Transactional email is priced two ways: per thousand recipients (Amazon SES a-la-carte, Cloudflare overage) and plan floors (Resend Pro, SendGrid Essentials, Postmark, Mailgun). Mixing those models without picking a SKU is how a “cheap” $0.90/1k rate still loses to a $20 floor — or beats it, depending on volume.
Email Sending Cost is the Tools.Town cluster for that job. One engine. Dated card. Not an invoice.
Indie / Worker
Cloudflare preset — Paid floor and Resend Pro vs included quota.
AWS shop
SES preset — per recipient, free tier off, optional attachments.
SaaS founder
Canonical compare — SendGrid Essentials vs SES at 50k.
Agency
Quote 10k transactional / month with SKU names on the PDF.
Vendor grid (same engine)
| Question | Start here |
|---|---|
| All vendors at one volume | Email Cost Calculator |
| Amazon SES a-la-carte | AWS SES Cost Calculator |
| Cloudflare Email Sending | Cloudflare Email Cost Calculator |
| SendGrid Email API | SendGrid Pricing Calculator |
| Resend | Resend Pricing Calculator |
| Mailgun | Mailgun Pricing Calculator |
| Postmark | Postmark Pricing Calculator |
Presets only change which row is highlighted. The math does not fork.
SES: cheap unit rate, easy to misread
A-la-carte SES is typically $0.10 per 1,000 recipients, charged per recipient, not per message. Free allowances are off unless you confirm them on the AWS account. Details: AWS SES pricing explained. Worked path: Estimate an SES bill at 10k emails.
Cloudflare: included quota + Workers Paid floor
Public sending needs Workers Paid. You get 3,000 included emails / account / month, then $0.35 / 1,000. Verified destination addresses are free. Guide: Cloudflare Email pricing explained. Indie job: Cloudflare vs Resend for a Worker app.
Plan floors: Resend, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun
The engine picks the cheapest SKU that can send the volume. Free tiers with a 100/day cap are not production prices when the month does not fit. How that works: Per-thousand vs plan-floor pricing.
Learn the concepts
- Transactional vs marketing email pricing
- Per-thousand vs plan-floor email pricing
- Email sending cost checklist before you pick an ESP
- How the Email Cost Calculator works
Comparisons
Use cases
- Estimate an SES bill at 10k emails
- Cloudflare Email vs Resend for a Worker app
- Quote transactional email for a SaaS client
Clean the list before you pay to send it
Invalid and duplicate addresses waste quota. Email Validator, Disposable Email Checker, List Ops Dedupe an email list before a campaign.
What this cluster is not
Marketing ESPs (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo marketing) price contacts, not sends. SMS, Workers request/CPU, and Lambda/S3 are different products.
Rates as of 2026-08-18 in the shipped card. Recheck vendor pages before you buy.