11 Free and Paid SMTP Services You Can Use For Transactional and Bulk Emails

Now is the age of NoOps. Even in email. The email automation industry is booming!

The young and enthusiastic DevOps people often suggest managing SMTP server on their own but a seasoned and experienced sysadmin understands that having own SMTP server for transactional as well as bulk email sending would be a hectic responsibility eventually!

This is why it is easier to rely on dedicated SMTP service providers. This is specially helpful when you are a small business and have limited human power.

In this short discussion, I'm going to list some SMTP services that offer both free and paid plans. I'll share an overview of each of them. At High On Cloud, we use at least two of these SMTP service providers extensively.

1. SendGrid

This tops our list since we rely on it for most of our web apps (Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat and Plausible Analytics). It is well trusted by developers and marketers for time-savings, scalability, and delivery expertise. I really wish their API goes open source sometime in the future.

The free plan offers 100 emails per day forever. All their plans are listed here.

2. Amazon SES

As per Amazon, Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application. Their paid plans may vary from region to region as detailed here.

3. Mailjet

Mailjet is an all-in-one e-mail platform. SMTP relay is an essential part of it. Their free plan offers 6,000 emails per month and 200 emails per day. You can discover more through their paid plans here.

4. Pabbly

Pabbly provides email marketing facilities through their own delivery servers as well as through other popular service providers. Bulk emails can be sent either through their inbuilt SMTP or by connecting through any external SMTP service.

Their free plan has restricted features (shared below). You can take a look at their plans here.

5. Sendinblue

Sendinblue provides a smart an intuitive interface for email marketing. They have both free and paid plans that you can check here.

6. SMTP.com

SMTP.com offers powerful email delivery features with their various paid plans. The platform sends billions of emails every month by handling large volumes efficiently at great speeds.

7. Postmark

Postmark is an email delivery service that specializes in transactional emails. It is not recommended for sending bulk emails, though. Their primary motivation is to ensure quick email deliveries and mitigating delays.

They offer a trial along-with a free developer plan with 100 test emails per month. Take a look at all of their plans here.

8. Inboxroad

Inboxroad specializes in personalized support for their email delivery services. Their basic plan begins at €59 per month. They also allow customization options to create your own expansive plan if your requirement is more demanding or higher than a premium one. A personal account manager handles such a requirement on a 1:1 basis.

9. SendPulse

SendPulse allows you to send email campaigns via SMTP or API with upto 12,000 emails for free. Note that their email marketing plans are different than their transactional email plans as shown here. They also offer "Pay AS you GO" options on both.

10. Mailgun

We use Mailgun for both transactional and bulk emails at Linux Handbook on Ghost. They claim to be the world's best email delivery platform. Sometime in the past they used to provide free plans but that is no longer the case. They now have a "Pay As You Grow" plan in addition to their premium plans. They also offer Enterprise based plans.

11. Mailtrap

Mailtrap is an email delivery platform for and dev teams who are looking to test, send, and control email infrastructure in one place. Its reliable SMTP service is one of its most prominent features.

The platform has a free plan that allows users to send up to 1,000 emails per month, but you can also check their paid plans here.

I hope you find a good SMTP service for your requirements. If you would like to share some of your favourite SMTP service providers, please join the conversation below. Any other suggestions, comments or feedback are always welcome!