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Free tiers

Free Resend alternatives

Resend's free plan is 3,000 emails a month — but only 100 a day, from one domain. Several alternatives give you more, and a couple give you much more.

Ranked below by what you can actually ship on, with the limit that stops you first named in every row. It's almost never the number in the headline.

12 free tiers Checked 2 August 2026 Trials marked as trials
Side by side

The limit that bites first

Headline volume is the number vendors advertise. The daily cap, the log retention and the footer branding are the numbers that decide whether you can use it.

ProviderFree tierWhat stops you firstType
Email Bump5,000 contacts + 5,000 emails/moA 'Powered by Email Bump' badge on marketing footers. No daily cap, and domains and seats are unlimitedPermanent
Mailtrap4,000 emails/mo150 emails a day, and logs disappear after 3 daysPermanent
Loops1,000 contacts + 4,000 sends/moA 'Powered by Loops' footer on every email, and 10 emails/secondPermanent
Resend3,000 emails/mo100 emails a day, 1 sending domain; marketing is a separate 1,000-contact free planPermanent
AhaSend1,000 emails/moVolume — but unlimited sending domains, which most free tiers don't give youPermanent
MailerSend500 emails/mo1 domain, 1 template, 100 API requests a dayPermanent
Scaleway TEM300 emails/moVolume, and marketing email is prohibited by policyPermanent
Mailgun100 emails/dayLogs are kept for 1 day, which makes debugging genuinely hardPermanent
Postmark100 emails/moVolume. It's an evaluation allowance, not a plan to ship onPermanent
ZeptoMail10,000 emails, onceThe free credit expires after one monthTrial
Amazon SESUp to $200 in AWS creditsNew AWS accounts only, spread over the first 6 months, and you're in a sandbox until reviewedTrial
useSend, Plunk, listmonk, PostalFree software, paid sendingThe code costs nothing; SES or your SMTP provider still bills you, and you operate itSelf-hosted

From each vendor's own pricing page on 2 August 2026. Free tiers change more often than paid ones — check before you commit a launch to one.

How to read these

Four things worth checking before the volume

The daily cap. A monthly allowance with a daily ceiling is a different product. Resend's free plan is 3,000 a month at 100 a day; Mailtrap's is 4,000 a month at 150 a day. Import a contact list or launch on Product Hunt and the daily number is the one you meet.

Log retention. This is where free tiers are quietly stingy — Mailgun keeps one day, Mailtrap three. The whole value of a hosted provider is being able to answer "what happened to this email", and a log that expired yesterday can't.

Branding and domains. Loops adds a "Powered by Loops" footer on free. MailerSend allows one domain and one template. Resend allows one sending domain. If you run more than one product from one account, that's the constraint.

Whether it's really free. ZeptoMail's 10,000 emails expire after a month, and Amazon SES's free-tier credits are a new-account promotion over six months. Both are worth taking; neither is a plan.

In detail

The providers with a free tier worth using

01Hosted service

Email Bump

Best for: Teams paying Resend twice — once for the API, again for the newsletter

Marketing and transactional email in one product, billed on contacts rather than sends. The transactional API takes the same fields as Resend's, so the migration is a base URL and a key. Also the only one on this list with a first-class CLI and MCP server, so an agent can run the whole account without a browser.

Starts at
$19/mo at 10,000 contacts
Free tier
5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails a month
Marketing
Included — campaigns, flows, segments and the API share one bill
Data region
United States (Amazon SES, us-east-1)
What it does well
  • One price covers campaigns, automated flows, segments and the transactional API.
  • Sending is uncapped on paid plans under fair use — a viral week doesn't produce an overage bill.
  • Unsubscribed and bounced contacts stop counting, so the bill tracks your real audience.
  • Unlimited team seats and unlimited sending domains on every plan, including free.
  • CLI, MCP server and agent skills cover the same surface as the API, including creating the account itself.
  • Inbound email, SMTP on the same key, and webhooks are part of the plan, not upsells.
What to watch for
  • Sending is US-only today — there is no EU data region.
  • Not open source, and there's no self-hosted build.
  • The free plan puts a 'Powered by Email Bump' badge on marketing footers. Transactional sends never carry it.
  • Younger than Postmark or SendGrid, without their decade-plus of public deliverability history.
02Hosted service

Loops

Best for: SaaS teams who want lifecycle email without assembling it

Contact-priced like Email Bump, with transactional sending folded in at no extra charge. Opinionated and pleasant; less of an infrastructure product than Postmark or SES.

Starts at
Paid plans are priced by subscribed contacts via a slider, not published as a fixed table
Free tier
1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends a month, with a Loops footer on your email
Marketing
Included — that's the core of the product
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Transactional sending is included rather than billed as a second subscription.
  • Free plan is generous enough to run a small product on.
  • Genuinely quick to set up.
What to watch for
  • The free plan puts Loops branding in your footer and caps you at 10 emails/second.
  • Paid pricing lives behind a slider, which makes budgeting a guess until you sign up.
  • Thinner on raw email infrastructure — inbound, SMTP nuance, deep log retention.
03Hosted service

Mailtrap

Best for: Teams who want the test sandbox and production sending from one vendor

Best known for its email-testing sandbox, which catches staging mail before it reaches a real inbox. The sending product grew out of that and keeps the same debugging bias.

Starts at
$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)
Free tier
4,000 emails a month, capped at 150 a day, 3 days of logs
Marketing
Bulk stream on Business and above; no journey builder
Data region
United States, with EU sending available
What it does well
  • The staging sandbox has no real equivalent at Resend.
  • Free tier is 4,000 emails/month against Resend's 3,000.
  • Bounce categorisation and per-domain debugging are unusually good.
What to watch for
  • Log retention is short on cheaper plans: 3 days free, 5 days on Basic.
  • Dedicated IP and bulk stream only arrive on Business, which starts at $85/mo.
  • Two products in one console takes a minute to get used to.
04Hosted service

MailerSend

Best for: Small teams who want the cheapest paid tier with a template builder

From the MailerLite family. Drag-and-drop templates non-engineers can edit, an inexpensive entry plan, and SMS bolted on for the same money.

Starts at
$5.60/mo for 5,000 emails (Hobby)
Free tier
500 emails a month, 1 domain, 1 template
Marketing
Templates and basic automation; MailerLite is the sibling product for campaigns
Data region
United States and European Union
What it does well
  • $5.60/mo for 5,000 emails is the cheapest real paid plan here.
  • Non-developers can edit templates without a pull request.
  • 100 SMS a month included on every plan.
What to watch for
  • Free plan is 500 emails/month — a sixth of Resend's free tier.
  • Hobby caps you at 1 domain, 3 templates and 1,000 API requests a day.
  • API log retention is 7 days even on Professional.
05Hosted service

Zoho ZeptoMail

Best for: Low, spiky transactional volume you'd rather not subscribe for

Pay-as-you-go credits instead of a monthly plan. One credit is 10,000 emails and lasts six months, which suits products that send in bursts.

Starts at
Credits, where 1 credit = 10,000 emails, valid 6 months
Free tier
First credit free — 10,000 emails, valid for one month
Marketing
None. ZeptoMail is transactional-only by policy; Zoho Campaigns is the other product.
Data region
Multiple, including EU data centres
What it does well
  • No subscription: buy credits, use them within six months.
  • 10,000 free emails to evaluate with is the largest trial on this list.
  • Backed by Zoho, with EU data-centre options.
What to watch for
  • Strictly transactional — marketing sending will get the account closed.
  • Being inside the Zoho console is a taste thing.
  • Credits expire; unused volume is money gone.
06Hosted service

AhaSend

Best for: EU teams who want Resend's ergonomics with the data kept in Europe

The closest thing to a European Resend: same shape of API and SMTP, multi-region EU infrastructure, and a free tier you can actually ship on.

Starts at
Paid tiers start at 25,000 emails/mo (Pro); the rate isn't published as a flat figure
Free tier
1,000 emails a month, unlimited domains, no card required
Marketing
Transactional focus; no campaign builder
Data region
European Union, multi-region
What it does well
  • Data stays in Europe, not just the sending — the usual gap in 'EU-friendly' claims.
  • Unlimited sending domains even on the free plan.
  • USD and EUR billing, OIDC SSO on the top tier.
What to watch for
  • Smaller company; fewer public deliverability case studies.
  • No marketing or automation side at all.
  • Retention is 14 days on Pro, 30 on Max.
07Hosted service

Scaleway TEM

Best for: French and EU public-sector-adjacent teams who need sovereignty on paper

European cloud infrastructure rather than a developer-experience product. Cheap per email, GDPR-clean by construction, and deliberately narrow.

Starts at
€0.25 per 1,000 emails after the first 300 a month (Essential)
Free tier
300 emails a month, every month
Marketing
Prohibited by policy — TEM is transactional only
Data region
European Union (multi-region, France-headquartered)
What it does well
  • €0.25 per 1,000 undercuts every hosted SaaS here except SES.
  • European sovereignty story is the strongest on this list.
  • Scale plan at €80/mo includes 100,000 emails, a managed dedicated IP and a 99.9% SLA.
What to watch for
  • Marketing email is against the acceptable-use policy — this is not a newsletter tool.
  • No inbound email support.
  • Billing counts recipients, so one message with three CCs is four emails.
08AGPL-3.0

useSend (formerly Unsend)

Best for: Self-hosters who want a Resend-shaped dashboard on top of their own SES account

The best-known open-source answer to this search. It wraps Amazon SES with a dashboard, contacts, campaigns and webhooks, so you pay AWS rates and keep the UI.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sending
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: contacts, campaigns and transactional in one app
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • SES pricing with a real interface on top.
  • Transactional and marketing, REST API and SMTP, webhooks and inbound.
  • Docker images and a one-click Railway deploy.
What to watch for
  • Still described as beta by its own maintainers.
  • Bring your own AWS account, DNS, Postgres and Redis — and your own on-call.
  • AGPL-3.0 has real obligations if you build a product on top of it.
The other kind of free

Free software is not free sending

A lot of the results for this search are open-source projects — useSend, Plunk, listmonk, Postal, FreeResend. They are free in the sense that matters to a licence and not in the sense that matters to a bill: every one of them still needs a sending provider underneath, and Amazon SES is the usual answer at $0.16 per 1,000 emails.

At small volume, self-hosting is more expensive than a free tier, not less — you're paying for a server to send a few hundred emails that Mailtrap or Email Bump would have sent for nothing. Self-hosting pays off at volume or when data ownership is the actual requirement. The self-hosting comparison works through which project fits which reason.

FAQ

Free email tiers, asked and answered

Is there a free alternative to Resend?

Yes — several free tiers are larger than Resend's 3,000 emails a month. Mailtrap gives 4,000, Loops gives 4,000 sends against 1,000 contacts, and Email Bump gives 5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails covering campaigns and the API together.

Compare the daily cap rather than the monthly one. Resend's free plan allows 3,000 a month but only 100 a day, so a single import or a burst of sign-ups hits the wall long before the month does.

What is the best free Resend alternative?

For a product that also sends a newsletter, Email Bump's free plan is the largest usable one here: 5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails a month, no daily cap, and unlimited sending domains and team seats. The trade is a 'Powered by Email Bump' badge on marketing footers until you're on a paid plan — transactional sends don't carry it. For pure transactional testing, Mailtrap: the sandbox that catches staging mail is worth more than the extra thousand emails. For European teams, AhaSend, which also gives unlimited sending domains at 1,000 emails a month.

Which free tiers are permanent and which are trials?

Permanent: Email Bump, Resend, Mailtrap, Loops, AhaSend, MailerSend, Scaleway TEM, Mailgun and Postmark. These renew every month for as long as you stay inside them.

Trials dressed as free tiers: ZeptoMail's 10,000 emails expire after a month, and Amazon SES's free-tier credits apply to new AWS accounts across the first six months. Both are generous and both end.

Can I send marketing email on a free plan?

Sometimes, and read the policy before you assume. Scaleway TEM prohibits marketing email outright, and ZeptoMail is transactional-only — sending a newsletter through either can cost you the account.

Email Bump's free plan does include campaigns, flows and segments, which is the main reason it's on this list. Like Loops, it adds a badge: marketing footers carry 'Powered by Email Bump' until you move to a paid plan. Transactional sends never carry it.

Is a free tier enough to launch on?

For a side project or a private beta, usually. For anything with paying customers, look at retention before volume: Mailtrap keeps 3 days of logs on free, Mailgun keeps 1. When a customer says they never got the receipt, a log that expired yesterday is the difference between an answer and an apology.

The largest usable one here

5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails, free

No card, no daily cap, unlimited sending domains and team seats — and campaigns, flows, segments, SMTP and the transactional API are all on the free plan rather than sold separately. Marketing footers carry a 'Powered by Email Bump' badge until you upgrade.

Start free Read the API docs

Keep reading

All Resend alternativesSixteen options, what each costs, and who each one is actually for.Open source & self-hostedThe AGPL and MIT projects, and what running one really costs you.Email Bump vs ResendThe head-to-head, including the numbers that don't flatter us.Email Bump pricingWhat contact-based pricing costs at every list size.