About this site

What the site covers

Transactional email is the mail your product sends because a user did something: a password reset, a receipt, a sign-in code, a failed-payment notice. The site covers the services that send it, including Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, MailerSend, SparkPost, Mandrill, SMTP2GO, Elastic Email, Mailtrap and ZeptoMail, along with the lifecycle platforms that some teams use for event-triggered mail as well.

The pages are grouped by the question a reader is trying to answer:

• Pricing pages explain what one service costs: tiers, overage rates, free-plan limits and billing details that surprise people after signup. Start at the tools directory if you do not know which service to look at first.
• Alternatives pages are for readers who already use a service and are considering leaving it, with the reasons people leave and what moving involves.
• Comparison pages put two services side by side on price at real volumes, plan limits and the way each one reports events.
• Use-case pages pick services for a situation, such as a Stripe-billed SaaS, a startup, or a high-volume sender.
• Guides cover the parts of sending that are not specific to one vendor, such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, password-reset email and API-versus-SMTP sending.

What the site does not do

This site does not run hands-on tests. We have not bought accounts to measure delivery rates, we have not sent mail to seed addresses to estimate inbox placement, and we do not publish open rates, uptime figures or latency numbers of our own. A page that says a service sends faster or lands in the inbox more often is repeating a vendor's claim, and it says so.

We also do not invent star ratings, customer quotes, review counts or reader numbers. When a detail is not published or we cannot confirm it from documentation, the page leaves it out, or tells you where on the vendor's site to read it. A smaller page that is correct is better than a longer one that guesses.

The consequence is a limit you should know about. Two services with the same published price can behave differently in your account, your region and your traffic mix. For anything that matters to your launch, send a pilot batch through the shortlisted service before you commit, and treat our comparison as the reading that tells you which two or three to pilot.

How prices stay trustworthy

Pricing in this market changes often: free tiers shrink, plan names get renamed, and a vendor may move its rates behind a slider or a sales form. Every number on a page is tied to the vendor's page it came from, which is linked beside it, and to the date shown on that page. If a price is more than a few months old, open the vendor link and check it before you rely on it. Where a vendor only quotes prices on request, the page says so instead of estimating.

Cost tables show their arithmetic. If a plan costs $20 for 10,000 emails and a vendor lists $2 for each extra thousand, the table would say $20 + (40 × $2) = $100 at 50,000, so you can substitute your own volume. Where a vendor's own volume slider shows a price at a given size, we use that reading instead of the formula, because a formula can overstate a bill. Code samples follow the vendor's current documentation and link to the page they came from; if we cannot confirm an API detail there, it stays out.

How to read a page here

Most pricing, alternatives and comparison pages follow the same order, so you can skip to the part you need. The opening paragraph gives the answer to the page's question in a few sentences. A screenshot of the vendor's pricing page follows, with a caption that carries the capture date and the address it was taken from; if the vendor's page would not render cleanly, the page has no screenshot and the editor does not substitute another vendor's image.

The cost table comes next, at list sizes such as 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 and 250,000 emails a month, with the arithmetic written in the paragraph under it. A figure marked as a floor uses the lowest overage rate a vendor lists, so your real bill can only be higher. After the table come the scenario sections, which say which service fits which situation, then the migration notes, then a short FAQ. If a section does not apply to the question, it is not there.

Where to start

• Choosing a service for the first time: read the transactional email guide, then the startup or developer use-case page that matches your team, and shortlist two services.
• Leaving a service: open the alternatives page for it, for example SendGrid alternatives or Mailgun alternatives, and then the comparison page for the service you are leaning toward.
• Mail that is not arriving: start with the guide to SPF, DKIM and DMARC before changing vendors, because the fix is often a DNS record rather than a new service.
• Billing and lifecycle email for a SaaS: the Stripe email integration guide and the B2B SaaS page cover the events worth emailing about.

Unless a page says otherwise, prices are list prices in US dollars for monthly billing, before tax. Annual billing, regional currencies, nonprofit discounts and negotiated enterprise rates can all differ, and a vendor may show different figures to a visitor in another country, so the number on your own checkout screen is the one that counts.

Funding

Links to vendors on this site are plain references for verification, so you can open the pricing page behind any figure. No vendor pays for placement in a ranking or comparison. Figures given for every vendor come from that vendor's own pricing and feature pages, checked on the date shown. A vendor asking us to reword a page gets a written answer based on its own documentation. The how we evaluate page describes the method in full.

Corrections

If a price, limit or plan name on a page no longer matches what the vendor shows, the contact page is the way to tell us. Include the page address and the vendor page that shows the difference. Vendor staff are welcome to do the same; a correction backed by a link to the vendor's own documentation will be applied to the page.

We collect nothing through forms except what you send us by email, and we do not sell or share the messages we receive.