SendGrid alternatives for small and mid-size senders
SendGrid's Email API page no longer lists a free plan. It offers a free trial of 100 emails a day for 60 days, then Essentials from $19.95 a month, Pro from $89.95 and custom Premier pricing. The volume selector offers "under 3,000" and then jumps to 50,000, which suits a company with an established sending volume and suits nobody who is still testing. People leave for four reasons: no standing free plan, a paid entry point sized for 50,000 emails, a dedicated IP reserved for the $89.95 tier, and short searchable activity history. This page covers six replacements: Resend, Postmark, Mailgun, Amazon SES, SMTP2GO and Brevo.
What SendGrid's plans include
| Plan | Starting price | Volume bucket on the page | Activity history | Dedicated IP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | $0 for 60 days | 100 emails a day | 3 days | No |
| Essentials | $19.95 | 50,000 to 100,000 a month | 3 days | No |
| Pro | $89.95 | 100,000 to 2,500,000 a month | 7 days | 1 included |
| Premier | Custom | Custom | 7 days | 1 included |
Prices on SendGrid's page are "starting at" figures, and the exact amount depends on the volume and feature options you pick on the selector, so use the table as a floor. The page also offers 30 days of searchable history as a purchasable add-on on paid plans, 2,500 free address validations on Pro and 5,000 on Premier.
Why people look elsewhere
The free plan became a trial
A side project or a pre-launch staging environment cannot live on a 60-day trial. When the trial ends, you either pay or move. Resend keeps 3,000 emails a month on a free plan (capped at 100 a day), Mailtrap allows 4,000 (150 a day), SMTP2GO gives 1,000 a month and Mailgun gives 100 a day, so the move is a question of which daily and monthly cap you can tolerate. Postmark's Free plan is the smallest, at 100 emails a month with no overage permitted.
The cheapest paid plan assumes 50,000 emails
Essentials is described on the page as the plan for sending 50,000 to 100,000 emails a month. If you send 12,000, there is no smaller published step; the selector goes from under 3,000 straight to 50,000. Providers with a 10,000-email entry plan, such as Postmark Basic, Mailgun Basic and SMTP2GO Starter at $15 each, fit the shape of a small product more closely, and Resend's $20 plan already covers 50,000.
A dedicated IP means Pro
The dedicated IP row is empty for the free trial and Essentials and shows "1 included" for Pro and Premier. A team that wants its own sending reputation at 80,000 emails a month is therefore pushed to a plan whose floor is $89.95. SMTP2GO's Professional plan is $75 for 100,000 emails with a dedicated IP, and Mailgun's Scale plan is $90 for 100,000 with dedicated IP pools.
Three days of history
The Searchable Email Activity row lists three days on the trial and Essentials, seven on Pro, and a 30-day option you can buy. If a customer writes in after the weekend, a three-day window may be gone. SMTP2GO's Starter plan lists 30 days of reporting, and Mailgun lists five days on Foundation and 30 on Scale.
Two products, two meters
Marketing Campaigns is a separate product with its own plans: a free plan of 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, Basic from $15 and Advanced from $60. A company using both pays against two different quotas. Brevo is the one alternative here that counts campaigns and transactional mail in a single volume pool, which can be simpler or more expensive depending on the mix.
Monthly cost at 10,000 to 300,000 emails
| Provider | 10,000 | 50,000 | 100,000 | 300,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SendGrid | No published plan | From $19.95 | From $19.95 to $89.95 | Pro from $89.95 |
| Resend | $20 | $20 | $90 | $270 |
| Postmark Basic | $15 | $55 | Not a slider stop ($115 at 125,000) | Check Postmark's slider |
| Mailgun | $15 | $35 | $90 | $310 |
| Amazon SES | $1.60 | $8 | $16 | $48 |
| SMTP2GO | $15 | $63 | $75 | $245 |
| Brevo | Starter from $9 | Set by slider | Set by slider | From $499 (Professional) |
The 300,000 column uses each provider's published overage rate: Resend adds $0.90 per thousand after 100,000, Mailgun at least $1.10, SMTP2GO $0.85 above the Professional allowance. Postmark is different: its pricing page prices Basic from a volume slider with stops at 10,000, 50,000, 125,000 and 300,000 (I read $15, $55 and $115 for the first three on October 7, 2026), so the 100,000 cell has no figure of its own and the 300,000 cell should be read off the slider, not computed from the $1.80 overage rate. SES is $0.16 per thousand. SendGrid's range reflects that its page prices 100,000 inside both the Essentials and Pro buckets; read the exact figure off the selector for your volume. At 50,000 emails, SendGrid's published floor is competitive with Mailgun at $35 and Resend at $20, so cost alone is a weak reason to leave. Capabilities are the stronger one.
Which replacement fits which kind of SendGrid account
Resend fits a product team on a modern stack that wants one clean plan at $20 for 50,000 emails; start from the Resend pricing page. Postmark fits a business whose transactional mail must not be mixed with anything else and that accepts a higher per-message price; its pricing page explains how streams are billed. Mailgun fits teams that need inbound routing and a logs-heavy workflow. Amazon SES fits an AWS-native team that will build its own dashboards. SMTP2GO fits legacy applications that speak SMTP and need a dedicated IP at a mid-range price.
Brevo is the only choice if the reason you have SendGrid is its marketing side. Its free plan allows 300 emails a day and the paid tiers start at $9 and $18 a month for 5,000 emails, with automation and A/B testing on Standard.
If your product is a SaaS with billing
If you are also hand-building payment-failed emails on top of SendGrid, Sequenzy says it starts dunning emails with a card-update page when Stripe sends invoice.payment_failed; retries themselves still run in Stripe or Paddle. Its pricing page lists a free tier of 2,500 emails and $19 a month for 15,000. Compare it with the specialists above.
Leaving SendGrid
Dynamic templates have IDs and versions
SendGrid's own documentation explains that a dynamic template has a unique ID and can have several versions, and that senders using their own templating can insert data with substitution tags. Your application probably references template IDs. Before the cutover, list every ID in use, export the HTML of each active version, and decide whether the template lives in your code or in the new provider.
The account moved to Twilio.com
SendGrid's own pricing page announces that its products, documentation and resources are now hosted on Twilio.com. Update bookmarks, API-key storage notes and support links, and check whether your billing now sits under a Twilio account, since that is where cancellation happens.
Suppressions and dedicated IP reputation
Export bounces, spam reports and unsubscribes before you disable the old route. A dedicated IP from the Pro plan does not transfer; the new provider's shared pool is the lower-risk first month, and a new dedicated IP needs a warm-up. Use a subdomain for the new provider's DNS records and keep SendGrid's authentication until in-flight mail is done.
Related pages
Head-to-head reading: Resend vs SendGrid, Postmark vs SendGrid, Mailgun vs SendGrid and SES vs SendGrid.
FAQ
Does SendGrid still have a free plan?
For the Email API, its page lists a free trial of 100 emails a day for 60 days. Marketing Campaigns still has a free plan of 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month.
What is the cheapest SendGrid alternative?
Amazon SES at $0.16 per thousand emails, with the trade-off that you build the reporting and suppression handling yourself.
Which alternative includes a dedicated IP at the lowest price?
For 100,000 emails a month, SMTP2GO Professional at $75 undercuts Mailgun Scale at $90 and SendGrid Pro from $89.95.