Transactional email APIs

Top-tier deliverability, dedicated streams, fast delivery. Boring in the best way.

Strong SMTP relay, routing rules, and event stream. Late-2025 pricing change is a caveat.

Cheapest at scale, but the most setup work. Great when you have AWS ops capacity.

Underrated. Independent tests place it near the top of inbox placement.

Improving deliverability and a dual testing-plus-sending product.

Clean SDKs across many languages, full message retention, predictable behavior.

API and SDKs are straightforward and the unified product reduces tool sprawl.

Modern API, clean dashboard, drag-and-drop plus code.

Best React Email experience but skewed toward React stacks; missing idempotency until recently.

Best-in-class staging plus production sending; SDK quality is solid.

Consistently in the top tier across independent tests.

Repeatedly recognized for top inbox placement.

Strong recent results.

Strong at scale once warmed and configured. Reputation rides on AWS regional pools.

Solid but variable across the shared-IP pool.

$0.10 per 1,000 emails. Nothing else comes close at unit cost.

$0.35 per 1,000 in beta. Cheapest managed sender if deliverability holds up.

Tiered plans with full-feature parity at higher tiers.

Volume tiers competitive at scale; pay-as-you-go less so after Dec 2025.

Built for high-volume senders.

Cheapest unit cost by far. Regional reputation pools, IAM auth, and native Lambda/SNS/EventBridge wiring make it the default for high-volume senders already on AWS.

Built for enterprise high-volume senders with deep deliverability analytics.

Volume tiers competitive at scale; routing rules are useful for sharding.

Reasonable at high volume but feature-gated to higher SKUs.

Underrated at scale; full-feature parity across tiers keeps the bill predictable.

6,000/mo capped at 200/day. Permanent.

Unlimited emails on the Free plan within a 1,000-contact ceiling. Different model: optimal when your contact list grows slowly but your volume is high.

300/day permanent. Best for low daily volumes.

4,000/mo permanent on the sending side, plus a free testing tier.

3,000/mo permanent on a single domain.

For teams that valued SendGrid as transactional only.

Closest API ergonomics if you used the SMTP plus API combo.

For volume-heavy senders with AWS infrastructure.

Testing plus sending with a generous free tier.

If you used SendGrid for marketing as well as transactional.

Closest to SES on pricing predictability, with deliverability and a real dashboard.

Volume tiers competitive at scale and proper webhooks out of the box.

Strong fit for teams leaving SES for analytics and a managed product.

Self-host on your own infra if owning every layer is the goal.

Fully managed alternative if SES operational overhead became a tax.