 100 emails a day, 1 domain, 1 user | None stated; paid plans include a free first month |
| Postmark | 100 emails a month | Doesn't expire |
| SendGrid | 100 emails a day | 60 days |
| Amazon SES | Up to $200 AWS Free Tier credits (new customers) | Credits expire within 12 months |
| Mailchimp Transactional | Up to 500 sends to a verified domain | One-time |
Contacts, seats and other charges that aren't per email
Price per email is only part of the bill.
- Contacts: Resend marketing and SendGrid Marketing Campaigns charge by stored contacts. For example, 10,000 marketing contacts on Resend Pro costs $80/mo before any transactional plan. On Volanea, contacts are free and unlimited on every plan.
- Seats: SendGrid Essentials includes one teammate. Mailgun limits Free to one user and doesn't give Basic unlimited users. Postmark caps users on Basic and Pro.
- Dedicated IPs: from $24.95 (SES) to $59 (an extra Mailgun IP) per month. Several plans also set a minimum volume. If you're unsure whether you need one, read how dedicated IPs work first.
- Validation: Mailgun and SendGrid sell email validations; you can test addresses with our free email verifier.
Where Volanea fits
Volanea's plans: Free ($0, 1,000 credits a month), Starter ($5, 7,500 emails, 3 domains), Growth ($20, 50,000 emails, 10 domains), Scale ($149, 200,000 emails, 25 domains), and Enterprise above 200,000 with a custom monthly quota. One credit is one email to one recipient, or two with an attachment. Count that if you send a lot of PDFs. Credits reset monthly and don't roll over.
The two choices that set Volanea apart: there is no overage billing, because sending pauses at your limit, and contacts are free on every plan, with marketing campaigns, automation, inbound email and webhooks included at every tier. You'll never get a surprise bill, but you have to upgrade before you hit the limit. Volanea is cheapest at 7,500 emails ($5) and is the cheapest flat plan at 200,000 ($149). At 100,000 it costs more than Resend, Mailgun or SendGrid. Full details are on pricing.
FAQ
Is Resend free?
Yes. As of November 2026, Resend's free plan includes 3,000 emails a month, capped at 100 a day, with 3 domains and 30-day data retention. The free marketing tier covers 1,000 contacts. You can't buy overage on the free plan.
How much does Mailgun cost per email?
As of November 2026, roughly $1.50 per 1,000 on Basic ($15 for 10,000), $0.75 per 1,000 on Foundation 100k ($75) and $0.70 per 1,000 on Scale 1M ($700). Overage runs from $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic down to $0.40 on Scale 2.5M.
Is Mailgun free, and is there a free trial?
Mailgun has a free plan with 100 emails a day, one domain and one user, and its pricing page gives it no end date. Foundation and Scale are free for the first month, then $35 and $90 a month.
How much does Postmark cost?
As of November 2026, Postmark Basic is $15 for 10,000 emails, $55 for 50,000 and $115 for 125,000. Pro and Platform cost a little more per tier. The free plan is 100 emails a month.
What does SendGrid charge for transactional email?
SendGrid Email API Essentials is $19.95 for 50,000 or $34.95 for 100,000 a month, and Pro starts at $89.95 for 100,000, as of November 2026. The free option is a 60-day trial at 100 emails a day.
What is the cheapest email API?
On raw sending cost, Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000. Among managed APIs it depends on volume: Mailgun or Postmark at 10,000, SendGrid or Resend at 50,000 and 100,000, Resend with overage at 200,000, Resend Scale at 500,000.
How much is Mailchimp Transactional?
$20 per block of 25,000 emails up to 500,000 a month, with lower block prices above that, as of November 2026. You also need a paid Mailchimp Standard or Premium plan.
Start on the free plan, no card needed: create a Volanea account or compare plans on pricing.