Run the maths
before signing.
Adjust the sliders below for your real volume profile — transactional vs marketing mix, dedicated IP requirement, EU sovereignty needs. The calculator shows your actual monthly bill across five providers — Amazon SES plus SendGrid plus Mailgun plus Postmark plus us — at the equivalent feature set. No hidden tiers, no asterisks, no "contact us for Enterprise pricing". Where SES is cheaper, we show it. Where we are, we show that. About 1 in 4 of the calls that start here end with us recommending the prospect stay where they are.
Five providers, same maths.
The headline number on a vendor pricing page is rarely the bill that lands. Add the dedicated-IP add-on, factor the operational engineering time AWS leaves to you, model the placement gap that compounds at scale — and the per-message price stops being the right metric. The calculator below uses public list pricing as of April 2026, applies it honestly, and surfaces the comparison the way procurement should see it.
The five providers we model are the ones our prospects actually shortlist. Amazon SES is the cheapest per-message infrastructure in the market for AWS-native shops; SendGrid is the legacy default with the deepest integration coverage; Mailgun is the developer-friendly middle ground; Postmark is the transactional gold standard; and we compete on operational depth and EU sovereignty. None of these is wrong for everyone. The right answer depends on your volume profile, your traffic mix, your dedicated-IP requirement, and where your subscriber data needs to live.
Two things the calculator does not model: the engineer-hours required to operate each platform (we estimate this separately during the discovery call), and the placement-gap-to-revenue conversion (which is workload-specific). For senders past 5M messages a month, the engineering-time gap and the placement-gap-to-revenue conversion typically each exceed the per-message price difference by an order of magnitude. The calculator is the floor of the comparison; the discovery call is the rest.
Adjust the inputs. Watch the bill.
Move the volume slider to your monthly send count. Pick your traffic profile and dedicated-IP requirement. The bars below recompute as you go — winning provider for your specific situation gets highlighted in sovereign teal at the top, others ranked below. About 1 in 4 of these calls ends with us recommending you stay where you are; about 1 in 6 reveals a 30-50% saving most prospects had not modelled.
Prices are USD or EUR as published by each provider; we convert at €1.00 ≈ USD 1.07 (April 2026 average). The calculator handles tier-jump behaviour for SendGrid plus Mailgun plus Postmark — when your volume crosses a tier boundary, the model picks the smallest tier that fits your volume and reports that price (not a linear interpolation). For our products, the model picks the smallest tier whose volume cap accommodates your traffic and reports the flat fee.
The calculator above models transactional and opt-in marketing mail, where the five providers compete on the same terms. Cold email is a different market with a different cost structure — dedicated IPs at one domain per IP, weeks of managed warmup, continuous reputation defence — so it is priced separately and is not part of this comparison. Plans run €1,399 to custom. See the Cold Email infrastructure page for the full reasoning and the per-plan breakdown.
What the model does and doesn't count.
Calculator transparency is the only thing that makes a TCO comparison useful. Below is exactly what we model, exactly what we don't, and exactly how we handle the edge cases each vendor's pricing page leaves ambiguous.
What we model
Monthly subscription or per-message price. For SES, $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent from EC2 (we assume EC2-origin since that is the SES-native architecture; non-EC2 senders pay $1.00/1k which makes the model unfavourable to a degree we do not flatter SES with). For SendGrid, the Free → Essentials → Pro → Premier tier ladder with their published per-100k pricing. For Mailgun, Foundation → Growth → Scale at their published rates. For Postmark, the per-tier rates that scale with volume. For us, the flat-fee tiers we publish on each service page.
Dedicated-IP add-on cost where applicable. SES adds $24.95 per IP per month; SendGrid Pro includes 1 IP and adds $79.95 per additional; Mailgun Foundation requires the $59/month IP add-on below 100k and includes 1 IP at Growth+; Postmark does not offer dedicated IPs in the standard plans (separate add-on); our €259 Sender plan and above include dedicated IPs at no marginal cost.
Tier-jump behaviour. When your volume crosses a tier threshold for any provider, the model picks the smallest tier that fits and reports that flat tier price. This is conservative against us — the alternative would be to assume linear scaling, which favours the per-message providers (SES, in particular) more than reality does at small volumes.
What we do not model
Engineering time required to operate each platform. SES leaves authentication setup, IP warmup, bounce processing, suppression management, and per-domain throttling to your team. We estimate that as 8-15 hours/week of senior engineering attention for a typical mid-market sender; at fully-loaded Western European rates that is roughly €4,500-9,000/month in opportunity cost. Our hosting includes all of this in the price; SendGrid plus Mailgun plus Postmark partially include it. Putting this in the calculator would tilt the model toward us in a way that is technically defensible but may feel like a thumb on the scale, so we leave it out and discuss it on the call.
Placement-gap-to-revenue conversion. Across our migrations, average inbox-placement lift coming off SendGrid is 5-15 points at Microsoft and 2-8 points at Gmail. For a sender doing 100k marketing sends/month at €0.30 average revenue per email opened, a 7-point placement lift is roughly €1,200-2,000/month in additional revenue. This effect is real and recurring but workload-specific; we model it during the call rather than building it into the public calculator.
Compliance and procurement overhead. A Data Protection Impact Assessment for a U.S.-controlled provider runs longer and produces more residual risk than the equivalent for an EU-controlled provider. Some procurement frameworks reject U.S. providers outright for specific workload types. The calculator flags EU sovereignty as a binary input but does not put a number on the compliance cost differential.
SLA and support cost. AWS Support Plans run 3-10% of monthly AWS spend separately. SendGrid premium support is a paid add-on at higher tiers. Postmark and Mailgun include reasonable support in the published pricing. Our pricing includes 24/7 ticket support with a 4-hour SLA on all paid plans, 1-hour on Enterprise. Different shapes of support cost; not modelled directly.
When the calculator gets it wrong
The calculator is most accurate in the 50k-2M emails/month range — the band where most of our prospects live and where the published vendor pricing is unambiguous. It gets less accurate in two directions.
Below 50k/month, the free tiers and small-tier pricing differences become noise relative to setup and integration costs. Most senders in this band stay where they are because the migration cost dominates the per-message savings; the calculator may show us as the cheaper option without the rest of the comparison being decisive.
Above 5M/month, all the providers move into custom Enterprise pricing that is negotiated per-deal and not published. We extrapolate from the published Volume / Premier / Custom tiers honestly, but the actual enterprise quotes vary 20-40% based on contract length, payment terms, and volume commitment. For senders in this band, the calculator is a starting point — bring the real quote and we will model against it specifically.
For dedicated MTA hosting (PowerMTA, KumoMTA), the calculator switches to the dedicated tier when your volume crosses 1M/month or when traffic profile + dedicated IP requirements compound. The choice between PowerMTA and KumoMTA is dimensional rather than priced — see the PowerMTA vs KumoMTA comparison for the operational decision criteria.
Every tier, fully published.
Eight services, twenty-three pricing tiers, no "contact for Enterprise" hand-waving. Below is the complete public price book. The discovery call is for matching you to the right tier and answering specific procurement questions, not for revealing prices we hide.
Email infrastructure
Cold email infrastructure
A separate product from our bulk and transactional hosting. Cold outreach needs dedicated IPs at a one-domain-per-IP ratio, top-tier managed warmup, and continuous reputation defence against Gmail, Microsoft and Spamhaus enforcement. The price reflects that the infrastructure is fundamentally different — not a markup on the same stack. Read the full Cold Email page →
IP warmup and consulting
Offshore dedicated
Switzerland adds ~20% to the listed prices due to higher facility costs and hardware import duty. Iceland adds ~10%. Slovenia subtracts ~15% from the Starter / Professional baseline. The Cluster tier (PowerMTA or KumoMTA, custom multi-region deployments) is quoted by spec; typical engagements run €1,200-3,500/month including both hosting and operations.
Pick by what you send, then by what you need to control.
The calculator shows what each tier costs. The questions below decide which one actually fits — volume sets the starting point, and your operational requirements move you up or down from there.
Start with monthly volume. Below 100,000 messages per month the SMTP Relay Starter tier at €89 is operationally correct unless you have specific isolation requirements that demand a dedicated IP from day one. Between 100k and 250k, SMTP Relay Sender at €259 with the dedicated IP is the right tier for most senders. From 500k upward, the choice splits between SMTP Relay Volume at €599 and PowerMTA Single at €449-€949 depending on whether you need configuration access. Above 5M, PowerMTA Multi or KumoMTA dedicated tiers are the operational answer, with the choice between them following the criteria from the PowerMTA-vs-KumoMTA comparison page.
Volume gives you a default; three things override it. If you need configuration access — reading MTA logs, adjusting queue parameters, deploying custom routing rules — skip the SMTP Relay tiers at any volume and move to PowerMTA or KumoMTA. If you need offshore jurisdiction beyond the EU baseline, layer the Offshore Dedicated tier on top of whichever delivery service fits your volume. If you need authentication management bundled (DMARC monitoring, BIMI hosting, MTA-STS hosting), the Email Authentication Suite at €299/mo adds those across whichever delivery service you choose. The tiers stack rather than substitute, which is the operational difference between our pricing and most competitors who price each capability separately.
Bring the actual numbers.
The calculator above gets you 80% of the way to the right answer. The 30-minute discovery call covers the remaining 20% — the operational time you are spending today, the placement gap your current provider has been hiding, the procurement constraints we cannot model in a slider. About 1 in 4 calls ends with us recommending you stay on your current provider; about 1 in 6 reveals a 30-50% saving most prospects had not modelled. Both outcomes are wins.