SendGrid pricing in 2026

The famous forever-free 100 emails a day is gone. What replaced it is a 60-day trial, two separately billed products, and a contact-storage model that bills people you cannot email.

SendGrid has had no free plan since July 26, 2025. Twilio announced the retirement on May 27, 2025, gave existing free accounts 60 days, and then cut sending off entirely. What new accounts get now is a 60-day trial (100 emails a day, 100 contacts), after which you pay at least $19.95 a month or stop sending. A decade of "start free on SendGrid" tutorials went stale in one changelog post.

SendGrid sits in the same dataset as the other 13 providers in our email pricing guide. All SendGrid figures were checked August 7, 2026 against Twilio's official pricing pages; two upper Pro tiers come from a March 2026 secondary price sheet because the official page hides those steps behind a JavaScript selector. One navigation note: sendgrid.com/pricing now 301-redirects into twilio.com. The brand is being absorbed into its 2019 acquirer (a roughly $3B deal), and the pricing lives on Twilio's domain.

Two products, two bills

The single most misunderstood thing about SendGrid pricing: it is two products, purchased and billed separately.

The Email API is the transactional relay, the thing developers mean when they say SendGrid. It sends your app's receipts, resets, and notifications over SMTP or REST, and it prices purely by monthly email volume. It stores no marketing lists.

Marketing Campaigns is the newsletter product. It prices by stored contacts, starts at $15 a month, and bills you for every contact in storage, including people who have unsubscribed. If you need both app email and a newsletter, you are signing up for both bills.

SendGrid (Twilio) plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing	What you get
Free Trial	$0 per month flat, 60 days only	n/a	100 emails/day, 100 contacts, 1 teammate; sending stops entirely when the 60-day trial ends
Email API Essentials 50K	$19.95 per month flat	n/a	50,000 emails/mo, 1 teammate, 2 event webhooks, no dedicated IP; overage $0.0013/email
Email API Essentials 100K	$34.95 per month flat	n/a	100,000 emails/mo, 1 teammate, no dedicated IP; overage $0.0009/email
Email API Pro 100K	$89.95 per month flat	n/a	100,000 emails/mo, dedicated IP included, up to 1,000 teammates, 5 event webhooks, 2,500 email validations/mo; overage $0.0011/email
Email API Pro 300K	$249 per month flat	n/a	300,000 emails/mo; overage $0.0009/email
Email API Pro 700K	$499 per month flat	n/a	700,000 emails/mo; overage $0.0008/email
Email API Pro 1.5M	$799 per month flat	n/a	1,500,000 emails/mo; overage $0.0006/email (price via Mar-2026 secondary sheet; official selector is JS-gated)
Email API Pro 2.5M	$1,099 per month flat	n/a	2,500,000 emails/mo; overage $0.0005/email (price via Mar-2026 secondary sheet; official selector is JS-gated)
Marketing Campaigns Basic 5K	$15 at 5,000 contacts (smallest paid tier)	n/a	5,000 stored contacts (unsubscribed count too) + 15,000 emails/mo, 1 teammate, no automation; overage $0.0040 per extra email/contact
Marketing Campaigns Basic 10K	$25 at 10,000 contacts	n/a	10,000 contacts + 30,000 emails/mo; overage $0.0030 per extra email/contact
Marketing Campaigns Advanced 10K	$60 at 10,000 contacts	n/a	10,000 contacts + 50,000 emails/mo, automation, dedicated IP access, 1,000 teammates; overage $0.0075

Prices checked August 2026 against the SendGrid (Twilio) pricing page.

The API tiers get honestly cheap per email as volume climbs: overage rates fall from $0.0013 per email on Essentials 50K to $0.0005 at the 2.5M tier. Pro at $89.95 includes a dedicated IP, which is real value if you send enough to keep one warm. Also worth knowing: 2026 price sheets show Pro 700K at $499 where pre-2025 sheets listed $449, a quiet 11% increase on an upper tier that arrived alongside the free-tier retirement. The $19.95 entry price stayed put, and the raise landed where fewer people compare.

The math nobody shows

The contact-storage model on Marketing Campaigns produces two surprises that the pricing page does not walk you through.

First, the smallest paid tier is 5,000 contacts. There is no 500 or 1,000 tier; the ladder jumps from the 100-contact trial straight to 5,000. A 300-subscriber newsletter pays the same $15 as a 5,000-subscriber one. And because stored contacts include unsubscribed ones, your billable count only ratchets up.

Second, the email allowance is small relative to the contact allowance, and the gap fills with overage fees. Basic 5K includes 15,000 emails a month; a weekly newsletter to 5,000 subscribers sends about 21,700. Here is the real cost of a weekly newsletter on Marketing Campaigns Basic, computed from the published overage rates:

List size	Weekly-send volume/mo	Plan + allowance	Overage	Real monthly cost
5,000	~21,700 emails	Basic 5K: $15, 15,000 emails	~6,700 x $0.0040 = ~$27	~$42
10,000	~43,300 emails	Basic 10K: $25, 30,000 emails	~13,300 x $0.0030 = ~$40	~$65

So the $15 newsletter plan is a $42 newsletter plan for a normal weekly cadence. For contrast, MailerLite at 5,000 subscribers is $44.10 a month on annual billing with the sending allowance built in, and a LetterDuck domain is $50 flat with subscribers and sends uncounted (behind a warm-up throttle).

One more absence: there is no annual-billing discount anywhere on SendGrid. Every price above is monthly billing because monthly billing is all that exists; negotiated discounts start around $12k a year of committed spend.

What it costs at your list size

Monthly cost at	SendGrid (Twilio)	LetterDuck
500 subscribers	$15	$50 flat
1,000 subscribers	$15	$50 flat
5,000 subscribers	$15	$50 flat
10,000 subscribers	$25	$50 flat

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. SendGrid (Twilio): Marketing Campaigns Basic, the product needed for list newsletters. The smallest paid contact tier is 5,000, so smaller lists pay the same. Volume caps mean a weekly newsletter usually adds overage charges. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

The table uses Marketing Campaigns Basic, the product a list-based newsletter actually requires. It looks flat because of the 5,000-contact minimum: 500, 1,000, and 5,000 subscribers all pay the same $15 base. The overage math above is the number that moves.

When AWS SES is the answer instead

If you are comfortable in an AWS console, SES still undercuts SendGrid heavily, but check which price applies to you: as of August 2026 Amazon leads with plan pricing from $0.16 per 1,000 emails, and the widely quoted $0.10 now sits under a collapsed a la carte section. Fully used, SendGrid's Essentials 50K works out to $0.40 per 1,000. The same 50,000 emails on SES is $8 on the entry plan against $19.95, and the gap widens at Pro volumes.

The honest tradeoffs: SES gives you an API and almost nothing else. No campaign UI, no template gallery, no contact storage, thin analytics, and reputation management is entirely on you. It is also unforgiving: SES can pause a whole account around 5% bounce or 0.1% complaint rates. That threshold is why we built automatic suppression into our own send path before we ever needed SES; if you go the SES route, build bounce and complaint suppression on day one, not after your first pause.

Choose SES when you have engineering time and volume. Choose SendGrid when you want the tooling, webhooks, and deliverability support as a product. Choose neither for a team mailbox: both are send-only pipes, and neither will receive a single reply for you.

Is SendGrid worth it?

For a developer sending app-generated email, yes, with a caveat. Essentials at $19.95 for 50,000 emails is a fair price for the SDKs, event webhooks, and per-message analytics, and Pro's bundled dedicated IP at $89.95 beats assembling the equivalent elsewhere. The caveat is support quality on the low tiers, a recurring complaint in the years since the Twilio acquisition.

For a newsletter operator, mostly no. You are buying a 5,000-contact minimum, paying for unsubscribed contacts, and eating overages on a weekly cadence. Purpose-built newsletter tools price this job better; our pricing dataset has the numbers side by side.

For a small team that wants email on its own domain, wrong category entirely. SendGrid hosts no mailboxes and receives no mail. A workspace setup covers inbound, replies, and the newsletter in one place; SendGrid covers none of those.

Common questions

Is SendGrid still free?

No. The forever-free plan (100 emails a day) was retired in 2025: announced May 27, sending stopped July 26. New accounts get a 60-day trial with 100 emails a day and 100 contacts, then must upgrade to a paid plan ($19.95/mo Email API minimum or $15/mo Marketing Campaigns) or lose sending entirely.

How much does SendGrid cost for 100,000 emails a month?

Two ways, as of August 2026: Email API Essentials 100K at $34.95 a month (no dedicated IP, 1 teammate), or Email API Pro 100K at $89.95 a month, which adds a dedicated IP, up to 1,000 teammates, and 2,500 email validations a month. All monthly billing; SendGrid offers no annual discount.

Does SendGrid charge for unsubscribed contacts?

On Marketing Campaigns, yes. Pricing is based on stored contacts, and unsubscribed contacts stay in storage and count toward your tier. Combined with the 5,000-contact minimum tier, small lists pay for a lot of headroom they cannot use.

Is SES actually cheaper than SendGrid?

Per email, substantially: SES plans start at $0.16 per 1,000 (the older $0.10 is the a la carte rate) against an effective $0.40 per 1,000 on a fully used Essentials 50K plan, both August 2026 published prices. What SES does not include: campaign tooling, contact storage, meaningful support, or forgiveness. SES can pause accounts around 5% bounce or 0.1% complaint rates, so it rewards teams that build their own suppression and monitoring.

What is the cheapest way to run a newsletter on SendGrid?

Marketing Campaigns Basic 5K at $15 a month, but budget for the send cap: 15,000 emails a month is about three sends to a 5,000-contact list. A weekly cadence adds roughly $27 a month in $0.0040-per-email overages, so plan on about $42 in practice.

What is the price of SendGrid for a small sender?

Essentials starts at $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails, and there is no free tier any more: the price SendGrid publishes now begins with a 60-day trial of 100 emails a day. For list newsletters you need Marketing Campaigns, which starts at $15 a month for 5,000 contacts.