Resend Pricing and Cost Per 1,000 Emails: Resend Email API Pricing Plans

This is the complete transactional ladder exactly as Resend publishes it in its own machine readable price file, with the effective cost per 1,000 emails worked out for each step. Resend does not print that column, so we calculated it by dividing the monthly price by the included volume.

Two things jump out of that table once the per 1,000 column exists. The cheapest place on the entire Resend ladder is the Pro step at 100,000 emails, where you pay $0.35 per 1,000. And Scale at 100,000 costs $0.90 per 1,000, which is exactly the overage rate, meaning the emails included in that plan cost you the same as emails you had not paid for in advance.

Resend also quotes its own effective rates for the top of the ladder: $0.70 per 1,000 at 500,000 emails, $0.65 at one million, and $0.46 at 2.5 million. Those match our arithmetic, which is a good sign the published ladder is internally consistent.

Go to resend.com/pricing and drag the volume slider to 100K. You will be shown Scale at $90 a month. What you will not be shown is that Resend also sells a Pro step at $35 a month for the same 100,000 emails. It appears in the price file Resend publishes for AI agents at resend.com/pricing.md, and it does not appear in the interactive pricing UI.

That is a $55 a month gap, or $660 a year, for an identical send allowance. We have not found a single third party pricing roundup that mentions the $35 step. Every one we checked lists Resend as "Free 3K, Pro $20 for 50K, Scale $90 for 100K", which is what the slider shows.

The gap gets wider once you price overage instead of upgrading. Pro overage is $0.90 per 1,000, so staying on the $35 Pro step and paying for extra buckets works out cheaper than every Scale step until about 450,000 emails a month:

That crossover is our calculation from Resend's published rates, not a number Resend prints. Read it as a planning guide rather than a guarantee, and confirm with Resend before you build a budget on it. The honest conclusion is that Scale is a feature purchase, not a volume discount, until you are well into the hundreds of thousands. What the extra money buys is 1,000 sending domains instead of 10, Slack support instead of tickets, and the right to add a dedicated IP.

Resend calls it pay as you go. Once you pass the volume included in your plan, it charges your plan's overage rate for every additional bucket of 1,000 emails, automatically, on any paid subscription. The Free plan has no overage at all, it simply stops.

The detail worth knowing is that the overage rate is flat at $0.90 per 1,000 across the Free, Pro and lower Scale steps. It does not begin to fall until the 200,000 step, and then it drops in stages:

Because overage is charged in whole buckets of 1,000, small spills are rounded up. Sending 100,400 emails on a 100,000 plan bills a full extra bucket at $0.90, not $0.36. At low volumes nobody notices. If your sending is spiky and you routinely land a few hundred emails over the line, it adds up over a year.

Automations are metered separately. Every plan, Free included, gets 10,000 automation runs a month. Paid plans continue past that at $0.0015 per run, so an extra 100,000 runs is $150. If you are building anything event driven, price the runs alongside the emails rather than after the fact.

This trips up anyone who reads the transactional ladder and assumes it covers everything. Resend's marketing plans use an entirely different meter. You are billed on how many contacts you hold, and broadcasts to those contacts are not limited by send volume.

Broadcasts can only be sent to contacts that already exist in your audience, which is the structural reason this product cannot be used for prospecting. You cannot upload a bought list and broadcast to it, and doing so would breach the Acceptable Use Policy anyway.

The contact meter is competitive at the small end. A 10,000 contact list at $80 a month with unlimited broadcasts compares well against most contact priced marketing platforms. It gets less attractive above 50,000 contacts, where dedicated marketing platforms start bundling more segmentation and automation for similar money.

Three add ons can move a Resend bill meaningfully, and two of them have eligibility rules rather than just prices.

The dedicated IP gate is the one that surprises people. You cannot buy a dedicated IP on Free or Pro at any price, and even on Scale you have to be sending more than 3,000 emails a day to qualify. Resend's reasoning is sound: a dedicated IP with low, irregular volume performs worse than a well maintained shared pool, because mailbox providers have nothing to build a reputation from. Resend warms, monitors and autoscales the IP once you have one.

The domains add on matters more than it looks. Pro includes 10 sending domains. If you run a product that sends on behalf of customers, or an agency with a domain per client, 10 disappears fast and each additional block of 100 is $20 a month. Scale's 1,000 included domains is the real reason some teams move up, rather than the volume.

We compared what the third party pricing pages say against what Resend publishes, on the same day. There are four specific reasons the numbers drift, and knowing them tells you which source to trust.

The slider hides a step. The interactive pricing page steps through 3K, 50K, 100K, 200K, 500K, 1M, 1.5M, 2.5M and 3M plus. At the 100K stop it shows Scale at $90. The Pro step at $35 for 100,000 exists in Resend's own price file but is not surfaced by the slider, so anyone writing from the visible page misses it.

Resend contradicts itself on Free plan domains. The Free plan card and the price file both say 3 domains. The feature comparison table further down the same page says custom domains: Free 1. Both statements are on resend.com on August 21, 2026. Roundups quote whichever one they happened to read, which is why you will see the Free plan described as one domain in some places and three in others. Assume one until Resend fixes the page.

Two meters get conflated. Transactional pricing is per email sent. Marketing pricing is per contact stored. Articles that quote "Resend costs $20 a month" without saying which product are describing the transactional Pro step only, and the marketing plans start at $40 for a much smaller audience.

Overage is quoted as if it were tiered from the start. The rate is a flat $0.90 per 1,000 on Pro and on Scale up to 100,000. Sources that quote "$0.46 to $0.90 per 1,000" are technically right about the range but misleading about where you will actually sit, because you need to be at 2.5 million emails a month to see $0.46.

The reliable source is resend.com/pricing.md, which Resend maintains for AI agents and which lists every step in a plain table. It is more complete than the page humans are shown.

No, and Resend is unusually direct about it. The Acceptable Use Policy, last updated by Resend on August 5, 2026, lists prohibited sending purposes. The first one reads:

"Spamming: You are prohibited from sending unsolicited messages of any kind, including cold outreach, purchased lists, or scraped contact data."

That is not an inference from a general spam clause. Cold outreach is named. The same document also sets hard numeric thresholds that a cold campaign is unlikely to survive:

For context, Google's published bulk sender guidance asks senders to stay under 0.3% spam complaints. Resend's ceiling is roughly a quarter of that. Amazon SES puts an account under review at 0.1% and pauses it at 0.5%, with a review step in between. Resend's policy language is "may be shutdown without warning", with no graduated stage described.

Resend's consent documentation is equally clear about what does not count as permission: a clause in your terms of service saying users agree to receive email, a pre checked marketing box, and assuming someone is opted in unless they unsubscribe. A prospect who has never heard of you fails all three tests.

None of this makes Resend a bad product. It makes it a transactional and opted in email product, which is exactly what it says it is. If the mail you want to send is outbound prospecting, the right structure is different: send from mailboxes you own on domains you control, warm them properly, rotate across them, and keep volume per mailbox low enough that no single sender attracts attention. That is what cold email infrastructure means in practice, and it is why outbound tools are bring your own mailbox rather than shared API relays.

Comparing email APIs on their headline price is close to useless because the included volumes differ. Here is the same 100,000 emails a month priced on each vendor's published rates, checked in August 2026.

Look at that column again. Resend Pro is $35.00 and SendGrid Essentials is $34.95. Resend Scale is $90.00 and SendGrid Pro is $89.95. At 50,000 emails Resend Pro is $20.00 and SendGrid Essentials is $19.95. Three matched pairs, five cents apart each time. Resend has priced its transactional ladder against SendGrid's and rounded off the ninety five cents. That is not a coincidence worth much operationally, but it does tell you these two are competing on developer experience rather than price, because there is no price difference to compete on.

Amazon SES remains an order of magnitude cheaper per email and always will be, because you are buying raw infrastructure and supplying the operational work yourself. The gap between $10 and $35 at 100,000 emails is the price of not running SES. For most teams that is money well spent. For a team already deep in AWS it is not. We break the AWS side down in detail on our Amazon SES pricing page, and the SendGrid ladder on the SendGrid pricing page.

One thing none of these four vendors sells is permission to prospect. SES asks you to send only to recipients who explicitly requested your email. Resend names cold outreach as prohibited. That is the shared reason outbound teams end up on a different kind of tool entirely, one that sends through your own SMTP mailboxes rather than a shared relay.