Cheapest SendGrid alternatives at 1,000 emails/month
SendGrid's Free plan already covers 1,000 emails/month; its cheapest paid tier is priced for 50,000. Volume-matched competitors, including pay-per-email Amazon SES, sourced from official pricing.
Updated 2026-09-12 · prices verified against official pages
SendGrid's free plan already covers this scenario
Our scenario: 1,000 emails/month, 1 seat, monthly billing. Twilio SendGrid's Free plan allows 100 emails a day, no credit card required — about 3,000 a month, comfortably past our 1,000-email scenario. The jump comes the moment Free isn't enough: Essentials starts at $19.95/month, but that price is for the 50,000-emails-a-month tier ($34.95 at the 100,000 tier) — SendGrid doesn't sell a paid plan sized for 1,000 emails at all. Pro starts at $89.95/month for 100,000 emails and adds dedicated IP options, and Premier is custom-quoted. At this volume, the real comparison isn't SendGrid's paid tiers — it's whether you need to pay anyone at all.
Free plans that also cover 1,000 emails/month
Several competitors match or beat SendGrid's free allowance outright. Mailgun's Free plan gives 100 emails/day (about 3,000/month), though it restricts the account to 1 user. Resend's Free plan is the most generous of the group: 3,000 emails/month, 100/day, 3 domains and 1 webhook endpoint. SMTP2GO's Free plan caps at exactly 1,000 emails/month with a 200/day, 25/hour limit (the hourly cap lifts once you verify your sending domain) — the tightest fit to our scenario of any product here. Two products fall short: Postmark's Free tier is only 100 emails/month and MailerSend's Free plan gives 500/month — both below the 1,000 our scenario needs, which forces a paid plan sooner than the others. MailerSend's Free plan also asks for card details to subscribe, unlike Mailgun, Resend, SMTP2GO and SendGrid's free tiers, which don't.
Amazon SES: pay per email, not per tier
Amazon SES doesn't sell tiered plans at this volume at all. Its À la carte rate has no plan fee and no minimum: $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, outbound or inbound, which puts 1,000 emails a month at roughly a dime. Its Essentials tier is also fee-free but charges a slightly higher $0.16 per 1,000 emails (0-10M/month band) in exchange for account-level features. Either way, that's the cheapest way to send this volume in the category, by a wide margin, though it comes without the dashboards, templates or deliverability tooling the other products bundle in. SES's Pro ($105/month) and Enterprise ($500/month) tiers add features like managed dedicated IPs and global endpoints, but both carry account-level monthly fees that only make sense at far higher volume than 1,000 emails/month. Dedicated IPs are a separate add-on even at the entry tier: $24.95/month per standard IP. New AWS customers separately get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credit usable against SES and other eligible services for 6 months after account creation — a general AWS perk, not an SES-specific free plan.
Cheapest paid tier once you outgrow free
If 1,000 emails/month becomes 5,000 or 10,000, MailerSend's Hobby plan is the cheapest named paid tier in the category: $7/month ($5.60/month billed yearly) for 5,000 emails and 5 seats, with Email API and SMTP included; extra emails beyond that run $1.50 per 1,000. Postmark's Basic plan is $15/month for 10,000 emails (4 users, 45-day data retention, $1.80 per 1,000 for overage); Mailgun's Basic plan is also $15/month for 10,000 emails, with overage starting at $1.80 per 1,000 as well. SMTP2GO's Starter plan is $10/month for 10,000 emails ($100/year billed yearly), with overage at $1 per 1,000 — the cheapest overage rate of the three. All four undercut SendGrid's own next step up, which starts at $19.95/month for its 50,000-email tier.
What this means at 1,000 emails/month
At the scenario volume, the real winners are the free plans: Resend, SMTP2GO, Mailgun and SendGrid itself all cover 1,000 emails/month for $0, and Amazon SES will send that volume for around a dime on its À la carte rate if you're comfortable without a dashboard. The products to watch out for at this specific volume are Postmark and MailerSend, whose free tiers (100 and 500 emails/month) are too small for the scenario — meaning they cost real money before the others do. None of that changes once you factor in inbound email, either: Amazon SES charges the same $0.10 per 1,000 messages for inbound as outbound on its À la carte rate, so a low-volume sender's total bill stays in single-digit-cent territory either way.
Every claim above links back to computed comparisons with sourced, dated pricing.
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