SendGrid Pricing 2026: Essentials, Pro and the Retired Free Plan

SendGrid's Email API costs $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails on Essentials, $34.95 for 100,000, and from $89.95 a month on Pro, which runs from 100,000 to 2.5 million emails. Premier is a custom quote. There is no free plan any more: new accounts get a 60-day trial capped at 100 emails a day. Prices read on Twilio SendGrid's Email API pricing page, October 2026, all billed monthly.

The jump that matters is Essentials to Pro. At 100,000 emails the same volume costs about two and a half times as much on Pro, and the $55 difference buys a dedicated IP, subusers and single sign-on rather than more sending. Most small apps should stay on Essentials until deliverability or team structure forces the move.

Toolradar data: on SendGrid's Toolradar record, the Essentials entry plan ranks #49 of 84 for price among email tools with a verified entry price, where the median entry plan is $15 a month, and SendGrid is listed as an alternative to 26 other tools, #8 of 178 in the email category, as of October 2026. It is cross-shopped constantly and priced in the middle of the pack. Dupple's own newsletters are sent on beehiiv, not on SendGrid.

Plan	Monthly emails	Price per month	Price per 1,000 emails	What it adds
Free trial	100 a day, 60 days	$0	n/a	Analytics, deliverability tools, dynamic template editor
Essentials 50k	50,000	$19.95	$0.40	Core API and SMTP sending, 2 event webhooks, 1 teammate
Essentials 100k	100,000	$34.95	$0.35	Same features, twice the volume
Pro 100k	100,000	$89.95	$0.90	Dedicated IP, subusers, SSO, 1,000 teammates, 2,500 validations
Pro 300k	300,000	$249	$0.83	Same Pro features
Pro 700k	700,000	$499	$0.71	Same Pro features
Pro 1.5M	1,500,000	$799	$0.53	Same Pro features
Pro 2.5M	2,500,000	$1,099	$0.44	Same Pro features
Premier	Custom	Custom pricing	Custom	5,000 validations, expert program management

The per-1,000 column is our arithmetic from SendGrid's listed prices at each stop on its volume slider.

What happened to the SendGrid free plan?

Twilio retired it in 2025, and the trial that replaced it is the only $0 option left. A Twilio changelog entry dated May 28, 2025 announced the end of the free Email API and free Marketing Campaigns plans: existing free accounts kept their limits for 60 more days, then sending was paused and Marketing Campaigns tools were switched off. Free accounts storing more than 100 contacts had their contacts deleted, with no restore after upgrading.

New accounts have received a 60-day trial instead since March 25, 2025, according to SendGrid's trial overview article. The trial allows 100 emails a day through the API or SMTP, gives access to most Essentials features, and needs no credit card. A separate Marketing Campaigns trial runs alongside it with 100 emails a day and 100 stored contacts.

When the trial ends, mail stops. Any integration using the account's API keys stops sending, and support cannot restore sending on its own; only an upgrade does. Put the upgrade date in your calendar on day one, because a password reset flow that silently dies on day 61 is the most expensive way to discover the policy. If you need a permanent free tier for a side project, our best transactional email APIs list ranks the services that still have one.

Essentials: cheap sending, few controls

Essentials is the cheapest way onto SendGrid, and its two tiers reward the larger one: doubling the volume from the 50,000 tier to the 100,000 tier adds less than the first tier costs, so the larger tier has the lower per-email rate of the two. Both include the purpose-built mail transfer agent, SPF and DKIM domain authentication, suppression management, real-time analytics, and 3 days of searchable email activity.

The limits are about people and reputation. Essentials includes one teammate and no dedicated IP, so all your mail shares SendGrid's IP pools and only one extra login can reach the console. It also has no subuser management, which is how agencies and multi-tenant SaaS products separate one customer's sending from another's.

For a single product sending receipts, password resets and notifications, those gaps rarely matter. A startup sending 40,000 transactional emails a month fits the 50,000 tier with headroom for a busy launch week.

Pro: what the extra money buys

Pro starts at 100,000 emails and climbs through 300,000 ($249), 700,000 ($499) and 1.5 million ($799) to 2.5 million emails ($1,099). Every tier carries the same feature set, so the price moves with volume only.

Pro is a deliverability and governance plan. It includes one dedicated IP with automated warm-up and IP pooling, subuser management, single sign-on, up to 1,000 teammates, 5 event webhooks, 7 days of searchable activity, template testing and 2,500 email validations. Those are the features a company buys when a shared IP's reputation is a risk it will not take, or when ten engineers and a support team need their own logins. For what single sign-on costs from login providers themselves, see our authentication pricing comparison.

Per email, Pro falls fast with volume: from $0.90 per 1,000 at the entry tier to $0.44 at 2.5 million. The entry tier is the expensive one. An app at 100,000 emails that does not need a dedicated IP pays more than twice the Essentials price for features it does not use.

Premier and custom volume

Premier has no list price. SendGrid's FAQ describes it as custom volume, more email validations (5,000 against Pro's 2,500) and expert email program management, and points anyone sending more than the Pro slider covers to sales. Budget for a negotiation above 2.5 million emails a month rather than extrapolating from the Pro tiers.

Add-ons and overages

Three charges sit outside the plan price.

• Extra dedicated IPs cost $30 per IP per month, available on Pro and above, according to SendGrid's dedicated IP article. You can add one new IP a month from the console; more needs support.
• Overages. The pricing page says only that overage charges may apply above your plan's volume. SendGrid's invoice guide uses Pro 100K as its example, at $0.001 per extra email: 60,000 emails over the limit cost $60. Check your own plan's rate before relying on it.
• Paid extras such as additional email activity history, expert services and personalized support are listed as available for purchase without public prices.

The overage example is a warning. At $1 per 1,000 extra emails, a Pro 100k account that sends 160,000 in a month pays the plan price plus $60, about $150, while the 300,000 tier costs $249. Overages are cheaper than upgrading for an occasional spike, but a steady 200,000 a month belongs on a bigger tier. On Essentials the page publishes no overage rate at all, so a sustained overrun is a reason to move up rather than to guess.

Marketing Campaigns is a separate bill

SendGrid sells newsletters and campaigns as a second product with its own plans, priced by stored contacts and monthly sends on the Marketing Campaigns pricing page. It does not share the Email API's volume.

Marketing Campaigns plan	Contacts	Emails per month	Price per month
Basic 5k	5,000	15,000	$15
Basic 10k	10,000	30,000	$25
Basic 100k	100,000	300,000	$200
Advanced 10k	10,000	50,000	$60
Advanced 100k	100,000	500,000	$450
Advanced 200k	200,000	1,000,000	$900

An app that sends both transactional mail and a product newsletter pays twice. Essentials 100k plus Basic 10k comes to $59.95 a month. Advanced is also the Marketing Campaigns tier where dedicated IPs become available, per SendGrid's invoice guide, which is part of why the same 10,000 contacts cost $60 on Advanced against $25 on Basic.

Four monthly bills

These use SendGrid's list prices, billed monthly, before taxes.

Scenario	Plan choice	Monthly cost
SaaS app, 40,000 transactional emails	Essentials 50k	$19.95
Same app at 100,000 emails, plus a 10,000-contact newsletter	Essentials 100k + Marketing Campaigns Basic 10k	$59.95
Fintech app at 100,000 emails that needs its own IP and SSO	Pro 100k	$89.95
Agency on Pro 300k with a second dedicated IP for one client	Pro 300k + one extra IP	$279

The third row is the decision most teams face. A dedicated IP is worth paying for when your volume is high and steady enough to keep it warm, and when one bad campaign on a shared pool would hurt. Below that, Essentials on shared IPs is the cheaper and often equally reliable choice.

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How SendGrid compares on price

At 50,000 emails, SendGrid's Essentials is among the cheapest paid options. Resend Pro costs $20 for the same volume and $35 for 100,000, read on Resend's pricing page, and it keeps a permanent free plan of 3,000 emails a month. Mailgun's Foundation plan costs $35 a month for 50,000 emails, after one free month, on Mailgun's pricing page. Postmark's Basic plan covers 10,000 emails at the same entry price as Mailgun Basic, with extra emails at $1.80 per 1,000, on Postmark's pricing page.

Service	Entry paid plan	Free option
SendGrid	Essentials, 50,000 emails	60-day trial, 100 a day
Resend	Pro, 50,000 emails	Permanent, 3,000 a month
Mailgun	Basic, 10,000 emails at $15	100 emails a day
Postmark	Basic, 10,000 emails at $15	100 emails a month, no expiry

SendGrid's edge is the bundled IP at scale, not the entry price. Resend matches it at 50,000 and keeps a free tier, while SendGrid bundles a dedicated IP from its first Pro tier where Resend sells one only on Scale. The full volume-by-volume comparison is in Resend vs SendGrid, and the Resend review covers its plans in depth. Product records sit on Resend, Mailgun and Postmark on Toolradar.

If email is one of several APIs on your bill, Twilio's SMS pricing sits under the same company, the cheapest SMS APIs compares the alternatives, and cloud free tiers compared covers the hosting side. Early-stage teams can also check best dev tools for startups and best backend-as-a-service platforms.

How we checked these prices

Louis Corneloup, founder of Dupple and Toolradar, wrote this breakdown for Devshot readers. Plan prices, volumes and features come from Twilio SendGrid's Email API pricing page and Marketing Campaigns pricing page; the free plan retirement from Twilio's changelog; trial terms, IP and overage figures from SendGrid's support articles, all read in October 2026. Competitor prices come from the vendors' own pricing pages the same month. The per-1,000 rates and monthly bills are our own arithmetic from those listed prices. The price rank comes from Toolradar's SendGrid record.

FAQ

How much does SendGrid cost in 2026?

The SendGrid Email API costs $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails or $34.95 for 100,000 on Essentials, and Pro runs from $89.95 a month for 100,000 emails to $1,099 for 2.5 million. Premier is custom. Prices are monthly, as listed on Twilio SendGrid's pricing page in October 2026.

Is SendGrid still free?

No. Twilio retired the free Email API and Marketing Campaigns plans from May 28, 2025. New accounts get a 60-day trial with 100 emails a day and no credit card, and sending stops when the trial ends unless you upgrade to a paid plan.

What is the difference between SendGrid Essentials and Pro?

Essentials covers core sending, analytics and deliverability tools with one teammate and shared IPs. Pro adds a dedicated IP, subuser management, single sign-on, up to 1,000 teammates, 2,500 email validations and longer activity history. At 100,000 emails a month, Pro costs more than twice the Essentials price for the same volume.

Does SendGrid charge overages?

Yes, the pricing page says overage charges may apply above your plan's volume. SendGrid's invoice guide shows Pro 100K billing $0.001 per extra email, so 60,000 extra emails cost $60. For a steady overrun, the next volume tier is usually cheaper than paying overages every month.

How much is a dedicated IP on SendGrid?

Pro and Premier plans include one dedicated IP. Each additional IP costs $30 a month, per SendGrid's support documentation, and you can add one per month from the console. Essentials plans do not include a dedicated IP.

Is SendGrid cheaper than Resend?

At 50,000 emails they are almost identical: SendGrid Essentials is $19.95 a month and Resend Pro is $20. Resend keeps a permanent free plan of 3,000 emails a month, while SendGrid offers only a 60-day trial. SendGrid includes a dedicated IP from its Pro plan, where Resend sells one only as a Scale add-on.

Does SendGrid offer annual billing?

The Email API pricing page lists monthly prices only and shows no yearly discount. Premier pricing is negotiated, so commitment terms belong in that sales conversation.

Cite this: Devshot, "SendGrid Pricing 2026: Essentials, Pro and the Retired Free Plan", October 2026.

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