SendGrid vs Mailgun Pricing: Cost Per Email at Every Volume

At 10,000 emails a month Mailgun is cheaper. At 50,000 and 100,000 SendGrid is cheaper. From 250,000 to 1,000,000 Mailgun is cheaper again. At 2,500,000 SendGrid takes it back. The two price curves cross four times, so there is no correct answer to which is cheaper without your monthly volume in hand. This page has both full ladders, read off each vendor's own pricing page on 1 September 2026 with the currency forced to USD.

SendGrid vs Mailgun pricing at every published volume

Both vendors sell fixed volume rungs rather than a smooth per email rate, and their rungs do not line up. SendGrid steps at 50,000, 100,000, 300,000, 700,000, 1.5 million and 2.5 million. Mailgun steps at 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 250,000, 500,000, 750,000, 1 million and 2.5 million. Where a vendor has no rung at a volume, you buy the next one up.

Two figures in that table deserve a second look. At 100,000 emails a month Mailgun costs $75 against SendGrid's $34.95. That is 115 percent more for the same volume, and it is the widest gap on the whole ladder. Then at 750,000 the direction reverses hard: SendGrid has no rung between 700,000 and 1.5 million, so a sender at 750,000 pays $799 while Mailgun charges $550 for a plan sized exactly for them.

The lesson is not that one vendor is greedy. It is that fixed rungs punish you whenever your volume sits just above a step, and the two vendors put their steps in different places.

Cost per 1,000 emails, and why both ladders go backwards

Divide each plan price by the emails it includes and something odd shows up in both price lists.

The word "effective" in the SendGrid column matters. SendGrid has no rung at 250,000, 500,000 or 1,000,000, so a sender at those volumes buys the next rung up and pays for headroom they are not using. Mailgun has a rung at each of them, which is why its column is cheaper across that whole middle band.

Neither ladder is monotonic. Buying more email does not reliably lower your unit rate at either vendor. SendGrid's rate improves from $0.40 at 50,000 to $0.35 at 100,000, then jumps to $0.83 at 300,000, a 137 percent increase in unit price for buying more. Mailgun's improves from $1.50 at 10,000 to $0.70 at 50,000, then worsens to $0.75 at 100,000 and peaks at $0.86 at 250,000, which is Mailgun's worst value rung anywhere on the list.

If you are near either of those bad rungs, the cheapest move is often to stay on the plan below and pay overage rather than upgrade. Which brings us to the number nobody quotes.

Cost per extra email: the two curves are nearly identical

SendGrid publishes an overage table headed "Cost per extra email". Mailgun publishes the same thing as a per thousand tooltip on each plan. Put them side by side and the picture is very different from the plan prices.

At 50,000 the two vendors charge the identical $0.0013. At 100,000 on their upper tiers they charge the identical $0.0011. From 700,000 upward Mailgun is consistently cheaper on overage, ending 20 percent below SendGrid at 2.5 million. So the plan prices diverge wildly while the marginal prices converge almost exactly, which tells you the real difference between these two is packaging rather than cost of delivery.

One SendGrid quirk worth knowing: Pro 100K charges $0.0011 for an extra email while Essentials 100K charges $0.0009, for the same 100,000 email limit. The upgrade costs $55 more per month and makes every overage email 22 percent more expensive. Overage is billed on the following period's invoice, so you find out about it a month later.

What the price includes, beyond the send count

Plan price alone would send most small teams to Mailgun Basic at $15. The feature gates change that answer for some of them.

Mailgun's one day log retention on Basic is the gate that catches people. If a customer asks what happened to a receipt sent three weeks ago, Basic cannot tell you. The workaround is to send the event webhook into your own store the day you launch, then ask questions of that send history in plain English whenever support needs an answer. It is worth wiring up on day one, because retroactively reconstructing a month you did not log is impossible.

Mailgun's own FAQ is refreshingly blunt about what the product is not: "There is no send button in Mailgun." It is infrastructure. If your marketing team expected to log in and press send, neither of these is the product you wanted.

Which should you pick at your volume?

Under 10,000 a month, take Mailgun. $15 for 10,000 beats paying SendGrid $19.95 for 50,000 you will not use. At 5,000 emails a month SendGrid's effective rate is $3.99 per thousand against Mailgun's $1.50.

Between 50,000 and 100,000, take SendGrid. This is its strongest band by a wide margin: $19.95 and $34.95 against Mailgun's $35 and $75. If you are already on SendGrid at this volume, migrating away on price grounds will cost you money.

Between 250,000 and 1,000,000, take Mailgun. SendGrid's rung placement leaves a large dead zone between 100,000 and 300,000 and another between 700,000 and 1.5 million. Mailgun has a rung in each of those gaps and charges $34 to $249 less depending on where you land.

Above 2 million, price SendGrid again, and price Amazon SES against both. SendGrid's $1,099 undercuts Mailgun's $1,250 at 2.5 million. But at that volume the real comparison is Amazon SES at $0.10 per thousand, which is roughly $250 for the same 2.5 million if you are willing to run your own bounce handling and warm up.

Neither of these is a cold email tool

A large share of people comparing these two are not sending receipts. They are trying to work out which relay will let them run outbound prospecting cheaply, and the answer is neither.

Both are shared reputation platforms, which means every customer's sending affects every other customer's delivery. That forces both vendors to police consent hard. SendGrid documents an Account Under Review state triggered by what it calls apparent abnormal activity, and the detail that catches people out is that SendGrid keeps accepting and queueing your mail while the account is under review. Your API returns success. Nothing arrives. You can burn a week of a campaign before anyone notices.

SendGrid also charges you for the attempt regardless of outcome. Its billing FAQ states that a send burns one credit "whether the email is ultimately deferred or sent to spam by the inbox provider". On a cold list with a 6 percent bounce rate, you are paying full price for mail that was never going to be read.

The setup that does work for outbound is different in kind, not in price: real mailboxes on domains you register and warm yourself, sending at human volumes, with replies landing in an inbox you own. We cover the options in detail in our guide to the best SMTP for cold email, and if you are specifically weighing whether to stay on the SendGrid stack, our breakdown of SendGrid alternatives and competitors prices nine of them against SendGrid's current ladder. There is also a full walkthrough of whether you can use SendGrid for cold email, policy wording included.

How we checked these numbers

Every figure here was read on 1 September 2026 from the vendors themselves. Mailgun's full ladder came out of the price data behind its own currency and volume selectors at mailgun.com/pricing, with USD selected. SendGrid's came from the plan data on twilio.com/en-us/products/email-api/pricing, which is where the ladder now lives after sendgrid.com/en-us/pricing started redirecting to a Twilio product page with no prices on it.

That redirect is the main reason published comparisons of these two disagree with each other. A large number of articles still cite the old sendgrid.com pricing URL, which no longer serves a plan table, so their numbers were frozen at whatever the page said the day it was scraped. We re-read both vendors from source rather than from any roundup, and we have deliberately not reprinted either company's own on site rating or review count.

For the full per plan detail on each vendor separately, see SendGrid pricing and Mailgun pricing. For how both compare against the developer first options, Postmark vs SendGrid and Resend pricing cover the same ground at the low volume end, and cold email software pricing puts the whole category on one page.