The best SMTP service providers of 2026

Amazon Simple Email Service charges by the email. On its a la carte pricing there is no monthly fee: you pay $0.10 per 1,000 emails, plus $0.12 per GB of attachments, so a million emails a month comes to about $100 before attachments. Nothing else on this list comes close at that volume.

Since July 21, 2026, new SES accounts start on the Essentials plan, which charges $0.16 per 1,000 emails for the first 10 million a month and adds deliverability insights. You can switch to a la carte at any time. The Pro plan adds managed dedicated IPs and email validation for $105 a month per region plus $0.22 per 1,000 emails.

You connect through the SES SMTP interface, the API or an AWS SDK. The price of all this is setup work. AWS places every new account in a sandbox, where you can send only to verified addresses, at most 200 messages a day and one a second, until you ask for production access. You also verify each sending domain and address yourself in the AWS console.

New AWS customers get up to $200 in Free Tier credits that apply to SES. Pick SES if someone on your team already works in AWS. If nobody does, a provider with a simple dashboard and a support team will save you more time than the price gap is worth.

Postmark is built for the email your customers are waiting on: password resets, receipts and sign-in links. It keeps transactional email and bulk email in separate message streams, so a big newsletter send can't hold up a reset link. Every account starts on a free Developer plan with 100 emails a month that never expires, which is enough to test your integration.

Paid plans start at 10,000 emails a month and none has a daily sending limit. Basic costs $15 a month, with extra emails at $1.80 per 1,000, five sending domains and four users. Pro costs $16.50, cuts the overage to $1.30 per 1,000, adds inbound email processing and lets you keep activity data for up to 365 days. Platform, at $18, allows unlimited domains and users and charges $1.20 per 1,000 extra emails. Dedicated IPs cost from $50 a month per IP on Pro or Platform, and only once you send 300,000 emails a month.

You send through SMTP or the REST API. Postmark keeps 45 days of activity and full message content by default, which helps when a customer says a receipt never came and support needs to check.

For newsletters, Postmark has a Bulk Email API on paid plans. If you want a campaign editor and sign-up forms in the same account as your SMTP relay, Brevo and Mailjet give you both.

SMTP2GO is the closest thing here to the classic SMTP relay: you get a server name, a username and a password, and you paste them into your website, CRM, printer or office software. It suits a small business or an IT team that needs mail to go out reliably and wants a person to call when it doesn't.

The free plan sends up to 1,000 emails a month and needs no card. Starter costs $15 a month for 10,000 emails, or $150 a year, with extra emails at $1 per 1,000. Professional costs $75 a month for 100,000 emails, or $750 a year, adds a dedicated IP address and email testing tools, and charges $0.85 per 1,000 extra emails. Paying yearly gets you two months free.

Ticket, live chat and toll-free phone support come with every plan, though chat and phone last only 14 days on the free plan. SMTP2GO also handles DKIM and SPF setup, feedback loops and blocklist monitoring for you, keeps 30 days of email reports and can send SMS from the same account. It promises a full refund if you don't like it within 30 days.

One snag at signup: SMTP2GO refuses addresses at public domains such as Gmail and Yahoo, so register with an address at your own domain.

Brevo, the company that used to be Sendinblue, gives you an SMTP relay and an email marketing app in one account. Every plan, the free one included, has transactional email through SMTP and a REST API, with outbound webhooks and unlimited log retention. That makes it a good fit for a shop or a small SaaS that wants order emails and a monthly newsletter to come from the same place.

The free plan lets you send up to 300 emails a day once Brevo approves your account for sending. Brevo prices its marketing plans by the emails you send each month, not by contacts. Starter costs $9 a month for 5,000 emails, or $97 a year. Standard costs $18 a month and adds unlimited multi-step automation workflows and A/B testing. Professional starts at $499 a month for 150,000 emails and adds WhatsApp, pop-ups and contact scoring. You can also buy pay-as-you-go email credits that don't expire if you send now and then.

The 300-a-day cap is the main limit of the free plan. If your app sends 500 password resets on a busy day, you need a paid plan, or a provider such as Mailjet that counts free sends by the month.

Resend is built for developers writing a new app. It has official SDKs, an SMTP relay for tools that can't call an API, and support for React Email, so you can write your email templates as components next to the rest of your code.

The free plan covers 3,000 emails a month with a limit of 100 a day. Pro costs $20 a month for 50,000 emails, with extra emails at $0.90 per 1,000 if you switch on pay-as-you-go overages. Scale costs $90 a month for 100,000 emails. A dedicated IP costs $30 a month on Scale once you send more than 3,000 emails a day, and Resend warms it up and watches it for you. Webhook endpoints go from one on the free plan to five on Pro and ten on Scale, and every plan keeps 30 days of data.

Resend bills monthly only, with no yearly discount. Registered nonprofits can apply for 50% off paid plans. Resend holds SOC 2 Type II certification, which matters if you sell to companies that ask about it.

If you need someone to pick up the phone, Resend is the wrong choice: support runs through tickets, with Slack support only on the top plans. SMTP2GO suits that need better.

SendGrid, now part of Twilio, has been a default choice for app email for years, and it still covers the most ground: an SMTP relay, a web API with client libraries in the common languages, an inbound parse webhook and a separate Marketing Campaigns product for newsletters. If your company already pays Twilio for text messages, keeping email on the same account is convenient.

SendGrid no longer has a free plan for new accounts. You get a 60-day trial that sends 100 emails a day, with no card needed. Email API Essentials starts at $19.95 a month and suits senders of 50,000 to 100,000 emails a month. Pro starts at $89.95 a month and adds a dedicated IP, 2,500 email address validations, single sign-on and EU data residency. Premier is priced by quote. Marketing Campaigns is a separate subscription, so budget for both if you want campaigns as well as app email.

The trade-off is price at the low end. A small business sending 10,000 emails a month pays $19.95 here against $15 at Postmark or SMTP2GO, and once the 60-day trial ends there is no free tier to fall back on.

Mailjet puts an SMTP relay and APIs next to an email editor and a form builder, so the developer wiring up order emails and the marketer writing the newsletter can work in the same account. It also has a parse API for inbound email and supports MJML for coding responsive emails.

The free plan is generous by the month: 6,000 emails, 1,000 contacts, the APIs, SMTP relay, webhooks, the email editor and a form builder. The catch is a cap of 200 emails a day, so a busy sale day can hit the limit. Starter costs $9 a month for 8,000 emails and removes the daily cap. Higher plans add segmentation, automations, landing pages, A/B testing and more email volume.

Mailjet suits a small team that sends a few thousand emails a week across both kinds of mail and wants one bill. A developer who only needs a relay will find Postmark or Resend simpler, and a heavy sender will pay less at Amazon SES.

MailerSend is an email API and SMTP relay with a drag-and-drop template builder that non-developers can use. Its Hobby plan is the cheapest paid entry point here: $7 a month, or $5.60 a month billed yearly, for 5,000 emails, with extra emails at $1.50 per 1,000. That suits a side project or a small store that has outgrown a free tier.

The free plan sends 500 emails a month through the API and SMTP relay. Hobby adds bulk sending and user roles but allows one sending domain, ten templates and one day of activity data, and the MailerSend logo stays on. Starter costs $35 a month for 50,000 emails, removes the logo, raises the limits to ten domains and 250 templates, keeps seven days of activity and adds an SMS API for the US and Canada. Professional costs $110 a month for 50,000 emails and keeps 30 days of activity. Yearly billing takes 10% off Starter and Professional.

Every new account gets a 14-day trial of Professional features. When it ends, MailerSend moves you to the free plan instead of charging you.

The one-day log on Hobby is short. If you often need to check whether a specific email went out last week, Starter or a provider like Postmark with 45 days of history fits better.

Elastic Email sells an Email API with an SMTP relay on its own price list, separate from its email marketing plans. The API's Starter plan costs $19 a month for up to 50,000 emails, which works out to $0.38 per 1,000, a fraction of what Postmark charges per email at that volume. Higher tiers go up to 10 million emails a month.

The free plan sends 3,000 emails a month with a limit of 100 a day. Starter covers the API, SMTP relay, email designer, suppression management, email verification and tracking. Pro costs $49 a month for the same 50,000 emails and adds inbound email processing, webhooks, sub accounts, user management and reseller features, which matter to agencies that send for clients. A private IP costs $40 or $50 a month; the price table lists both figures without saying which plan each belongs to.

The weak spot is history. Starter keeps email logs for three days and Pro for seven, so you can't look back far when a customer asks about a missing message. Webhooks, which most apps use to record bounces automatically, need Pro.