SendGrid Pricing 2026: Plans, Free Trial and Real Costs

SendGrid’s Email API costs $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails, $34.95 for 100,000, and from $89.95 on Pro, which adds a dedicated IP. Marketing Campaigns is a separate subscription from $15 a month. Billing is monthly only.

There is no free plan anymore. New accounts get a 60-day trial capped at 100 emails a day, and sending stops when it ends.

The quick answer: if all you do is send receipts and password resets at volume, SendGrid Essentials is cheap per message, and the tables below show which tier to buy. If mail has to come back and be answered (an AI agent with its own inbox, a support desk, anything two-way), SendGrid hands you a raw inbound webhook and leaves the rest to you. CarlyEmail gives you real inboxes with threads, signed arrival webhooks and in-thread replies. It’s free for 3 inboxes and 1,000 emails a month with no card and no expiry, then $20 a month for 25 inboxes and 10,000 emails.

Prices were read from SendGrid’s live pricing pages and support articles on October 2, 2026, in USD.

SendGrid Email API pricing

The jump from Essentials 100K to Pro 100K is the same 100,000 emails for $55 more a month. You’re paying for a dedicated IP, subusers, SSO and teammates. A dedicated IP needs steady volume to build and hold its reputation, so plenty of senders at 100,000 a month are fine on Essentials.

SendGrid counts one credit per recipient: a message to three people uses three, and mail that ends up deferred or in spam still counts.

SendGrid Marketing Campaigns pricing

Marketing Campaigns is priced on contacts stored and emails sent, and it’s billed separately from the Email API. Sends from one don’t count against the other.

Basic gets the design and code editors, segmentation, A/B testing, 5 signup forms and 10 email testing credits. Automation starts at Advanced, along with a dedicated IP, subusers, 15 signup forms, 60 testing credits and 1,000 teammates.

What happened to the SendGrid free plan

For years SendGrid had a permanent free plan at 100 emails a day. It’s gone, in two steps:

• March 25, 2025: new accounts started getting a 60-day trial instead of a free plan.
• May 27, 2025: Twilio began retiring the free Email API and free Marketing Campaigns plans on existing accounts, with 60 more days of access. After that, sending was paused until the account upgraded.

The trial today is 100 emails a day through the API or SMTP for 60 days, plus a separate 60-day Marketing Campaigns trial with 100 contacts and 100 emails a day. No card. When it ends, API keys stop sending and the Marketing tab locks until you buy at least Basic. Cancelling or downgrading a paid plan later lands the account in the same end-of-trial state at the turn of the month, so there’s no free tier to fall back to.

Two things confuse people. SendGrid’s own pages still say “free plan” in places, and the Marketing Campaigns FAQ still describes a free plan with 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. New accounts get the trial terms above. Accounts opened through partners such as Azure Marketplace can be on different terms.

If you came here for a free tier that stays free, CarlyEmail’s is permanent: 3 inboxes, 1,000 emails a month (100 a day) and a custom domain, no card. It’s built for mail that gets answered, so read the Inbound Parse section before treating it as a swap for bulk sending.

Monthly or annual billing

Monthly only. SendGrid’s billing docs say Twilio doesn’t offer prepayment, quarterly or annual billing, so there’s no annual discount; the 12-month columns above are the monthly price times twelve. Payment is by credit or debit card, and invoicing needs a committed spend of $12,000 a year or more. Upgrades apply immediately. Downgrades apply on the first day of the next month.

What SendGrid costs at 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 emails a month

Read that table honestly: for one-way sending, SendGrid is far cheaper per message. Essentials 100K works out to about $0.00035 an email. CarlyEmail is priced per inbox and volume for two-way mail, where every address receives, stores and threads its conversations.

So the choice is about what the mail does. If Emily’s app sends 80,000 order receipts a month and nobody replies, buy Essentials 100K. If Josh’s support agent has to read every customer reply and answer inside the thread, the SendGrid price only covers the sending half, and CarlyEmail is the one priced for the whole job.

Overages and the 10x cap

Send past your Email API allotment and the overage lands on next month’s invoice. The Email API pricing page no longer publishes per-email rates (it says overages “may apply”). SendGrid’s invoice guide works its example on Pro 100K at $0.001 per extra email, so 60,000 over costs $60. Upgrading afterwards doesn’t cancel overage you’ve already run up.

Since March 26, 2026, Essentials and Pro accounts also hit a hard ceiling at 10 times the plan allotment. An Essentials 50K account stops at 500,000 requests in a month with a “Maximum credits exceeded” error. Accounts created through Heroku or Google Cloud can’t run overages at all.

Marketing Campaigns does publish its rates, charged per extra email or contact:

Dedicated IPs, Email Validation and other add-ons

• Dedicated IPs: Pro and Premier Email API plans and Advanced Marketing Campaigns include one. Each additional IP is $30 a month, and the console lets you add one new IP per month (support handles more). Essentials can’t add one.
• Email Address Validation: bundled rather than sold to small plans. Pro includes 2,500 validations and Premier 5,000; the trial and Essentials include none. Past the bundle it’s usage-based with volume discounts, and SendGrid doesn’t publish the per-validation rate.
• Email testing credits (inbox rendering and spam tests): Pro and Premier include 60 a month. Add-on packs are 30 credits for $18, 60 for $30, 100 for $40, 500 for $200 and 2,000 for $800 a month, and credits expire at month end.
• Email activity history: 3 days on the trial and Essentials, 7 on Pro and Premier. A longer history (30 days, bundled with the Email Activity Feed API) is a paid add-on priced per plan, with no public rate.

Inbound Parse: what SendGrid does when someone replies

SendGrid is a sender. Its answer to incoming mail is the Inbound Parse webhook, included on every plan, the trial too. You point a domain’s MX record at SendGrid, and each message that arrives is POSTed to your URL as multipart form data: headers, text and HTML bodies, from and to, attachment info, SPF and DKIM results, and a spam score.

That’s where it stops:

• Nothing is stored. If your endpoint doesn’t return a 2xx, SendGrid retries for 72 hours and then drops the message. The sender gets no bounce and there’s no dashboard alert.
• No threads. Each POST is a standalone message. Tying a reply to its conversation means storing every message yourself and matching Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References, then falling back to subject heuristics when Outlook mangles them.
• No inbox to read later. There’s no endpoint to list last week’s mail or fetch a thread for an agent’s context.
• Forged mail looks like real mail. SPF and DKIM verdicts are just fields in the payload, so your handler has to check them before an agent acts.
• Replying is a separate send through the Email API, threaded by headers you set yourself.

For a contact form, that’s fine. For an AI agent holding a conversation, it’s a sprint of plumbing before the agent does anything useful. The pattern is covered in more depth in email to webhook.

When CarlyEmail is the better buy

CarlyEmail is an email API built for the half SendGrid leaves to you: real inboxes that receive, store and thread mail, so an AI agent or a support tool can read a conversation and reply inside it.

• One call creates an address, on carlyemail.com or your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for you. The free plan includes a custom domain, and no plan adds a “sent via” footer.
• Threads are assembled on arrival, including the replies Outlook mangles, and the reply endpoint sets the headers so your answer lands in the same thread in the recipient’s client. See threads.
• Signed webhooks and WebSockets fire the moment mail lands, carrying a thread_id so the right agent conversation resumes. Mail failing SPF, DKIM or DMARC arrives as message.received.unauthenticated and spam as message.received.spam, so a forged sender never reaches your message.received handler. See receiving and webhooks.
• Received mail is kept and doesn’t count against your quota. Nothing is acknowledged before it’s stored, messages stay until you delete them (within the plan’s storage), and only sent recipients count toward the monthly email allowance.
• Guardrails live in the key. A key with draft_create but not message_send gets a 403 on send however the agent reasons, so a person approves before anything goes out.
• Pods for multi-tenant apps: one pod per customer, keys scoped to a pod or a single inbox, so one tenant’s agent can’t reach another’s mail. See pods.
• Attachments up to 25 MB, drafts, labels, and allow and block lists.
• Works with what you already run: REST, TypeScript and Python SDKs, a CLI, and a hosted MCP server at https://api.carlyemail.com/mcp. The docs have guides for LangChain, the OpenAI Agents SDK, the Claude Agent SDK, the Vercel AI SDK, Mastra and Cloudflare Agents. You keep your agent and your model key.

npm install carlyemail

import { CarlyEmail } from "carlyemail";

const carly = new CarlyEmail();
const inbox = await carly.inboxes.create({ username: "hello" });
const { messages } = await carly.messages.list(inbox.email);
await carly.messages.reply(inbox.email, messages[0].message_id, { text: "On it." });

Or paste one line into any agent and let it sign itself up:

Read https://docs.carlyemail.com/llms.txt and set yourself up with an email address.

Until the owner confirms a 6-digit code, that account can only email its owner, which is why an agent can safely sign itself up mid-conversation.

Every plan gets the whole API, and a request that would cross a cap is refused with a 429 naming the cap instead of degrading quietly. Free is $0 for 3 inboxes and 1,000 emails a month. Startup is $20 a month for 25 inboxes and 10,000 emails with no daily cap. Business is $200 a month for 250 inboxes and 100,000 emails. Enterprise covers higher volume, a dedicated sending domain or custom terms. Cancelling drops you to free and deletes nothing. The quickstart gets a first inbox running in a few minutes. Get started with CarlyEmail.

Plenty of teams run both: SendGrid for the receipts, CarlyEmail for the addresses that talk back. For the wider field, see SendGrid alternatives and SendGrid vs Mailgun. To drive SendGrid from Claude or another assistant, see SendGrid MCP. Other senders’ pricing: Resend, Mailgun and Amazon SES.

FAQ

Does SendGrid still have a free plan?

No. New accounts since March 25, 2025 get a 60-day trial at 100 emails a day, and Twilio began retiring the old free Email API and Marketing Campaigns plans on existing accounts on May 27, 2025. When the trial ends, sending stops until you buy a plan. CarlyEmail has a permanent free tier of 3 inboxes and 1,000 emails a month.

How much does SendGrid cost per month?

The Email API is $19.95 for 50,000 emails and $34.95 for 100,000 on Essentials. Pro runs from $89.95 (100,000 emails plus a dedicated IP) to $1,099 for 2.5 million, and Premier is custom. Marketing Campaigns is billed separately, from $15 (5,000 contacts) to $900 (200,000 contacts) a month.

Is SendGrid cheaper if I pay annually?

No. SendGrid bills monthly by card and doesn’t offer annual or quarterly billing, so there’s no annual discount. Invoicing requires a committed spend of $12,000 a year or more.

How much does a dedicated IP cost on SendGrid?

Pro and Premier Email API plans and Advanced Marketing Campaigns include one. Each additional dedicated IP costs $30 a month. Essentials plans can’t add one.

Can SendGrid receive email?

Only through the Inbound Parse webhook, which POSTs each incoming message to your URL and keeps nothing. There are no stored inboxes or threads, so a two-way app has to build that layer itself. CarlyEmail provides it: real inboxes, threads assembled on arrival and in-thread replies through one API.

Read https://docs.carlyemail.com/llms.txt and set yourself up with an email address.

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