MailerSend vs Postmark for transactional email under $10/month
Under a hard $10/month cap there is no comparison to make: Postmark does not sell anything between its 100-email free plan and the $15 Basic plan, so MailerSend's Hobby plan — $7/month ($6.30/month billed yearly) for 5,000 emails — wins by forfeit. The real question is whether Hobby's fine print bites you: 1 day of activity retention (that's your entire debugging window), 1,000 API requests per day, and $1.50 per 1,000 overage. If you will ever have to answer “did the reset email send last Tuesday?”, the honest recommendation is that the $8 jump (computed: $15 − $7) to Postmark Basic — 10,000 emails with 45 days of searchable history — is the better spend. Both companies pay us the same 20% commission, so there is no thumb on this scale.
Side-by-side
| MailerSend | Postmark | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Hobby — $7/mo ($6.30/mo billed yearly) for 5,000 emails/month (re-verified from the live pricing page 2026-07-12; see note below) | Basic — $15.00/mo starting at 10,000 emails/month. Nothing exists under $10. |
| Free tier | 500 emails/month (100/day cap); 1 domain, 1 template, 1 seat, 100 daily API requests, drag-and-drop builder included | 100 emails/month; no overages allowed |
| Activity / data retention | 1 day on Hobby (7 days on Starter, 30 on Professional) | 45 days on all plans |
| Overage | $1.50 per 1,000 on Hobby; $1.30 per 1,000 on Starter at base volumes (live-page figure, 2026-07-12; declines at higher volume tiers) | $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic |
| API request limits | 1,000 API requests/day on Hobby; 60 req/min general, 120 req/min sending, 10 req/min bulk | No published numeric limit; 429 above “acceptable use” — threshold UNKNOWN |
| Recipient caps | Unapproved accounts: 10 TO / 1 CC / 1 BCC per email (approved: 50 / 10 / 10) | Not in the pricing data we captured — UNKNOWN |
| Attachments / size | 25 MB max attachments; bulk calls max 500 email objects | 10 MB per email; 50 MB per batch payload (max 500 messages per batch) |
| Affiliate program | 20% recurring up to 12 months, no cap pays | 20% of subscription for 12 months, no cap pays |
- MailerSend Hobby's 1-day activity retention means yesterday's delivery problem is already invisible. Budget debuggers should weigh Postmark's 45 days heavily.
- Hobby caps you at 1,000 API requests/day — fine for 5,000 emails/month, tight if you also poll activity endpoints.
- New (unapproved) MailerSend accounts are limited to 10 TO recipients per email until approval.
Some scrapers (and one of our own earlier passes) show MailerSend Hobby at $5.60/mo. We re-verified on 2026-07-12 by reading the live pricing page's raw HTML: the page's own data model prices Hobby at $7/month, with yearly billing displayed as price × 0.9 = $6.30/month — matching MailerSend's help docs. The $5.60 (and “$67.20 billed yearly”) strings are a stale no-JavaScript fallback baked into the static HTML from an older discount. If you're quoted $5.60, expect to pay $7 (or $6.30/mo billed yearly).
Where to sign up
Disclosure: both MailerSend and Postmark pay us 20% of the first 12 months — identical terms, so neither verdict is worth more to us than the other.
FAQ
Does Postmark have any plan under $10/month?
No. Postmark's pricing (accessed 2026-07-12) goes from a free 100-email/month Developer plan straight to Basic at $15.00/month for 10,000 emails. There is no tier in between.
What does MailerSend Hobby actually cost — $5.60 or $7?
$7/month, or $6.30/month billed yearly. We re-verified the live pricing page's raw HTML on 2026-07-12: its data model lists hobby_price 7 with a 0.9 yearly multiplier, matching MailerSend's help docs. The $5.60 figure is a stale no-JS fallback in the page's static HTML.
What are MailerSend Hobby's biggest limits?
1-day activity retention, 1,000 API requests per day, $1.50 per 1,000 overage, and (until account approval) a cap of 10 TO recipients per email.
When is paying $15 for Postmark worth it on a tight budget?
When you need to debug: Postmark keeps 45 days of email history on every plan versus 1 day on MailerSend Hobby. The difference is $8/month (computed: $15 − $7) for a 45× longer debugging window plus double the email volume (10,000 vs 5,000).
Sources
- https://www.mailersend.com/pricing (accessed 2026-07-12)
- https://www.mailersend.com/help/plans-features-and-limits (accessed 2026-07-12)
- https://developers.mailersend.com/general.html (accessed 2026-07-12)
- https://www.mailersend.com/affiliate-program (accessed 2026-07-12)
- https://postmarkapp.com/pricing (accessed 2026-07-12)
- https://postmarkapp.com/developer/api/overview (accessed 2026-07-12)
- https://postmarkapp.com/lp/referral-partner-program (accessed 2026-07-12)