ranking
Cheapest at scale (1M+/mo)
Pure unit-cost ranking at million-message-a-month volumes.
criteria
- Cost per 1,000 emails
- Hidden fees
- Required commitments
- 01
Amazon SES
Transactional$0.10 per 1,000 emails. Nothing else comes close at unit cost.
- 02
Cloudflare Email Service
Inbound Transactional$0.35 per 1,000 in beta. Cheapest managed sender if deliverability holds up.
- 03
SMTP2GO
TransactionalTiered plans with full-feature parity at higher tiers.
- 04
Mailgun
TransactionalVolume tiers competitive at scale; pay-as-you-go less so after Dec 2025.
- 05
SparkPost
TransactionalBuilt for high-volume senders.
- 06
SendGrid
Transactional MarketingReasonable at high volume but feature-gated.