SendGrid pricing in 2026: both price lists, worked bills, and when it is cheaper

SendGrid, which Twilio owns, sells two products that are bought and counted separately. The Email API carries mail your application sends (receipts, password resets, alerts) through the API or over SMTP, and is priced on emails a month. Marketing Campaigns is the newsletter editor, priced on the contacts you store, with a cap on how many emails you can send them.

Twilio’s FAQ says that to use both “you will need to purchase the email plans separately”, and that campaign emails “will be counted separately from any emails you send via the Email API”. An email counts per recipient “whether the email is ultimately deferred or sent to spam”.

Overage is what you pay for emails past your plan’s monthly allowance. The web page says only that “overages may apply”; the PDF prints the rate per email, converted here to per 1,000.

Essentials 100K and Pro 100K send the same 100,000 emails for $34.95 and $89.95. The $55 buys what Twilio lists as “dedicated IPs, subuser management, single sign-on, and email testing”:

• a dedicated IP, explained below;
• subusers, separate sending accounts under one bill, for agencies or products with several brands;
• single sign-on (SSO), so staff log in with the company’s identity provider, and up to 1,000 teammates instead of one;
• 2,500 address validations (an API that checks an address exists before you mail it) and seven days of searchable email logs instead of three.

The log window is the one most teams feel first: on Essentials, a customer who says a password reset never arrived four days ago is past what you can search.

Each tier caps two things: the contacts you store and the emails you send in a month. Basic allows three emails per contact a month and Advanced five. Twilio’s overage table is headed “cost per extra email or contact”, so a list that grows past its tier costs more even in a month you do not mail it.

Extra emails or contacts cost from $0.0023 each on Basic 100K to $0.0075 on Advanced 10K. Basic has the design and code editors, segments and A/B tests but no automation; a welcome series or any email triggered by what a contact does needs Advanced, which at 10,000 contacts costs $35 more than Basic.

Sending stops, because there is no SendGrid free plan to fall back to: Twilio retired its free Email API and Marketing Campaigns plans in a changelog notice of 28 May 2025, and new accounts now get a 60-day trial at 100 emails a day (100 contacts on the campaigns side). Twilio’s trial article says that when it ends, “any active email send integration using your account’s API keys will stop sending messages” and the Marketing console closes. Your contacts are “not deleted”, but the only way back to them is to upgrade Marketing Campaigns.

One Marketing Campaigns FAQ answer still describes a free plan of 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month; the 2025 notice is newer, so treat that answer as out of date. A side project should plan on Essentials at $19.95 from day 61.

A dedicated IP sends only your mail. It does not replace your domain’s record: Google’s sender guidelines say “Gmail tracks volume, feedback, and limits per domain and IP address”, and a new IP starts with no history, so it has to be warmed up and then fed steady volume.

There is no industry threshold. Ours, the one Rasket’s dashboard applies before it suggests the add-on, is about 5,000 emails a day (roughly 150,000 a month). Below it, or if most of your mail goes out in one monthly burst, stay on a shared pool.

On SendGrid, Pro and Premier include one, and the invoice guide says extra addresses “cost $30.00/month each” on “Pro API and Advanced Marketing Campaigns plans and above”. Twilio’s plan comparison also lists automated dedicated-IP warm-up. Essentials cannot have one, so the cheapest way in is Pro 100K at $89.95. Its 100,000 emails are about 3,300 a day, under that threshold, so buy Pro for the IP only if you will grow past it.

• Extra log history: “available for purchase”, at a price the pricing pages do not publish. More address validations come with Premier, priced by sales.
• Email-testing credits (previews of how a message renders in different inboxes): packs from 30 credits a month for $18.00 to 2,000 for $800.00, per the Marketing Campaigns FAQ.
• Personalised support and expert services: for purchase on every paid Email API plan, price unpublished.

Where Twilio publishes no price, ask for one in writing before you commit.

A busy month. On Essentials 50K, sending 60,000 adds 10,000 × $1.33 per 1,000, so the month is $33.25. Essentials 100K costs $34.95, so moving up only pays once you regularly pass about 61,300 emails a month. Twilio’s own advice is that if you are “regularly pushing your limit, upgrading to the next tier usually beats paying overages”.

The worst month. You cannot set a spending cap on SendGrid, but since 25 June 2026 Twilio stops Essentials and Pro Email API accounts at 10 times the plan’s emails, per its support article. On Essentials 50K that is 500,000 emails, a month of $618.45.

Between tiers. At 300,000 emails, Pro 300K costs $249, but Essentials 100K plus 200,000 emails of overage comes to $210.95. The cheaper route gives up Pro’s features, so price both.

Receipts plus a list. Each product needs both subscriptions. These three months are the ones used in the comparison below. The busy app’s 5,000 contacts land on Basic 10K because 4 sends to them are 20,000 emails, over the 15,000 that Basic 5K allows.

If you run a hosted store, check whether you need the Email API at all: Shopify, for one, sends order emails itself (“notifications are triggered by specific events such as order placement”, per its help centre). Then only the newsletter is a cost, and the campaign rows of the second table below are the ones to compare.

Rasket sells one plan per project, and every email counts against its one monthly allowance: API and SMTP sends, campaigns and flows (automations) alike. A newsletter to 2,000 people uses 2,000 of the same emails your receipts use; there is no separate campaign email meter, though contacts are counted, as below. Flows are not billed, up to a fair-use 250,000 runs a month. Both companies name a tier Pro, so on this page every tier carries its company’s name: SendGrid Pro 100K is not Rasket Pro 100,000.

Each tier also includes some contacts. Past them, you pay per 1,000 contacts, and a part of 1,000 counts as a whole one. Example: 5,000 contacts on Rasket Pro 50,000, which includes 4,500, is 500 over, so 1 × $8.80: the month is $28.80. Unsubscribed and suppressed addresses are not counted. The paid ladder, from Rasket’s pricing page:

Below the ladder, Rasket’s Free plan has no end date: 3,000 emails a month (100 emails a day) and 900 contacts, once you verify a domain and add a payment method that is not charged.

Rasket Pro and Rasket Scale both sell 100,000 emails, for $35 and $90. The $55 buys 13,500 contacts instead of 6,750, 1,000 domains instead of 10, priority support, and the right to add single sign-on or a dedicated IP, which Scale is the first plan to sell. Pick Scale if you need one of those or your list passes 12,750 contacts, where Pro’s extra contacts make it the dearer of the two; otherwise Pro is the same sending for less.

The tables below follow fixed rules rather than picked results. For each use they price the cheapest SendGrid route and the Rasket tier that gives the lowest month once extra emails and contacts are added, which is why a contact-heavy list can land on a tier with more emails than it sends.

What decides most rows is overage: Rasket charges $0.60 per 1,000 on Pro, so it wins between SendGrid’s tiers and loses at them. Automation does not change the winner on its own: SendGrid Advanced 10K is still cheaper for 10,000 contacts. Add receipts and it depends on the tier: in the SaaS month, SendGrid with Basic is cheaper than Rasket, and SendGrid with Advanced is dearer. Prices here are monthly; yearly billing takes 20% off Rasket’s plan price.

Stay on SendGrid if:

• most of your mail is newsletters to a large list;
• you need a dedicated IP at around 100,000 emails a month;
• you send about 1.4 to 1.6 or 2.4 to 2.5 million emails a month, where SendGrid’s largest tiers are cheaper;
• you already buy Twilio’s other products, such as SMS, and want one vendor.

Rasket is likely to cost less if:

• your overage line is the problem, because your volume is spiky;
• you send 110,000 to 2,500,000 emails a month, outside those ranges;
• you pay for two SendGrid products to send receipts and a small newsletter.