Your first 10k emails: what transactional email really costs at launch
Launch-stage email is a solved problem that everyone solves badly, because the pricing pages make comparison nearly impossible: one vendor counts recipients, another counts messages, a third bundles marketing sends with transactional ones, and the fourth quotes "from $0" in type large enough to need its own viewport. We built an email API comparison tool on top of a captured catalog of eleven vendors (verifiedAt 2026-08-22), and pointed its standard startup scenario at them: 10,000 emails per month, 95% transactional — auth mails, password resets, receipts, notification streams.
The result: at launch volume, email should be free
| Vendor | Monthly total | Free allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Brevo | $0.00 | 9,000/mo |
| Mailersend | $0.00 | 500/mo trial credits |
| Mandrill (Mailchimp) | $0.00 | trial block |
| AWS SES | $0.00 | 62,000/mo (from EC2 or SMTP relay) |
| SMTP2GO | $0.00 | 1,000/mo |
| Scaleway Transactal | $0.00 | 300/mo + trial |
| Postmark | $15.00 | 100/mo |
| Mailjet | $16.20 | 6,000/mo |
| SendGrid | $19.95 | 100/mo |
| Resend | $20.00 | 3,000/mo |
| Mailgun | $35.00 | 100/mo |
Six of the eleven vendors land at an effective $0.00 per month at this workload. The cheapest paid entry point is Postmark's $15 base plan, and the most expensive position on our board — Mailgun's $35 — costs literally infinite percent more than the free options. That spread, $0 versus $35 for the identical job, is the entire reason this comparison exists.
Read the shape, not just the number
The zero-dollar rows are not all the same deal. AWS SES's 62,000-message monthly free allowance is the largest in the market by an order of magnitude — enough that most apps stay inside it well past their first year — but it comes with AWS's setup ceremony: sandbox approval, DNS verification, and a sending reputation you manage yourself. Brevo's 9,000 free emails cover most of the launch month but overshoot into paid territory the moment growth hits. Vendors like Postmark skip the free tier almost entirely and instead sell what they call deliverability polish — which is a real product difference, not just a premium brand tax, though whether it's worth $180/year on a 10k-month workload is a question only your open-rate data can answer.
When does the free ride end?
- Volume cliff: every free tier ends at a hard number. Past it, you jump to the first paid plan — there is no smooth metering between 'free' and 'entry plan' on most vendors.
- Feature gates matter earlier than volume: dedicated sending IPs, sub-accounts, and advanced webhooks are typically paid-plan features regardless of how few emails you send.
- Growth math: at 75k/month (our Growth App scenario) the board reshuffles completely — the vendors that were free at 10k are now mid-priced and the flat-rate entrants look different.
- EU residency requirements can disqualify otherwise-cheap options instantly; filter before comparing, not after.
The honest summary for founders: at launch volume, do not pay for transactional email — but choose your free tier by where you expect to be in six months, because that's when these prices start to diverge sharply. The full interactive picture, including 250k and 2.5M-volume scenarios and per-vendor feature matrices, lives in the comparison tool. All prices captured 2026-08-22 from vendor pricing pages; where a vendor publishes no figure, our catalog records the absence rather than guessing.