How we evaluate transactional email services

We compare transactional email APIs and SMTP services for developers and SaaS teams using public, checkable evidence. Prices come from vendor pricing pages and documentation, checked on the date shown on each page. Screenshots are captured from the live public page on the date in the caption. This page explains how that work is done, so you can judge how far to trust a number before you spend money on it.

Where a price comes from

Every price on this site is read from the vendor's own pricing page or billing documentation. Before it goes into a page, we write it down with the exact wording the vendor used and the address it came from, and the saved page text is checked against that wording. Pages that rely on a vendor's figures name the vendor and link to the page they came from, so you can open it yourself.

A price we cannot read is left out. If a vendor shows its rate only on a slider that does not render for us, the page says to read the figure off the slider; if a vendor sells by quote, as some enterprise-oriented providers do, the page says it is quote-priced and does not guess. A vendor's price is never taken from a review site, a forum post or an older version of one of our own pages.

How cost tables are calculated

The tables that show a bill at 10,000, 50,000 or 100,000 emails a month are arithmetic on published rates, and the working is written beside the table: the plan price plus the overage rate times the extra thousands. Where a vendor lists overage as "from" a rate, we use that lowest rate and call the result a floor. Where a vendor's formula would misstate a large bill, for example a per-thousand overage applied to hundreds of thousands of emails, we say so instead of printing a misleading total.

Costs are list prices in US dollars before tax and exclude anything the vendor sells separately, such as dedicated IPs, address validation or an account on another product that the service requires. When a limit rather than a price drives a decision (log retention, number of domains or webhook endpoints, daily sending caps), we put that limit in the comparison and say which plan it belongs to.

How screenshots are captured

A screenshot is taken by loading the vendor's public page in a browser and saving what appears, on the date in the caption. We do not edit, crop out prices or combine screenshots. If a page does not load fully (an empty pricing table or a cookie overlay covering the plans), we do not use the image; we either capture a different public page that shows the same figures, such as the vendor's documentation, or omit the screenshot and note it.

What we check on each service

• Published plans, included volume, overages and free-plan limits, including daily caps.
• API, SMTP, webhooks, suppression handling and message-stream controls as described in vendor documentation.
• Plan limits that matter after the first month: log retention, dedicated IP availability, user and domain counts.
• Migration details that affect DNS, templates, event payloads and rollback ownership.

Code samples on this site follow the vendor's current documentation and link to the page they follow. If we cannot confirm an API detail from the documentation, we leave it out.

What we do not do

We do not publish delivery-rate tests, open-rate figures or uptime numbers of our own, and we do not claim to have run campaigns or held accounts with the services we cover. We do not invent star ratings, reviewer quotes or customer counts. Vendor claims stay attributed to the vendor, and a detail we are unsure about is left out. Rankings are not for sale: no vendor pays for placement.

Independence

Links to vendors are plain references so you can check a figure yourself; no placement on a ranking or comparison is paid for. Every vendor's facts are checked against its own pricing and feature pages in the same way. Corrections about any vendor are welcome through the contact page.

Who edits this site

Nora Vance is a pen name. It is the byline this site's editor publishes under, and it carries no employer, career history or credentials. The work behind that byline is reading: vendor pricing pages, documentation and changelogs; re-checking each price on the date shown on the page; capturing screenshots of pricing pages; and working out the cost tables from the published rates. It does not include hands-on testing of the services, and the site does not claim any. More about the site's scope is on the about page; see the alternatives and comparison sections for the method applied to specific tools.