GSuite may not have been your first choice as a SMTP solution, but it’s become increasingly popular lately because of the fact that one’s reputation is more or less safeguarded since one is mailing from Google’s servers. That’s not to say that someone couldn’t end up in spam if they domain became too abusive, but the truth is that there’s a certain advantage. With 60,000 emails (at 2,000 max per day) per month, depending on your needs, this option may be more than sufficient. Google’s platform is relatively easy to use and each email account gets 1 TB of storage (this basically means unlimited storage). With Gmail, you can technically also do this same thing for free but you’d have a max of 500 emails per day. Of course, the problem is that you would need to use a ‘@gmail.com’ email alias hypothetically, but in this case the email would still send from your host’s servers and Gmail would just be the interface.

GSuite Pricing:

• Free Plan: None
• Pricing Begins: $6/Month for 1 email (per user), but up to 30 additional email aliases included. Sending limits cap at 2,000 unique users per day.

Sendpulse may have been unknown to you, as this Ukrainian company (now located in the U.S.) started making a name for itself in 2014 with an attractive free offer that rivaled MailChimp’s. It’s clear to see that they did will for themselves; pulling in hundreds of thousands of new subscribers. They also became an omnichannel solution, adding generous push notification, email automation, and chatbot capabilities. Recently they’ve scaled back their free offering but their SMTP option remains to be an attractive offer, being priced are around 50% less than the competition. Despite its sleek platform and robust features, Sendpulse used to be plagued by less-than-ideal deliverability, however according to our testing – in recent years it seems to have been performing fairly competitively with other dominant SMTP and email marketing players. 

Sendpulse Pricing:

• Free Plan: 12,000 Emails Free
• Pricing Begins: $8.85/Month for 25,000 monthly emails.

 

The next site we found is actually a web and email hosting company catered to small business. They had a pretty solid deal – unlimited shared hosting and emails for $14.99 for the first year. So far it works pretty well, and it’s the only company I know that offers unlimited SSD storage for both hosting and emails. It’s important to point out, even though the plan is claimed to be unlimited, it should be noted that there’s a 1,000 daily email limit. Meaning that if you’re using an SMTP connection to send email, you’re going to only be able to send about 30,000 emails per month (per email) – for about $2 a month for just the email plan (or $1.25 for the first year for unlimited hosting), that’s probably the best deal so far. Another feature that’s nice that you can even test out before you buy is the hosting dashboard. It’s fairly simple to use, but you can be sure to test it out to make sure it’s a good fit for you first. This could be a good fit for a lot of people, you would need to know you’re sending needs. Do note, that they don’t offer a dedicated IP if that’s something you’re looking for. 

SMBwebhost Pricing:

• Free Plan: Yes – 1 SMTP Email (limited to only 21 emails), 5 GB Storage.
• Pricing Begins: $47/year for unlimited hosting, unlimited emails, and unlimited storage. No limits known aside from 1,000 emails per day, per email. You can get this plan for $14.99 for the first year instead. 

 

Elastic Mail has really built up their reputation lately with their sleek design, simple pricing, simple interface options, but flexible and powerful APIs. While we understand that APIs may not appeal to all businesses, their $0.09/1,000 email price point with no up-front obligations may be extremely attractive to many businesses who need that flexibility. This means that they’re just slightly cheaper than Amazon SES but they don’t have the headaches that are required with getting setup with Amazon. Elastic Mail has been around since 2010, and for much of that time since they weren’t such a big player, but recent investments within the last few years have proved otherwise. What’s nice is that since the beginning from when you open your account, they guide you through the whole journey of setting up your account. In our testing, we found that their support coupled with the onboarding process, or essentially the ability to get up and running (especially with my apps that utilize SMTP), was the best by far. It should be noted that in the last year, they’ve also added email marketing and landing page capabilities with an easy-to-use page builder that’s very similar to MailChimp’s. These arguably cost much lower than MailChimp’s offering and should be investigated but for the purposes of this review, we’ll leave it out for now.

Elastic Email Pricing:

• Free Plan: 100 emails per day for the SMTP feature.
• Pricing Begins: $.09/1,000 emails.

  SendGrid, recently acquired by Twilio, is an established SMTP provider, having brand name recognition with most developers and medium-sized businesses. What started as a light-weight startup has now become a comprehensive SMTP side-kick, with enough features that would take you one to two hours of playing with to learn. The SaaS is now arguably a bit easier to use than it used to be, with most features having been consolidated to somewhere within the left-hand menu. Like Elastic Mail, SendGrid has also added a suite of email marketing tools like autoresponder and automation features, as well as sign up forms. One of the most loved features of SendGrid is the API. Much like MailChimp, there are tons of integrations with various WordPress plugins and other SaaS services which is likely why it was so successful prior to being purchased by Twilio. The SendGrid (SMTP) pricing follows the number of emails that are sent out monthly, beginning with $14.95/up-to 50,000 emails, which is a higher start-up cost but 50,000 emails is definitely a good starting point. However, perhaps the best benefit of SendGrid is that it has a reputation for ensuring that your emails deliver. The only caveat is that as a user of SendGrid, you’ll be bound to their email-abuse policy – which may, or may not work with your style of business. 

SendGrid Pricing:

• Free Plan: 40,000 emails free for the 1st month. 100 emails/per day after the 1st month.
• Pricing Begins: $14.95/Month for up to 50,000 emails per month.

 

Sendinblue is a email SaaS software tool that is very dear to us, not because we have a huge investment in the software, but because it was the first software that we actually fully reviewed on our platform. The reason why we chose Sendinblue to review is because we admired that we felt that they were one of the few software out there that was really out there for the small business. They offer a generous starter free plan, which arguably is about 50% less than what it used to be, but we feel like it’s still a good solution if you’re just getting started. One thing that’s a little unique about Sendinblue is that they offer a free CRM with unlimited contacts. This is huge, since most companies typically charge a premium for this. Furthermore, they allow up-to 2,000 records at any one time to go through their automation workflow tool. Not even MailChimp offers something like that. The only slight down fall is that Sendinblue limits its free plan to just 300 emails per day (although some people might be grandfathered into 600/day if they signed up before 2019), and up to 40 emails per hour. They are extremely protective over their IP addresses and will throttle your sends to go to as low as 0 if too many records are bouncing or being flagged as spam. We found that their standards can be very high, so just a word of caution before sending emails through Sendinblue. One area we find a little odd is that unlike most other email marketing SaaS software, Sendinblue prices there SMTP emails the same as sending marketing emails, this could make sending 40,000 SMTP emails via Sendinblue a lot more expensive than sending via a service like Elastic Mail, which would be: $3.60 ($.09 (per thousand) x 40 (thousand emails) via Elastic Mail) versus $25 via Sendinblue. The thing that’s nice about Sendinblue is that they make it easier to manage both marketing and transactional/SMTP emails in one place. 

Sendinblue Pricing:

• Free Plan: Most features included. 300 emails per day (both marketing and transactional); limited to 40 emails per hour.  2,000 concurrent users using the email automation tool. Free CRM with unlimited records. 
• Pricing Begins: $25/Month for 40,000 emails per month, no sending limits.

  

You probably haven’t heard of MailRelay. They don’t have a huge American following and don’t do exceptionally well with SEO. They don’t perform well in English circles likely because they’re an Argentinian company that markets predominantly to the Spanish-speaking communities of South America, as well as Spain.  They have a very unique and some bizarre pricing plan. You see, as long as you follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, you can get a free SMTP send limit of 75,000 emails for free. Now if you look at the other services list here, buying the equivalent of 75,000 emails can add up to be a very sizeable amount of money within a year’s time. However what we find bizarre is that once you begin having to pay for the service, the costs are very steep for the return. So much so, that they probably aren’t worth it. The next (pricing) tier after the free plan goes for $54.10 (or ~$600/year) for 100,000 emails (and 20,000 contacts). Comparatively, 100,000 emails with Elastic Mail would cost just $9. Thus, maybe if you’re a small startup, it might be worth it to use their service. The service also comes with a host of other features like A/B testing, an open API, autoresponders, analytics, and more. Not bad right? Well, it’s not bad, but the design looks like it was made 15 years ago. We also must admit, the setup took is simple but not always predictable, meaning the setup took us a little longer than we expected. In the end, the service does send emails. 

MailRelay Pricing:

• Free Plan: Includes 75,000 free emails with 15,000 contacts if you decide to host them in the tool. Most other features are included at well. You must like/follow the company on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
• Pricing Begins: $54.10/Month for 100,000 emails per month, and 20,000 contacts if they’re hosted in the tool.

  

Stepping away from the traditional email or SMTP service provider that provides a set amount of emails per month, or per send, we’re going to switch focus to an alternative, more cost-effective solution; which is renting or purchasing an email server. MailCheap.co offers a wide array of options which include servers as low as $2 per month, with the shared plans equipped with an optimized email relay to optimize delivery. Every plan has unlimited users and domains, so you can use any plan with multiple websites or services. The cheapest plan comes with 10 GB of bandwidth and storage, which is enough for a few hundred thousand emails, we figure. However, to optimize deliverability, their email relay page specifies that there is a 5,000 email send limit per domain by default, which is then broken down further. However, you can technically ask their support to alter those limits for you. 

You can see from the screenshot that their dashboard and app is relatively straight forward to navigate and to setup. 

Mailcheap.co Pricing:

• Free Plan: None
• Pricing Begins: $2/Month for 10 GB of emails per month, no sending limits. This would be around 300,000 emails per month if each email was 30 KB of data. Referencing the shared server (cheapest plans), this would include relay sending, as well as open source email clients to check your email. Technically their email relay page species a 5,000 email daily limit per domain, and a user limit of 400 emails, per day but these can be altered. In general, it looks promising that for cold email senders, that Mailcheap may be a good fit since it utilizes an email relay and doesn’t monitor senders as harshly as services like SendGrid or Elastic Mail.