SendGrid pricing in 2026: both price lists, the real bill, and where it gets expensive

Most searches for SendGrid pricing want one number: what will this cost me each month? There is no single number to give, because SendGrid, which Twilio owns, sells two products. Each has its own plans and its own way of counting.

• The Email API is for mail your application sends: receipts, password resets, notifications. It is priced on how many emails you send in a month. Sending over SMTP counts too.
• Marketing Campaigns is for newsletters and campaigns built in SendGrid’s editor. It is priced mainly on how many contacts you store, with a monthly send allowance tied to that contact count.

Twilio’s FAQ is explicit: if you want both, “you will need to purchase the email plans separately”. One account can hold both, but they bill separately. Emails sent through Marketing Campaigns “will be counted separately from any emails you send via the Email API”. A product that sends receipts and a monthly newsletter therefore pays two subscriptions. A bill estimate has to add them together.

The address has changed too. Whether you searched for “sendgrids” or typed the old sendgrid.com pricing address, you now land on Twilio’s site. The figures below come from the pages and the PDF Twilio publishes there, listed under Sources at the foot of this post.

The SendGrid Email API pricing page sorts plans by the volume you pick, from under 3,000 emails a month up to 5,000,000 and beyond. The rate per extra email comes from Twilio’s downloadable Email API plan comparison, because the web page only says that “overages may apply”.

Two things stand out. First, Essentials 100K and Pro 100K send the same 100,000 emails for $34.95 and $89.95. The $55 difference buys features, not volume. Second, the overage rate falls as the plan grows, so going over a small plan costs much more per email than going over a large one.

SendGrid Marketing Campaigns pricing is a second ladder with two tiers. You choose by the contacts you store and the emails you send, and each plan caps both. Basic allows three sends per contact a month; Advanced allows five.

The difference between the tiers is more than volume. On the plan cards, Basic lists the design and code editors, segmentation, and A/B testing. It does not list automation. Advanced adds automation and access to dedicated IPs. It also raises email-testing credits from 10 to 60, signup forms from 5 to 15, and teammates from 1 to 1,000. So if your campaigns include a welcome series or anything triggered by a contact’s actions, the plan to price is Advanced, not Basic.

The overage on Marketing Campaigns is also per contact as well as per email. Twilio’s table is headed “cost per extra email or contact”, so a list that grows past its tier is billed for the extra contacts, whether or not you send to them.

Not on the current price lists. Both pricing pages put a Free Trial at the bottom of the ladder, at “$0/mo for 60 days”. The Email API page puts it this way: the trial “runs $0 for 60 days and lets you send 100 emails a day — no credit card, no commitment”. The Marketing Campaigns version covers 100 contacts and 100 emails a day for the same 60 days, and says “you can’t exceed these limitations”.

The pages are not consistent. Buttons still say “Start with our free plan”, and an older answer in the Marketing Campaigns FAQ still describes a “Free Marketing Campaigns Plan” of 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. That answer contradicts the price table above it on the same page. We are quoting both rather than guessing which one Twilio meant. Neither page says what happens to a trial account on day 61, beyond inviting you to upgrade.

In practice, the SendGrid free plan is now a two-month evaluation, not a place to run a small project indefinitely. A side project that sends a few hundred emails a month will need Essentials once the trial ends: $19.95 a month, mostly for allowance it never uses.

The base plan is only part of the bill. These are the extras SendGrid charges for, and what each one costs where Twilio says.

• Overage. The Marketing Campaigns FAQ says going over your plan means “a small overage fee on a per-email basis”, added to the next month’s invoice. On the Email API the rates run from $0.00133 an email on Essentials 50K down to $0.00047 on Pro 2.5M. Twilio’s own advice: if you are “regularly pushing your limit, upgrading to the next tier usually beats paying overages”.
• Dedicated IPs. Pro and Premier include one. Twilio’s invoice guide says extra addresses “cost $30.00/month each and are available on Pro API and Advanced Marketing Campaigns plans and above”. Essentials cannot buy one, so getting a dedicated IP means moving from $34.95 to at least $89.95.
• Email validation. The validation API comes with 2,500 validations on Pro and 5,000 on Premier. Essentials gets none. The pricing pages do not publish a price per extra validation.
• Email activity history. Searchable activity is three days on Essentials and seven on Pro. More history is “available for purchase”, at a price the pages do not publish.
• Support and services. Personalised support and expert services are “available for purchase” on every paid plan, again without a published price.

Where a price is not published, we say so rather than estimate it. If one of these matters to your decision, ask Twilio for it in writing.

Here is what you actually pay at three common volumes for transactional mail. Each row uses the cheapest plan that covers the volume, at list price before tax. The Rasket column uses Rasket’s pricing page. How we price is explained in the next section.

The volume tiers are close to identical. SendGrid is five cents cheaper at each step, and $30 cheaper once you need a dedicated IP. Rasket’s first paid tiers do not offer one; SendGrid’s Pro includes it.

Overage is where the two diverge. Say you are on the 50,000 plan and send 60,000 one month. SendGrid charges 10,000 × $0.00133 = $13.30 on top of $19.95, so $33.25. Rasket charges ten buckets of 1,000 at $0.60, so $6 on top of $20, or $26. On Rasket, pay-as-you-go is off by default. With it off, a send past the quota is refused rather than billed. Turn it on if you would rather pay than stop.

The entry price is low. These are the four places the bill grows faster than the volume.

• Running both products. Receipts through the Email API plus a monthly newsletter to 10,000 people means Essentials 50K plus Marketing Campaigns. With Basic 10K that is $19.95 + $25 = $44.95 a month. Add any automation and it becomes Advanced 10K: $19.95 + $60 = $79.95.
• Overage on a small plan. At $1.33 per extra thousand, Essentials 50K has the highest rate on the Email API list. A launch week, a password-reset storm or a retry loop all bill at that rate.
• Features gated on Pro. A dedicated IP, subusers for separate customers or brands, single sign-on and more than one teammate all start at Pro. That moves a 100,000-email bill from $34.95 to $89.95 even though the volume has not changed.
• Contacts you keep but rarely email. Marketing Campaigns bills extra contacts as well as extra emails. A list that grows past its tier costs money every month, whether or not you send to it.

Rasket’s price list has four plans. Free is 100 emails a day, as a plan rather than a trial. Pro costs $20 for 50,000 emails a month or $35 for 100,000. Scale starts at $90 for 100,000 and steps up to $1,150 for 2,500,000. Custom covers anything beyond that. Overage is sold in buckets of 1,000: $0.60 on Pro, and on Scale a rate that steps down from $0.60 to $0.25 as the tier grows.

Campaigns are a separate add-on, bought on the same account as the transactional API rather than as a second subscription. Like SendGrid, Rasket prices them on contacts, with sending under fair use rather than a fixed allowance. Every team gets 1,000 contacts for free. After that it is $25 a month for 5,000, $50 for 10,000, $175 for 50,000 and $350 for 100,000. Automations are not a separate tier. Every plan includes 10,000 runs a month, and further runs cost $0.0015 each.

For the row-by-row picture beyond price, see Rasket vs SendGrid, which compares inbound mail, webhooks, idempotency and SDKs, all sourced. If you are leaving SendGrid and want more than one option, start with the SendGrid alternatives. The seven-provider comparison puts both of us next to five others.

On transactional volume alone, the two price lists are close enough that price should not decide it. Five cents a month is not a reason to migrate anything. Price becomes the deciding factor in three situations:

• You want a dedicated IP and send around 100,000 a month. SendGrid Pro costs less at that point, and the IP is included.
• Your volume is spiky. If you regularly go over your plan for a few days a month, overage decides the bill, and Rasket’s rate is less than half of Essentials 50K’s.
• You send campaigns as well as transactional mail. Add the two SendGrid subscriptions together before comparing. Then check whether you need automation, which decides between Basic and Advanced.

Whichever you choose, estimate from your own monthly volume and contact count, not from the “starting at” figure on either page. The cheapest plan is the one that fits the month you actually have, including the busy one.