Email Providers Keep Nerfing Free Plans, and Some Are Now Just Trials
Published at Oct 11, 2026
The free plan has always been the way a developer ends up on a transactional email service. You sign up, wire it into a side project, and by the time you have real traffic the provider is hard to replace.
Providers have noticed that this works a bit too well for people who never pay. During the latest price review for the email calculator I found two flavors of the same trend: free plans that got smaller, and free plans that are no longer free at all but a trial.
Free plans that got smaller
MailerSend went from 3,000 emails per month to 500, with a cap of 100 per day. MailerSend’s own help article about the change says existing accounts were moved to the new free plan on December 2, 2025 unless they opted in to the Hobby plan. A third-party write-up dates the change for new signups to October 21, 2025. The Hobby plan is now a paid plan, $7 for 5,000 emails. Seats and templates were cut as well, from 5 to 2 users and from 3 templates to 1.
MailerLite’s transactional offering is MailerSend under the hood, so the same numbers apply there. MailerLite’s marketing side got the same treatment, which I wrote up in the newsletter roundup, and Mailchimp did it in February.
Free plans that are now trials
This is the part I find more annoying. A small free plan at least stays free. A trial ends, and you have to either pay or move.
- SendGrid retired its free plans starting May 27, 2025. Existing free users got 60 days of full access, then sending stopped, and accounts with more than 100 stored contacts had them deleted. The cheapest paid plan, Essentials, is $19.95 per month.
- UniOne used to have 6,000 free emails per month. The pricing page now describes a 4 month trial with the same 6,000 emails, after which the plan costs $4 per month. Four dollars is hardly a deal breaker, but it is a different thing from free, and the FAQ says you add a card in the billing section to activate it. I could not find an announcement date, we simply noticed it in this review.
- SocketLabs has no permanent free plan. You get the Core plan for the first month without a card, then it is $39.95 per month for 40,000 emails.
- Amazon SES has quietly joined them. Since July 21, 2026 the SES-specific allowance of 3,000 free messages per month for 12 months is no longer offered to new customers, according to an AWS Builder Center article about the launch. New AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits and a 6 month free plan instead. There is more to the SES story than the free tier, which I wrote up in Amazon SES is no longer just $0.10 per 1,000 emails.
In the calculator, UniOne is now modeled as a $4 per month plan, and SES has no free plan. SendGrid’s free plan was removed from our data in September 2025, a few months after SendGrid retired it.
Who still has a real free plan
As far as I can tell, these are the ones that do not expire:
| Provider | Free plan |
|---|---|
| Resend | 3,000 emails per month, 100 per day, 3 domains |
| Brevo | 300 emails per day |
| Mailgun | 100 emails per day, 1 domain, 1 day of logs |
| Postmark | 100 emails per month, mostly for testing |
| MailerSend | 500 emails per month, 100 per day |
Brevo is the most generous on paper, since 300 per day adds up to around 9,000 emails a month if you spread them out. Resend gives you 3,000 per month. But both have daily caps, which makes them a poor fit for anything bursty like a launch day or a wave of password resets.
What I would do about it
This is my opinion, not something any of the providers have said, but the logic seems clear. Free email accounts attract spammers, and spammers hurt deliverability for everyone on shared IPs. A trial with a card on file or a small monthly fee is a cheap way to filter them out. It makes sense for the provider. It does not make it any better for a side project with ten users.
So when you pick a provider for something small:
- Check whether the free plan expires. “Free for 4 months” and “free forever” look the same on a pricing page until you read the fine print.
- Look at the first paid step, not just the free one. The $4 to $7 per month plans are often fine, as long as you know that is where you end up.
- Keep your sending code behind a thin wrapper. Switching providers mostly means new API calls and updating SPF and DKIM records, and that is a lot less painful if you only have to do it in one place.
You can compare all of them by volume in the email calculator.