Brevo SMTP Relay Pricing and Sending Limits for Cold Email

Brevo's SMTP relay is included on every plan, including the free one, and it draws from the same monthly email allowance as your marketing campaigns. Starter is $9 a month for 5,000 emails, which is $1.80 per 1,000. But you cannot use it for cold outreach: Brevo's acceptable use policy prohibits purchased and scraped lists outright and requires provable opt-in for every contact. That last point decides the question for most people reading this, so it is worth understanding before you weigh the price.

How much does Brevo SMTP cost?

There is no separate transactional price list. This is the first thing that surprises people coming from SendGrid, Resend or Mailgun, all of which split marketing and transactional into different products with different meters. Brevo runs one meter for both.

The per 1,000 column is the one that matters and it is not on Brevo's pricing page. At the plan floors, Brevo is expensive per message compared with a dedicated relay. Resend and SendGrid both land around $0.35 per 1,000 at 100,000 emails a month, and Amazon SES a la carte is $0.10. Brevo at $1.80 to $3.60 is five to thirty times that.

You are paying for more than delivery, of course. The plan includes a campaign builder, segmentation, automation on Standard and above, and a CRM alongside the relay. If you need those things, bundling them is a legitimate saving. If you only need an API that puts application mail on the wire, you are subsidizing features you will never open. The full ladder, including the add-ons and the gap between Standard and Professional, is on our Brevo pricing page.

One genuinely useful option that gets overlooked: Brevo sells pay as you go email credits that do not expire, where one email sent equals one credit. If your sending is bursty rather than monthly, credits usually beat carrying a subscription through the quiet periods.

Brevo SMTP sending limits and rate limits

Two different kinds of limit apply and people conflate them constantly. The first is your plan's monthly email allowance. The second is how fast the API will accept requests. They are unrelated.

A thousand messages a second is 3.6 million an hour, so the send rate is not going to be your constraint. The limits that will actually bite sit elsewhere in the API. Most non send endpoints are capped at 100 requests an hour on the general tier, and the contacts endpoints at 10 a second. If you are syncing a large customer database into Brevo on a schedule, that hourly cap is the number to design around.

The free plan carries a harder and more practical restriction: 300 emails a day, and Brevo has to approve your account for sending before that allowance does anything at all. The account exists and looks perfectly functional before approval lands, which catches out people who build an integration on a Friday and discover on Monday that nothing left the building. If application mail is on the critical path for your product, that send endpoint is a dependency worth watching the way you watch your other APIs rather than finding out from a customer.

What Brevo does better than most here is log retention. Every plan includes unlimited event history, where competitors typically cap it at 3 to 30 days on entry tiers. When you are debugging a delivery complaint from six weeks ago, that difference is worth real money.

Can you use Brevo SMTP for cold email?

No, and Brevo is more explicit about it than any other major platform we have read. The rules live in Appendix 7 of the Terms of Service, not in a help article, which means they are contractual.

On lists, the policy states that contacts "scraped on the internet, acquired or purchased from a third-party" are "strictly prohibited on our Software, whether You send transactional or marketing electronic communications." That transactional extension is unusual. Most relays ban purchased lists for marketing and stay quiet about transactional. Brevo closes that door too.

On consent, the standard is higher than opt-in as most people understand it: "You must have the consent of your Contacts, and it must be active: the Contact has to check a checkbox to subscribe to your newsletter AND the registration checkbox CAN'T be pre-checked." It adds that "You must be able at any time to provide a proof of opt-in for each of your Contacts."

Read those together and there is no interpretation under which cold outreach qualifies. It is not enough that the address is published on a company website, or that a data vendor supplied it, or that your email is B2B and fully CAN-SPAM compliant. Brevo wants an unchecked box that a specific person ticked, plus evidence you can produce on demand. A prospect who has never heard of you cannot have done that.

Brevo describes this as a zero tolerance policy and warns that breaching it "may result in the immediate suspension or restriction of your entire account." Entire account, not the offending campaign. If you are running transactional mail for a live product through the same account, a prospecting experiment can take your password resets down with it.

This is not Brevo being awkward. Shared IP pools work only because every sender on them keeps complaint rates near zero, and one outbound campaign can degrade inbox placement for thousands of other customers on the same addresses. Every shared relay has some version of this rule. Brevo's is just the most clearly written.

What to use instead for cold outreach

Outbound needs a structurally different setup, and once you see why, the policy stops feeling like an obstacle and starts looking like a signpost.

Cold email works by sending from mailboxes you own on domains you control, usually secondary domains that are not your main company domain, warmed gradually before real volume starts, with sending spread across enough inboxes that no individual sender looks unusual. Roughly 30 emails per mailbox per day is the ceiling that keeps a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailbox looking human. Reaching 5,000 emails a month means around eight mailboxes across three sending domains.

That structure does two things a relay cannot. It keeps your reputation yours, so a bad week hurts nobody else and nobody else's bad week hurts you. And it puts your mail through the same infrastructure your recipients' filters already trust for normal business correspondence, rather than through a bulk pool that filters treat with more suspicion.

We go through the whole setup on our cold email infrastructure page, and the specific question of which sending path to use is covered on best SMTP for cold email. If you want the mechanics of connecting your own mailboxes, that is on our SMTP email sender page.

Brevo SMTP against the dedicated relays

If your sending is genuinely transactional and consented, Brevo is a reasonable choice but rarely the cheapest. Here is the honest comparison at a matched volume.

The dedicated IP column is where Brevo is weakest for a growing sender. SendGrid bundles one into a $89.95 plan, Mailgun includes one on Scale, and Resend will sell you one as a monthly add-on. Brevo puts it behind Enterprise, which means a sales conversation and an unpublished price. For a business that has outgrown shared IPs but is nowhere near enterprise scale, that is an awkward place to be.

Brevo's strength is the opposite trade. If you want campaigns, automation, a light CRM and transactional mail on one bill and one sender reputation, no dedicated relay offers that, and running two vendors to get it costs more than the per message premium. We priced the alternatives from primary sources on our Resend pricing and SendGrid pricing pages if you want to compare properly.

The short answer

Brevo SMTP is included on every plan, costs $1.80 to $3.60 per 1,000 emails at the plan floors, and offers rate limits generous enough that you will never notice them. It is a sensible relay for a business that also wants marketing tools in the same account, and a poor value one for a team that only needs delivery.

For cold outreach it is not an option at any price. Brevo bans purchased and scraped lists across both marketing and transactional mail, requires an unchecked opt-in checkbox with retrievable proof for every contact, and suspends whole accounts for breaches. Outbound belongs on your own domains and your own mailboxes, which is a different product category rather than a cheaper plan.