SendGrid removed its free plan in May 2025. If your comparison article still mentions a free tier, it's lying to you. Here's what email APIs actually cost in 2026.
We Chrome-verified every number below by visiting the actual pricing pages. Not the docs. Not a cached snapshot from 2024. The real pages, in a real browser, this month.
The free tier that vanished
For years, SendGrid's free tier was the default answer to "how do I send email from my app." A hundred emails a day, forever, no credit card required. It was how most of us learned to send transactional email.
That's gone. SendGrid now offers a 60-day trial with 100 emails per day. After 60 days, you're paying $19.95/month or you're not sending email. Every tutorial, every Stack Overflow answer, every blog post that recommends SendGrid's free tier is out of date.
This matters because email is infrastructure. It's not something you choose once and revisit quarterly. You pick a provider, wire it in, and forget about it — until the pricing changes and you're scrambling.
Resend: the modern default
Resend gives you 3,000 emails per month on the free tier. There's a 100-per-day cap that can be annoying for staging environments, but for production use, 3,000 monthly emails is enough for a lot of early-stage projects.
The paid tier starts at $20/month for 50,000 emails. At 100,000 emails/month, you're looking at $90/month on the Scale plan. These numbers are nearly identical to SendGrid's — $19.95/month for 50K, $89.95/month for 100K. The price difference is negligible.
So if the cost is the same, why pick Resend? Two words: developer experience.
React Email changes everything
Resend's killer feature is first-class React Email support. If you're building with React or Next.js, you can write your email templates as React components. Same syntax, same tooling, same mental model. No more wrestling with table-based HTML from 2004.
import { Html, Button, Text } from '@react-email/components';
export default function WelcomeEmail({ name }) {
return (
<Html>
<Text>Hey {name}, welcome aboard.</Text>
<Button href="https://app.example.com">
Get started
</Button>
</Html>
);
}
That's a real email template. It renders to the gnarly inline-CSS HTML that email clients need, but you never have to look at it. You write React, Resend handles the rest.
SendGrid has nothing comparable. Their template system is a drag-and-drop editor or raw HTML. For developers who live in code, that's a step backward.
The Resend API is just cleaner
This isn't subjective. Compare the two.
Resend:
curl -X POST https://api.resend.com/emails \
-H "Authorization: Bearer re_123" \
-d '{"from":"you@example.com","to":"them@example.com","subject":"Hello","html":"<p>Hi</p>"}'
SendGrid's API has accumulated years of cruft. Multiple API versions, inconsistent naming conventions, nested objects for things that should be flat. It works, but it feels like it was designed by committee over a decade — because it was.
Resend's API was designed from scratch in 2023 with a clean, minimal surface. We'd rate the DX at 9 out of 10 versus SendGrid's 6 out of 10.
When SendGrid still wins
We're not going to pretend SendGrid is dead. It still has legitimate advantages.
Marketing email. Resend is transactional only — password resets, order confirmations, notifications. If you need marketing campaigns, newsletters, and transactional email in one platform, SendGrid does both. With Resend, you'd need a separate service like Mailchimp or Loops for marketing.
HIPAA compliance. SendGrid offers a Business Associate Agreement for HIPAA-covered entities. Resend doesn't. If you're in healthcare, this might be a hard requirement.
Existing integrations. If you're already on SendGrid and it's working, migration has a real cost. The API is different, webhooks are different, analytics are different. "It ain't broke" is a valid reason to stay.
The Twilio ecosystem. If you're using Twilio for SMS, voice, and video, consolidating email under the same billing and support umbrella has operational value.
The vendor health question
Resend is a YC-backed startup with $21.5M in funding and a growing developer community. They're focused, hungry, and shipping fast.
SendGrid is owned by Twilio, which has been through multiple rounds of layoffs and strategic pivots since the acquisition. Developer trust has been declining. The free tier removal is part of a broader cost-cutting pattern.
Neither is going away tomorrow, but the trajectories are pointing in different directions.
The decision
Pick Resend if you're starting a new project. You want the best developer experience available. You're building with React or Next.js and want React Email templates. You only need transactional email. You want a free tier that actually exists.
Pick SendGrid if you need transactional and marketing email in one platform. You need HIPAA compliance with a BAA. You're already integrated and it's working fine. You're in the Twilio ecosystem and want consolidated billing.
Pick neither if you're sending fewer than 300 emails a month. Use your hosting provider's built-in SMTP or Amazon SES at $0.10 per thousand. Don't add a dependency you don't need.
One more thing
We didn't just verify Resend and SendGrid. We Chrome-verified pricing for 74 cloud services across email, auth, databases, payments, hosting, and more. Every number on auxiliar.ai comes from a real browser visit — not cached documentation, not an LLM hallucination.
Get it in your terminal:
npx auxiliar
Or add to Claude Code as an MCP server:
claude mcp add auxiliar -- npx auxiliar-mcp
Every comparison. Every price. Verified.
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