Resend vs Postmark vs SendGrid vs SES for transactional email (2026)

$10 versus $40 versus $50 versus somewhere between $60 and $90 — that's the same rough 100,000 emails a month, priced by SES, Resend, Postmark and SendGrid respectively. Amazon wins that comparison by a mile on paper. It also gives you none of the things that make the other three worth paying for.

| Service | Free tier | Paid entry | ~100k emails/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | 62,000/mo from EC2 | $0.10 per 1,000 | ~$10 |
| Resend | 3,000/mo | $20/mo | ~$40 |
| Postmark | 100 test emails | $15/mo + $1.80 per 1k over | ~$50 |
| SendGrid | 100/day (~3,000/mo) | $19.95/mo (50,000) | ~$60–90 depending on plan |

What that $30–40 premium over SES actually buys is invisible until you don't have it: bounce and complaint handling, a dashboard that tells you what happened to a specific email, and IP addresses that are already warmed up rather than starting from zero reputation. SES gives you the raw sending pipe and stops there — everything else, suppression lists, bounce processing, deliverability monitoring, is your team's problem to build.

Resend has spent this year cementing itself as the default for developer-first teams, and the reason isn't really the free tier — it's React Email, built by the same team, which lets you send actual React components as email templates with no separate templating system to maintain. If you already write your app in JSX, that's a real time savings, not just a nice-to-have. Postmark hasn't chased that audience; it's stayed narrowly focused on being the option that reliably lands transactional mail in the inbox rather than the spam folder, which is the entire point if deliverability is what keeps you up at night. SendGrid's pricing, for what it's worth, remains the least legible of the four — it's the choice for teams already on Twilio or that need marketing and transactional email under one roof, not the one you pick for pricing clarity.

There's a real crossover point here, and it's worth knowing before you build around either extreme: somewhere around 200,000 emails a month is where SES stops being a false economy, *if* your team has the engineering capacity to run suppression lists and bounce handling properly. Below that volume, the time saved by a managed service is worth more than the money saved by SES.

Under roughly 50k emails a month, reach for Resend if the developer experience matters to you, or Postmark if deliverability is the whole job. Past 200k, move to SES — but budget real engineering time for it, because the $10 number on the pricing page doesn't include the infrastructure you'll have to build around it.