Amazon SES's July restructure prices a 100,000-email month at $16 before add-ons

Postmark's three paid plans include the same 10,000 emails a month and differ only in what the 10,001st costs ^[14]. Setting two plans equal gives you the switch point. Basic at $15 with $1.80 per thousand is cheapest up to about 13,000 a month; Pro at $16.50 with $1.30 holds from there to 25,000; above that, Platform at $18 with $1.20 wins, and at 100,000 it bills $126 ^[2][3][16].

AWS prices SES Pro at $0.22 per thousand plus a $105 monthly base fee, and describes that fee as adding dedicated-IP infrastructure and pre-send address validation ^[4]. Both of those have separate prices. A dedicated IP runs about $24.95 a month independent of plan ^[9], and cloudburn.io, which is not an AWS source, puts Virtual Deliverability Manager at $0.07 per thousand on top of the plan rate ^[8]. Assemble the same parts on Essentials at 100,000 messages and you get $16 for sending, $7 for VDM and $24.95 for the IP: $47.95, against $127 for Pro at that volume ^[4][7]. The $79 gap holds only if Pro's dedicated-IP infrastructure is the same product as the standalone IP, and the dev.to comparison does not link Pro's feature list to the standalone price.

The rates barely matter at the small end. A thousand messages a month on Essentials bills 16 cents ^[6], which no finance team is going to notice either way. The free tiers decide it there: Resend covers 3,000 a month behind a 100-a-day cap across three domains ^[11], Mailgun about 3,000 ^[21].

At exactly 100,000, Resend's Scale plan and Mailgun's Scale plan both cost $90 ^[11][21]. The dev.to comparison calls Resend the priciest of the five well past 100K because of its flat $0.90-per-thousand overage ^[12]. That rate sits below Mailgun's $1.10 on Scale ^[21], and Postmark switches to custom sales pricing above 1.5M a month ^[15]. Above 100K, the ranking turns on negotiated rates.

Mailgun's validation add-on is the line item most likely to surprise. It bills from $1.20 per 100 checks on Basic and Foundation down to $0.80 per 100 on Scale ^[22]. A team that validates every address it sends to, at 100,000 a month on Scale, pays 1,000 units at $0.80, or $800, nearly nine times the plan fee ^[7]. A team that validates only at signup is billed on signup volume.

SendGrid is the one you cannot compute from its own page. It shows $0.0011 per email at the Pro/100K volume selector, about $110 a month, and does not state whether the $89.95 Pro base fee sits inside that number or on top. That leaves a range of $110 to $200, and the dev.to writeup tells readers to run Twilio's own calculator before committing ^[20]. One SendGrid cliff has nothing to do with volume: dedicated IPs, which isolate your sender reputation from other customers on shared infrastructure, start at Pro, so a sender doing 5,000 a month that needs that isolation pays $89.95 ^[19][18].