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SendGrid Too Expensive? Here Are 11 Free SMTP Servers That Work, and the One I Choose
Published July 25, 20266 minBy Tuan NguyenUpdated August 7, 2026
The free tier landscape changed a lot. Here is what still holds up in 2026.
Every app needs to send email. Password resets, receipts, welcome messages, the boring plumbing nobody thinks about until it breaks. For years the default answer was SendGrid, sign up free and forget about it. That answer is gone. SendGrid's free offering is now a 60 day trial capped at 100 emails a day, and after that the paid plans are sized for companies sending tens of thousands of emails a month, not for a project sending forty.
So I went looking at what is actually still free. The limits below are what I could verify in July 2026. Providers change these numbers quietly and often, MailerSend used to give 12,000 a month and now gives 500, so check the pricing page before you commit to any of them.
The 11 free tiers, from biggest to smallest
- SendPulse, 12,000 emails a month. The biggest number on the list, but independent deliverability tests put it around 74 percent, which means a real chunk of your mail lands in spam. A big limit you cannot trust is a small limit.
- Brevo, 9,000 a month, capped at 300 a day. The daily cap sounds annoying but 300 transactional emails a day is a lot for an early product.
- Mailjet, 6,000 a month, capped at 200 a day. Solid, though free support is thin when something goes wrong.
- Mailtrap, 4,000 a month. Started as a testing tool, now does real sending, performance has been up and down across tests but is improving.
- Maileroo, 3,000 a month. Starts you at 30 an hour until you request an increase, and some tests show trouble reaching Microsoft inboxes.
- SMTP2GO, 1,000 a month, capped at 200 a day and 25 an hour. Small numbers, good reputation, and reporting history only goes back 5 days on the free plan.
- Aha Send, 1,000 a month. Newer company with less track record, decent middle of the pack deliverability so far.
- MailerSend, 500 a month, capped at 100 a day. The one that cut its free tier hardest, and data retention is a single day.
- Gmail SMTP, 500 a day. Fine for a hobby script, wrong for a product. It uses your personal address and caps recipients per message.
- Postmark, 100 a month. Tiny allowance, but Postmark's deliverability reputation is among the best, so it works as a taste test before paying.
- Elastic Email, 100 a day. The shared IPs performed worst in the tests I read, so I would not put a product's password resets on it.
The one I choose
For Beemud's transactional mail the pick is Brevo. Not because 9,000 is the biggest number, SendPulse beats it on paper, but because the combination matters more than the ceiling. A password reset that arrives in spam did not arrive. Brevo gives me the highest monthly volume among the providers with acceptable deliverability, a daily cap I will not hit for a long time, and a paid path that starts cheap when I outgrow it. SMTP2GO sits configured as my backup, because two cheap providers beat one perfect one the day something breaks.
One more honest note. Free tiers are marketing, and the providers know exactly what they are doing. The day your product works, you will pay someone, and at real volume the cheapest path is usually Amazon SES with your own domain reputation to manage. The free tier's job is to get you to that day without burning money on plumbing.
The real question is not which free tier is biggest. It is which provider you would still trust when the email is a receipt for money someone just paid you. Would yours pass that test?
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