Every provider shows its price at a different volume, which makes the pages hard to line up. Here they are at the same four volumes, from the pricing pages themselves, and a plain verdict for each.
The same four volumes, six providers
| Emails a month | Resend | Postmark | SendGrid | Mailgun | Amazon SES | Faivelo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3,000 | $0 (Free, 100 a day cap) | $15 (Basic, 10,000) | $19.95 (Essentials, from) | $15 (Basic, 10,000) | $0.30 | $6 (Starter) |
| 10,000 | $20 (Pro, 50,000) | $15 (Basic) | $19.95 (Essentials, from) | $15 (Basic) | $1 | $12 (Growth, 20,000) |
| 50,000 | $20 (Pro) | Higher tiers priced on postmarkapp.com | $19.95 and up (Essentials, from) | $35 (Foundation) | $5 | $24 (Pro) |
| 100,000 | $35 (Pro) or $90 (Scale) | Higher tiers priced on postmarkapp.com | $89.95 (Pro, from) | $90 (Scale) | $10 | $49 (Business) |
| Mailboxes for the team | None | None | None | None | None | Unlimited, every plan |
List prices, billed monthly, checked 6 October 2026: resend.com/pricing, postmarkapp.com/pricing, twilio.com/en-us/products/email-api/pricing, mailgun.com/pricing, aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing. SES is $0.10 per 1,000 emails plus $0.12 per GB of attachments. Faivelo is our own product; its monthly quotas are 3,000, 20,000, 50,000 and 100,000 by plan.
Two notes on reading it. Postmark publishes a free developer plan of 100 emails a month and then prices at 10,000 a month (Basic $15, Pro $16.50, Platform $18); its page says there is no tier between the two, so the 3,000 row is the 10,000 price. SendGrid's page gives "from" prices for Essentials ($19.95) and Pro ($89.95), with the exact figure depending on the volume you choose inside each tier, so those cells are floors, not quotes.
Who is cheapest at each volume
At 3,000 a month, Resend's free plan wins outright, with the caveat of a 100-a-day cap and 30-day log retention. Amazon SES is 30 cents. If you want a free tier and can live with the daily cap, Resend is the answer, and we say so on our own Resend comparison.
At 10,000, Postmark and Mailgun tie at $15, Resend is $20 for a plan that goes to 50,000, and SES is a dollar. At 50,000, Resend's $20 Pro plan is the cheapest managed service by a distance; Mailgun is $35. At 100,000, Resend is $35 on Pro, Mailgun and SendGrid are around $90, and SES is $10 if you are happy to build the dashboard, suppression list and bounce handling yourself.
Pure sending at volume, then, belongs to SES for the self-sufficient and Resend for everyone else. Nothing on the Faivelo side of the table beats those two cells, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Pure sending at volume belongs to SES and Resend. The question is what else is on the bill.
The other bill: who hosts the team's email
A company that sends 10,000 receipts a month also has people who read mail. On the five providers to the left, those people are a second vendor: Google Workspace at $7 a user on an annual commitment, or Microsoft 365 Business Basic at $7 a user paid yearly (workspace.google.com/pricing and microsoft.com, checked 6 October 2026). A team of five on either is $420 a year before a single API call.
Faivelo's plans carry both. Growth at $12 a month covers 20,000 transactional sends and unlimited mailboxes for the team on unlimited domains, with 200 GB of pooled storage. Add the two bills together and the comparison changes shape: Postmark Basic plus Workspace for five is $50 a month; Growth is $12. The API itself is the familiar kind, a key, a template, an idempotency key, and the reply to a receipt lands in a real mailbox the team can open, which is the thing a sending-only API cannot do and the reason the two-way email API exists.
Verdict by volume
Under 3,000 a month and you only send: Resend Free. Up to 50,000 and you only send: Resend Pro. Any volume, you have an engineer to spare and you want the lowest line item: Amazon SES. You need inbound parsing and fine delivery reporting at 10,000: Postmark Pro at $16.50. You send and you also host the team's mail on your domain: Faivelo, where the sending is included in the plan you were going to buy anyway. Details of the API, templates and quotas are on the transactional email page.
Send from the API, read the reply in a mailbox
Start a trial, verify your domain, send a test from the API and reply to it. The reply is waiting in the inbox. Fourteen days, no card.