The best SendGrid alternatives, compared honestly
SendGrid still does the unglamorous parts of email well: a mature REST API, a plain SMTP relay, an Event Webhook, and a deliverability team that very large senders lean on. What changed is the price of admission. Twilio announced on 27 May 2025 that it was retiring the free Email API and free Marketing Campaigns plans, gave existing accounts 60 days, then paused sending and deleted stored contacts above 100. This page compares seven alternatives on the one thing that decides your invoice: what each vendor actually counts.
The best SendGrid alternative depends on which meter is hurting:
- Cheapest per email → Amazon SES: $0.10 per 1,000, one meter, seven European regions included.
- A free tier you can stay on → Resend: 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, no countdown.
- Marketing and transactional on one meter → Brevo: bills emails sent, never contacts stored, free at 300 a day.
- Data that must stay in the EU → Scaleway TEM: priced in euros, 300 a month included, then €0.25 per 1,000.
Narrower cases are in the table below: Postmark if deliverability support matters more than unit price, Mailgun for a like-for-like swap with a US or EU switch, Postal if you accept owning the mail server.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off SendGrid
SendGrid did not get worse at delivering mail. Five things changed around it between May 2025 and now, and every one of them is dated and published on Twilio's own pages.
The free plan was retired, not reduced
Twilio announced the retirement of the free Email API and free Marketing Campaigns plans on 27 May 2025, with 60 days of continued access. Once the window closed, sending was paused on all free plans and stored contacts above 100 were deleted permanently. What replaced it is a 60-day timed trial at 100 emails a day.
Nothing exists between $0 and $19.95 on the Email API
After the trial, the cheapest way to keep an integration alive is Essentials 50K at $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails. There is no hobby band and no pay-as-you-go option. A side project sending 400 password resets a month pays exactly what a project sending 50,000 pays.
Two products, two meters, two pricing pages
The Email API counts emails sent. Marketing Campaigns counts contacts stored and emails sent together, and its own page says pricing is determined by monthly contact storage, email volume and features. They are separate subscriptions with separate pricing pages, and sendgrid.com/pricing now redirects to a product page carrying no prices at all.
The same email has two prices
Fifty thousand sends cost $19.95 through the Email API and $60 through Marketing Campaigns on Advanced 10K, which also caps you at 10,000 contacts. Even the cheapest Marketing Campaigns band that allows 50,000 sends, Basic 20k at $50 a month for 60,000 emails, costs two and a half times the Email API price. One email over the limit is $0.0013 on Essentials 50K and $0.0075 on Advanced 10K: 5.8 times for the same message.
EU data residency starts at $89.95
SendGrid's documentation limits EU data residency to Pro, Premier and Custom accounts and requires a dedicated EU IP: shared IP customers, it says, will need to upgrade a Pro or Premier package. The cheapest Pro band is $89.95 a month, whether you send 100,000 emails or 2,000.
The volume you pay for is not always volume
Pro 100K costs $89.95 against Essentials 100K at $34.95 for the identical 100,000 emails. The extra $55 buys a dedicated IP, subuser management and EU residency eligibility. Read the bands as feature gates, not as a volume curve, or the upgrade looks irrational.
The shortlist
7 SendGrid alternatives worth evaluating
This category splits into two jobs: a relay your application calls for receipts, resets and alerts, and a campaign tool that stores a mailing list and blasts it. SendGrid sells both, prices them on different units, and that is where the confusion starts. The ranking below optimises for the transactional job, because that is what an API key is doing in most codebases, and each entry notes whether it also covers campaigns. Every pick lists one honest strength and one real weakness.
$0.10 per 1,000 emails, billed per recipient, with no contact meter anywhere in the product. Fifty thousand emails is $5.00 against SendGrid's $19.95. Sending endpoints run in seven European regions, five of them inside the EU, so residency is a region choice rather than a plan upgrade, and a managed dedicated IP is $15 a month plus $0.02 to $0.08 per 1,000. Weakness: a new account sits in the sandbox at 200 emails per 24 hours and one per second, to verified recipients only, until AWS grants production access, and you supply the template editor, the suppression UI and the dashboards yourself.
3,000 emails a month at $0, capped at 100 a day, as a standing plan rather than a countdown. Pro is $20 a month for 50,000 emails with $0.90 per 1,000 beyond that, so it undercuts SendGrid Essentials on price and beats it on headroom. Weakness: EU residency is only half true and Resend says so plainly in its docs. Choosing eu-west-1 changes where mail is sent from, while all account data, email metadata, logs and API records stay in the United States. Its marketing product is a second, contact-based meter, the same shape as SendGrid's.
A published per-email price at every tier and a reputation built on transactional mail alone: Basic is $15 a month from 10,000 emails with $1.80 per 1,000 beyond it, Pro $16.50 and Platform $18.00. The free plan is 100 emails a month, permanently, with overages refused rather than billed. Weakness: at $1.50 per 1,000 it is roughly fifteen times SES, dedicated IPs start at $50 a month per IP and require 300,000 emails a month to qualify, and Postmark states it has no plans to add EU servers; data sits in a Chicago-area facility and AWS.
The direct answer to SendGrid's two-meter problem. Brevo's pricing slider is denominated in emails a month and stored contacts are not what you are billed for, which is the inverse of both Mailchimp and SendGrid Marketing Campaigns. Contacts are capped rather than priced: Brevo's own feature table lists a contact limit of up to 100,000 on Free and up to 500,000 on Starter. Free is 300 emails a day; Starter is $9 a month from 5,000 emails, or $96.96 billed annually; every plan includes the transactional API, SMTP and unlimited log retention. Weakness: it is a marketing suite first, so the API is not the centre of the product, the free cap is a daily one that makes nightly batches awkward, and the privacy policy confirms data may move between the EU and the US.
Structurally the nearest thing to SendGrid: REST API plus SMTP relay, sending domains, analytics, webhooks and validation, at $15 a month for 10,000 emails, $35 for 50,000 or $75 for 100,000 with a dedicated IP included. Its regional story is unusually clean, because one account can send through the US or the EU and Mailgun hosts the service in both. There is a $0 plan at 100 emails a day. Weakness: that free plan keeps logs for one day only, extra dedicated IPs are $59 per IP a month, and Sinch owns Mailgun and Mailjet both, so shortlisting the pair means shortlisting one company twice.
A European operator quoting in euros: 300 emails a month included, then €0.25 per 1,000, with a Scale plan at €80 a month for 100,000 emails and €0.20 per 1,000 after that, plus a managed dedicated IP and a 99.9% SLA. The unit is stated without ambiguity, per recipient, so one message to three addresses counts as three emails. Weakness: the ecosystem is thin next to SendGrid, there is no campaign product at all, and €0.25 per 1,000 is about two and a half times SES's $0.10 before currency conversion, so what you are buying is jurisdiction rather than volume.
MIT licensed, genuinely open source rather than source-available, and actively maintained: v3.3.7 shipped on 3 June 2026, after v3.3.6 in April and v3.3.5 in February. The licence costs nothing and there is no meter of any kind. Weakness, and it is the entire story: the software is the easy part. A fresh IP range carries no sending reputation, and you take on PTR records, SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment, IP warm-up, blocklist monitoring, feedback loops and bounce processing. Self-hosting is a fair call for internal and low-stakes mail; it is not a cheaper route to the inbox.
Three names were left off deliberately. MailerSend overlaps almost entirely with Mailgun in shape and price, at Starter $35 a month and Professional $110 for 50,000 emails on its pricing calculator, which defaults to annual billing, so it adds a row without adding a decision. Mailjet has the largest standing free tier here at 6,000 emails a month capped at 200 a day, with Essential at $17 and Premium at $27 for 15,000 emails a month, but Sinch owns Mailjet and Mailgun, and presenting one vendor as two choices would pad the list. Mailu is maintained and good, yet it hosts mailboxes rather than relaying application mail, so it answers a different question.
Side by side
SendGrid alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, taken from each vendor's own pricing page. The column that decides most migrations is Bills by: a per-email meter and a per-contact meter turn the same monthly volume into completely different invoices, and SendGrid runs one of each. SendGrid's own row is included as the baseline.
| Tool | Type | Bills by | Cheapest ongoing price | Free forever tier | EU data residency | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SendGrid | Hosted API + SMTP + campaigns | Emails (Email API); contacts and emails (Marketing Campaigns) | $19.95/mo, 50,000 emails | ✗ 60-day trial, 100/day | Pro and above, dedicated EU IP required | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Amazon SES | Hosted API + SMTP | Emails, per recipient | $0.10 per 1,000, no minimum | ✗ $200 AWS credits, 6 months | ✓ 7 European regions, 5 in the EU | ✗ proprietary (AWS) |
| Resend | Hosted API + SMTP | Emails | $20/mo, 50,000 emails | ✓ 3,000/mo, 100/day | Partial: sending region only, data in US | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Postmark | Hosted API + SMTP | Emails | $15/mo, 10,000 emails | ✓ 100/mo, overage refused | ✗ US only, none planned | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Brevo | Suite: API + SMTP + campaigns | Emails; contacts capped, not billed | $9/mo, from 5,000 emails | ✓ 300/day | French parent, but transfers to the US permitted | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Mailgun | Hosted API + SMTP | Emails | $15/mo, 10,000 emails | ✓ 100/day, 1-day logs | ✓ US or EU per account | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Scaleway TEM | Hosted API + SMTP | Emails, per recipient | €0.25 per 1,000 after 300/mo | ✓ 300/mo included | ✓ EU cloud, French operator | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Postal | Self-hosted relay | Nothing: you run it | Server cost only | ✓ unmetered, self-hosted | ✓ wherever you host it | ✓ MIT, open source |
Numbers that do not fit in cells. SendGrid Email API bands: Essentials 50K $19.95, Essentials 100K $34.95, Pro 100K $89.95, Pro 300K $249, Pro 700K $499, Pro 1.5M $799, Pro 2.5M $1,099, all per month in USD. SendGrid Marketing Campaigns bands run Basic 5K at $15 for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 sends through Advanced 100K at $450 for 100,000 contacts and 500,000 sends; Basic always allows three sends per contact per month and Advanced always allows five. SendGrid publishes no price for extra dedicated IPs beyond the one included with Pro. Amazon SES adds $0.12 per GB of attachment data and $15 a month for a managed dedicated IP. Pricing and free tiers change often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: SendGrid Email API · SendGrid Marketing Campaigns · Twilio free-plan changelog · Amazon SES · Resend · Postmark · Brevo · Mailgun · Scaleway TEM · Postal
A fair call
When SendGrid is still the right choice
Migrating costs almost nothing in code and quite a lot in reputation: credentials swap in an afternoon, while sending history does not transfer at all. Two meters are also the correct shape for a team that genuinely runs both jobs and wants one vendor, one invoice and one suppression list shared across receipts and campaigns. Splitting into SES plus a separate marketing tool means two sending reputations to keep healthy.
SendGrid is still right if…
- You run transactional and marketing mail from the same list and want shared suppressions, one login and one invoice rather than two vendors to reconcile.
- You are already at Pro volume. Pro 2.5M is $1,099 a month, which works out at $0.44 per 1,000, and it bundles a dedicated IP, subusers and EU residency eligibility.
- Your bill is dominated by sends rather than by list size. The per-contact meter that looks punitive to a 100,000-contact newsletter is irrelevant to an app that stores no marketing list at all.
- You depend on the template editor, the Activity Feed or the Event Webhook. Nothing on the shortlist is cheaper once you rebuild those in-house.
- Your deliverability is currently good on SendGrid IPs. A warm reputation is worth more than a lower unit price.
Look elsewhere if…
- You send a few thousand emails a month and $19.95 is the whole hosting budget: Resend at 3,000 a month free, or Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000.
- You send only transactional mail and the marketing meter is pure overhead: Amazon SES or Postmark.
- Your list is large and quiet, so paying per stored contact is paying for nothing: Brevo meters sends and does not bill for stored contacts.
- EU residency is a requirement, not a preference, and $89.95 a month plus a dedicated EU IP is not proportionate: Scaleway TEM or Mailgun's EU region.
- You want the meter gone entirely and can staff the deliverability work: Postal, MIT licensed and self-hosted.
Common questions
Common questions about SendGrid alternatives
What is the best SendGrid alternative in 2026?
It depends on which meter is hurting. Amazon SES is the cheapest and the simplest to reason about: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, billed per recipient, with no contact meter at all, so 50,000 emails costs $5.00 against SendGrid's $19.95. Resend is the better answer if you want a free tier you can stay on, at 3,000 emails a month and 100 a day. Brevo is the answer when marketing and transactional mail must share one meter, because it bills emails sent and does not bill for stored contacts. Postmark wins on deliverability support rather than on unit price.
Does SendGrid still have a free plan?
No. Twilio announced on 27 May 2025 that it was retiring the free Email API and free Marketing Campaigns plans, gave existing accounts 60 days of continued access, then paused sending and permanently deleted stored contacts above 100. What exists today is a 60-day timed trial: 100 emails a day through the API or SMTP, 100 a day through Marketing Campaigns, and 100 stored contacts. When the trial expires, SendGrid's own support documentation says any active integration using your API keys stops sending. The cheapest way to keep sending afterwards is Essentials 50K at $19.95 a month.
How much does SendGrid cost in 2026?
There are two answers, because there are two products. The Email API starts at $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails and $34.95 for 100,000 on Essentials, while Pro runs from $89.95 for 100,000 emails up to $1,099 for 2.5 million. Marketing Campaigns is a separate subscription priced on contacts stored and emails sent together: Basic 5K is $15 a month for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 sends, and Advanced 10K is $60 for 10,000 contacts and 50,000 sends. All figures are USD, billed monthly.
Why does the same email cost different amounts on SendGrid?
Because the Email API and Marketing Campaigns are metered differently. Fifty thousand emails cost $19.95 a month through the Email API on Essentials 50K, and $60 a month through Marketing Campaigns on Advanced 10K, which also caps you at 10,000 stored contacts. Overages diverge further: one extra email is $0.0013 on Essentials 50K and $0.0075 on Advanced 10K, which is 5.8 times more for the same message. Marketing Campaigns publishes a single rate headed cost per extra email or contact, so one number covers two different units.
Is there a truly open-source SendGrid alternative?
Postal is the credible one, and it is genuinely open source: MIT licensed, not source-available under BSL, SSPL or a Sustainable Use licence, and actively maintained, with v3.3.7 released on 3 June 2026. There is no meter of any kind, so the licence costs nothing. The honest caveat is that the software was never the expensive part. A new IP range carries no sending reputation, and you take on PTR records, SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment, IP warm-up, blocklist monitoring, feedback loops and bounce processing. Self-hosting suits internal mail far better than customer-facing volume.
Which SendGrid alternative keeps email data in the EU?
Amazon SES is the strongest answer: sending endpoints run in Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan and Zurich, five of them inside the EU, so residency is a region choice rather than a plan upgrade. Scaleway Transactional Email is a European operator quoting in euros, at EUR 0.25 per 1,000 after 300 free a month. Mailgun lets one account send through the US or the EU and hosts the service in both. Resend is the trap: its own documentation says choosing eu-west-1 changes only where mail is sent from, and all account data, metadata and logs stay in the United States.
Can I migrate off SendGrid without hurting deliverability?
The code change is small: swap the SMTP credentials or the API client, then re-point your webhook consumer. The reputation change is the risk. Sending IPs and domain history do not transfer, so a hard cutover puts your mail on a path receiving providers have never seen. Run both providers in parallel, move a slice of low-stakes traffic first, watch bounce and complaint rates, and raise volume over one to two weeks. Export suppression lists and contacts before you cancel, because SendGrid deletes stored contacts once a plan lapses.