Transactional email for WordPress: real pricing for SendGrid, Mailgun, SES and Brevo

Anyone running a WordPress site with contact forms, password resets or order notifications eventually discovers that the shared hosting SMTP server ends up in spam. The standard solution is to rely on a dedicated transactional email service. The problem is that pricing changes frequently and includes thresholds, overages and free plans that are not directly comparable at a glance. Here's what we found from pricing lists checked on 11 October 2026, for two typical volumes: 10,000 and 50,000 emails per month.

Pricing table

Service	Free plan	10,000 emails/month	50,000 emails/month
Mailgun	100 emails/day	Basic: $15/month (10,000 included)	Foundation: $35/month (50,000 included, first month free)
Amazon SES	No fixed free plan, pay from first send	À la carte: $0.10/1,000 = $1.00/month; Essentials plan (default): $0.16/1,000 = $1.60/month	À la carte: $5.00/month; Essentials: $8.00/month
SendGrid*	60-day free trial, 100 emails/day	Essentials: $19.95/month (up to 50,000 included)	Essentials: $19.95/month (same plan)
Brevo	Free plan, up to 300 emails/day after account approval	pay-as-you-go pricing not published in figures on the price list consulted	same

*Data taken from multiple industry sources, not confirmed on the official price list at the time of verification: to be checked before relying on this figure.

Mailgun: three plans with fixed pricing

Mailgun Basic starts at $15/month and includes 10,000 emails per month, while Foundation at $35/month includes 50,000 emails per month and adds email templates, 1,000 sending domains and log retention for five days. The free plan remains at 100 emails per day, with ticket support, API access, one sending domain and basic tracking. Beyond the included threshold, extra sends on Foundation start from $1.30 per 1,000 emails in the 50k bracket.

Amazon SES: consumption-based pricing, not a plan

SES works differently: there are no included thresholds, you pay for what you send. The official AWS price list shows an à la carte rate of $0.10 per 1,000 emails, with no monthly fee. Alongside this there is now an Essentials plan, which became the default option for new accounts from 21 July 2026, costing $0.16 per 1,000 emails in the 0–10 million per month bracket, still with no fixed fee, and which adds deliverability monitoring tools. Those who want to stay on the historical lowest rate can manually switch to à la carte mode at any time.

SendGrid and Brevo: data to be verified

For SendGrid the official site was migrating to twilio.com at the time of verification and did not display the pricing table. Multiple independent pricing trackers consistently report an Essentials plan at $19.95 per month covering up to 50,000 emails and a Pro plan at $89.95 per month for 100,000 emails with dedicated IP included: plausible figures, but to be confirmed on the official page before basing a quote on them.

For Brevo the official page confirms that transactional emails are included in all plans, but does not show the figure for pay-as-you-go packages, which are useful for those sending low volumes without signing up for a monthly subscription.

The common point: SPF/DKIM mandatory

On all four services, the sending domain must be verified with SPF and DKIM configured on the DNS side: without authentication, deliverability drops and email providers (Gmail, Outlook) start moving messages to spam or rejecting them altogether. This is the first step to take, even before choosing a plan.