Email & SMS API pricing

Transactional messaging APIs are priced per message, but "per message" hides two very different cost structures. Email providers mostly sell tiers — a monthly fee that includes a block of sends, then an overage rate. SMS providers sell true usage — a per-segment price that varies by destination country, sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Email: tier math, not unit price

The number that matters for email is the effective cost per thousand sends at your volume, which means you have to place yourself on the provider's tier ladder. A service that looks expensive at its entry tier can be the cheapest option once you're sending a few hundred thousand a month, because the included volume scales faster than the price. Also check what the tier gates: dedicated IPs, send-time deliverability tooling, and longer log retention are often what actually separates two providers at the same headline rate.

Deliverability is a real cost even though it never appears on the pricing page. A cheaper provider that lands 3% more of your mail in spam is more expensive than it looks if those are password resets or receipts.

SMS: the country is the price

An SMS "segment" is 160 characters (70 for messages with emoji or non-Latin text), and a long message is billed as multiple segments. The per-segment rate for the United States might be a fraction of a cent; the same message to a mobile number in the UK, Germany, or India can cost several times more, and some destinations add carrier surcharges on top. If you send internationally, the only meaningful comparison is one that prices your actual destination mix, not the US rate the pricing page leads with.

For A2P messaging in the US you'll also pay registration and per-message carrier fees that are separate from the provider's rate — budget for them.

Comparing providers

For email, estimate your monthly send volume, find the tier each provider puts you in, and compare the effective cost per thousand there. For SMS, list your top destination countries by volume and price the message mix against each provider's country rates. The individual comparisons here run those numbers for the common matchups; the full rate dataset is on the [data page](/data).