Posted on Oct 19 • Originally published at knock.app If your application needs to send transactional Emails, you'll need a transactional Email provider to deliver those emails on your behalf. In this article, we evaluate our favorite seven transactional email service providers you can use as a developer in 2023.Let's get to it.We're Knock and we're a developer tool for building production-grade, cross-channel notification systems. We've built integrations with 20+ different notification providers, spent hundreds of hours working with (and discovering the intricacies of) their APIs, and seen up-close how they perform at scale across a wide range of use cases. Today Knock powers production notifications for Vercel, Teikametrics, and SafetyCulture.We take an in-depth look at seven transactional email services using the above criteria as a guide to determine how the services stack up against each other. We've created an account on each service, set up a domain, and triggered emails to be sent to see how each service really performs.As an aside, we used Knock here as a way to quickly integrate the transactional email service, build an email template, and send a test email through each service, without needing to write service-specific integration code. Knock can also take care of managing our email templates, giving us cross-provider analytics, and sending cross-channel notifications to other in-app and out-of-app channels like push, SMS, and Slack. SendGrid is a widely-used email service from Twilio used by internet giants such as Uber, Booking.com, and Yelp to send and deliver their transactional emails. SendGrid is an excellent option for teams that want to get started quickly and have an email service that will scale with them over time.SendGrid offers 4 tiers of pricing: Free, Essentials, Pro, and Premier. The free plan offers 100 emails/day, while the Essentials plan starts at $19.95/month and includes 50,0000 emails each month with overages charged on top. Dedicated IP addresses email validations are available in the Pro plan and above. Volume based discounts are available on the Premier plan.Postmark is a transactional email service from ActiveCampaign that prides itself on its inbox deliverability. Compared to some of the offerings in this post, Postmark has a smaller set of customers but is still trusted to power emails for 1Password, Paddle, and Webflow. If you're looking for a no-nonsense service that focuses on deliverability, Postmark is an excellent choice.Postmark also offers a comprehensive dashboard that you can use to look at message-sending and engagement analytics data, as well as creating and maintaining email templates.Postmark offers a simple tiered-volume pricing that's billed monthly. Each plan tier includes a base amount of emails per month, and overages are charged by the thousand at a sliding scale depending on the volume sent. There's also a free developer plan that provides 100 test emails every month for free if you want to try out the service.Dedicated IP addresses are available for customers sending over 300,000+ emails a month for $50/month.AWS Simple Email Service (SES) touts itself as "a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service". It's a product offering from Amazon Web Services and is designed to send high volumes of transactional emails. AWS SES is lighter on features than some of the other services we're comparing in this list, but if you're already deployed within AWS or use any other products within the AWS suite it might be worth considering as an option.AWS SES is one of the cheapest options for sending emails out there. If your application is already hosted in AWS, then the first 62,000 emails sent each month is free. Beyond that volume emails are priced at $0.10 for every 1,000 emails sent and $0.12 for each GB of attachment data. On the inbound side, the first 1,000 emails are free and then it's $0.10/per 1,000 emails received.As an aside, it's important to note that with SES, like most AWS services, you will pay for outgoing data and transfer fees:“You pay for outgoing mail data, incoming mail chunks, and EC2 data transfer fees—even if your usage of Amazon SES qualifies for the AWS Free Usage Tier.“Pricing with SES can get complicated, so it's probably best if you use the AWS SES pricing calculator to understand exactly how much the service will cost you.Mailgun from Sinch is a well-established, developer-focused email service that's been in business since 2010. It powers email delivery for some large, well-known companies including Lyft, American Express, and Wikipedia. As a developer-focused tool, Mailgun is fast to get started with and integrate into your product. It's an excellent offering if you're looking for a reliable, easy-to-use product.Additionally, Mailgun also comes with a dashboard that you can use to look at emails sent and analytics around engagement and delivery data. The dashboard also allows you to create and maintain email templates using the visual email editor available via Mailjet.Mailgun comes with a generous trial tier that includes 5,000 emails included for the first 30 days. Extra sending volume is purchased in blocks of $1.00 per 1,000 messages. There are also paid tiers available that include a base amount of usage each month, with overages charged beyond the base amount. You can learn more and estimate your usage on their pricing page.All Mailgun plans include 99.99% uptime, 24/7 support, and analytics.Resend is a new transactional email service that was in the W23 batch of Y Combinator. As a relatively new player in the email API space, the feature set offered is limited but the (excellent) team at Resend are shipping new features each week to build out the service.Resend also comes with a dashboard that you can use to configure the service, view some statistics about the number of messages sent, see API logs for inbound requests, and logs of messages generated.Resend offer 3 pricing tiers: Free, Pro, and Enterprise. The free tier comes with 100 emails a month which must be sent from a verified sender. The pro tier offers a usage based plan, where 50,000 emails is $20/month. Each plan comes with different lengths of data retention for sent messages and logs. The Pro plan can be upgraded with a dedicated IP for $30/month, while the Enterprise plan comes with dedicated IPs out-of-the-box.Mailchimp Transactional Email is an email service that's an add-on to the ever popular marketing tool, Mailchimp. It used to be called Mandrill, but in recent years has moved from a standalone service offering to a paid add-on where you must have an existing Mailchimp subscription and plan to use the service. As such, it's an ideal offering if you're an existing Mailchimp customer.Mailchimp's Transactional pricing is based around the concept of blocks, where each block is a credit for 25,000 emails. Blocks are charged on a sliding scale, where the more blocks that are purchased the lower the cost per block. For example, to send 100,000 emails a month the cost will be $80. In addition, there's also a free plan available to new transactional email users with 500 free email sends included to a verified domain, and you can purchase a dedicated IPs for $29.95/month.Please note: you will need a Mailchimp account on the Standard or Premium plan to use Mailchimp Transactional Emails.SparkPost is an enterprise-grade email service from MessageBird that sends 37% of all emails for B2B and B2C applications. It's used by Twitter, Pinterest, and Zillow to reliably send and deliver emails. Although SparkPost is an enterprise-grade service, it's also accessible to teams at all sizes and prices very competitively.SparkPost offer 3 tiers of pricing: Starter, Premier, and Enterprise. There's also a free developer trial available that can be used to try out features before signing up for a paid plan. The Premier and Enterprise plans are available when your monthly volume exceeds 100,000 emails/month, with both including a Dedicated IP address as part of the plan. For much higher volumes, an Enterprise plan is available.Adding transactional email support to your product is usually one of the first steps to building out more notifications from your product, but before long you may find yourself in the weeds building lots of different types of notifications across disparate channels. This is where Knock can help.Knock is a developer tool for building cross-channel notification systems. With Knock, you can create complex cross-channel notifications for your product without writing complex notification code yourself. You call Knock's API and you can send notifications to in-app and out-of-app channels such as email, push, SMS, and Slack.Even if you're only planning on sending emails from your product, Knock can help. You can use Knock's dashboard to collaboratively manage your email templates, either with a drag-and-drop visual builder or by dropping down to writing HTML. Knock also takes care of all of your retry and delivery logic, as well as batching (collapsing multiple notifications about a single topic into one), managing per-user notification preferences, and providing unparalleled visibility into the notifications your product is sending.If you'd like to try it out, you can sign up for a free account or chat with our team. 👋Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? 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