Transactional email services, compared
Each provider is profiled from its own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure. Included volume and the price per thousand beyond it pull in opposite directions across these providers, so the cheapest plan and the cheapest marginal email are rarely the same one.
Adoption share
Origins in HTTP Archive's monthly crawl where its Wappalyzer fork detected each provider — not a share of the whole category. A provider is absent when no fingerprint exists for it, which is not the same as having no customers. Measured . Source: HTTP Archive.
Transactional email
| Provider | Emails included | Price per 1,000 over | Log retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| AhaSend | 25,000 a month on Pro and 100,000 on Max. The free plan allows 1,000. | Not documented | Configurable rather than fixed: 1 to 7 days on the free plan, 0 to 14 on Pro and 0 to 30 on Max. The lower bound of zero means retention can be turned off entirely. |
| Amazon SES | None. There is no included allowance on the pay-as-you-go rate; every email is billed from the first one. | $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails, charged per recipient. Mail Manager tiers run $0.16 to $0.23 per 1,000 depending on feature set, and a multi-region endpoint adds $0.03 per 1,000. | Not documented |
| Brevo | Free plan: 300 emails a day. Starter begins at 5,000 emails a month. | Not documented | Not documented |
| Cloudflare Email Service | 3,000 outbound emails a month included on the Workers Paid plan, then $0.35 per 1,000. Inbound routing is unlimited. The Workers Free plan cannot send outbound to arbitrary recipients at all. | $0.35 per 1,000 emails beyond the 3,000 included each month on Workers Paid. | Not documented |
| EmailLabs | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented |
| MailerSend | 50,000 a month on both Starter and Professional — the plans differ on features and SMS allowance rather than email volume. | $1.30 per 1,000 emails on both Starter and Professional. | Two windows, which no other provider here separates: 7 days of API logs and 30 days of activity data on Professional; 7-day activity data on Starter. |
| Mailgun | 10,000 a month on Basic; 50,000 on Foundation at $35. The free plan is capped at 100 a day rather than a monthly figure. | From $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic and from $1.30 on Foundation. Mailgun writes "from", so these are floors rather than fixed rates. | 1 day on Free and Basic; 5 days of logs and 1 day of message retention on Foundation. |
| Mailjet | 6,000 a month on the free plan, capped at 200 a day. Paid plans are sized by monthly send volume from 8,000 upward. | Not documented | Not documented |
| Postmark | 10,000 a month at the $15 Basic tier. The plan price scales with volume — 50,000, 125,000, 300,000, 700,000 and 1.5M are the published steps. The free tier is 100 a month. | $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic, $1.30 on Pro and $1.20 on Platform. The free tier allows no overage at all. | 45 days on Basic. Pro and Platform default to 45 days and can be raised to 365. |
| Resend | 50,000 emails a month on Pro, the cheapest paid plan; 100,000 on Scale. The free plan allows 3,000 a month and caps the day at 100. | $0.90 per 1,000 on Pro and Scale, charged automatically in buckets of 1,000. Paid plans only — the free plan stops at its limit. | 30 days. |
| SMTP2GO | 10,000 a month on Starter and 100,000 on Professional. The free plan allows 1,000. | $1 per thousand on Starter, falling to $0.85 on Professional — the cheapest published overage of any provider here. | 30 days of email reporting, on Starter and Professional alike rather than rising with the plan. |
Which to consider
EU-resident sending where you want to choose how long message data is kept — retention is a setting with a floor of zero on paid plans, not a policy you inherit.
High volume where the per-1,000 rate dominates everything else — at $0.10 per 1,000 it is roughly a twentieth of what the managed services charge in overage.
Teams whose free plan has to carry real sending rather than a test integration — 300 emails a day with no monthly ceiling outlasts most rivals' monthly caps, and marketing, SMS and transactional share one account.
Applications already on Workers that need to send from the same platform they run on — one binding, no separate vendor, and inbound routing free and unlimited alongside it.
European senders who want delivery infrastructure negotiated around their volume rather than bought off a price list, with EU-based handling.
Teams sending email and SMS from one provider who need a longer activity window than a debugging log — 30 days of activity data against 7 days of API logs is a distinction the rest of this category does not draw.
Senders who want inbound routing included from the free plan up, and who treat the message log as a debugging tool rather than a record.
Projects that want the largest permanent free monthly allowance with no card at signup — 6,000 emails a month, and both SMTP relay and API available on it.
Teams that need to answer "what happened to this message" weeks later — 45 days of retention as standard, extendable to a year, is the longest window in this set.
Projects that want a generous paid allowance for the money — 50,000 emails at $20 is several times what the same spend buys at Postmark or Mailgun.
Steady sending where the overage rate matters more than the plan fee — $0.85 per thousand on Professional is the lowest published here, and 30 days of reporting comes on every paid tier rather than as an upgrade.
Transactional email in the news
- Best Email Marketing Tools in 2026: How Klaviyo, Sequenzy, Customer.io, beehiiv and ActiveCampaign Differ - StreetInsider
- Resend Alternatives: 6 Transactional Email APIs Compared on Price - ilounge.com
- 8 Best Transactional Email APIs for AI-Built Apps (2026) - Brevo
- Thu. 10/1/2026Top 9 Trusted Sites to Buy Old Gmail Accounts for Usa - timesdaily.com
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