# Resend Pricing 2026: Free Tier, Plans and Limits By Femi Adegoke · 2026-11-08 · Source: https://www.activepieces.com/blog/resend-pricing-2026-free-tier-plans-and-limits --- [Resend](https://resend.com/pricing) tiers its pricing by emails sent, and teams wiring it into workflows built with tools like [Activepieces](https://www.activepieces.com) will notice the same structure at every level: - Free has a monthly email allowance, a daily cap, and limits on domains, seats and log history - Pro has a monthly email allowance, a daily cap, and limits on domains, seats and log history - Scale has a monthly email allowance, a daily cap, and limits on domains, seats and log history - Enterprise has a monthly email allowance, a daily cap, and limits on domains, seats and log history - Resend bills overage per thousand emails beyond the allowance Resend is an email API for transactional messages (receipts, password resets) and marketing broadcasts. Resend meters the email sent, not the user or the API call. I wrote this on 8 November 2026, and plan numbers change, so confirm against resend.com/pricing before you commit. ## Resend plans, prices and limits in one table ### The full plan table, verified from Resend's pricing page The daily limit, domain count and retention columns are **where a growing app hits a wall**. | Plan | Monthly price | Included emails | Daily limit | Domains | Team seats | Log retention | Overage per 1,000 emails | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Free | No charge | Smallest allowance | Tightest cap | Fewest | Fewest | Shortest | Not the plan to grow on | | Pro | Flat monthly fee | Larger allowance | Looser cap | More | More | Longer | Billed past the allowance | | Scale | Higher flat fee | Larger again | Higher ceiling | Most self-serve | Most self-serve | Longest self-serve | Billed past the allowance | | Enterprise | Negotiated | Set by contract | Set by contract | Set by contract | Set by contract | Set by contract | Set by contract | Every self-serve step trades a higher flat fee for looser limits, so the cheapest plan is cheap only until one column runs out. That ordering is the useful part. **Before choosing, compare your peak sending day, not your monthly average, against the daily limit column.** ## Small production app costs per plan The bill depends on which limit your event count hits first: the monthly allowance, the daily cap or neither. The headline price matters much less. | Emails per month | Plan it lands on | Base price | Overage | Total monthly bill | What drives the number | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | 2,000 | Free plan | None | None, if the allowance holds | Nothing | The daily cap, not the monthly count | | 20,000 | First paid tier | Its flat list price | Usually none, inside the included allowance | About the base price | Leaving the free plan's limits behind | | 100,000 | Higher tier, or a lower tier plus overage | The tier's flat list price | Per-thousand rate on every email past the allowance | The lower of the two routes | Overage rate against the next tier's flat price | *Calculated from list prices, not from invoices.* This volume fits a free plan on the monthly count, so the bill is nothing. Watch the daily cap. If a launch, a batch import or a digest job sends most of the month's email in one day, you hit the cap while the monthly total is still tiny. That means the free plan only works if your sends are spread out. ### 20,000 emails a month At this volume you are on the first paid tier, and the bill is essentially its flat price. Overage shouldn't appear if you stay inside the included allowance, so the price is predictable. The paid tier's value here is the lifted caps, so check domain count and log retention too. ### 100,000 emails a month Here two routes compete: stay on a lower tier and pay overage on every email past its allowance, or move up to the next tier and pay its flat price. Multiply your expected overage by the per-thousand rate and compare it with the upgrade. The cheaper route is whichever total is lower, and as volume rises that's almost always the upgrade. ## Overage fees versus plan upgrade costs Beyond your plan's allowance, **overage is metered per 1,000 emails sent**. The next plan wins at the volume where those extra thousands cost more than the price step to the next tier. ![Resend Scale overage rate per 1,000 emails by tier](https://ap-marketing-media.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/8e235f82-f163-4a7d-b31e-29425059018c/resend-pricing-2026-free-tier-plans-and-limits-f-7d211d58.svg "Source: Resend") ### Overage rate versus upgrade price At $20 a month, Pro charges $0.90 per 1,000 emails over its allowance. The $90 Scale entry wins at about 77,800 emails over ($70 ÷ $0.90). From there, Scale's [published prices](https://resend.com/pricing) step with volume: $90 for 100k emails, $160 for 200k, $350 for 500k, $650 for 1M and $1,150 for 2.5M. Past each crossover, each step costs less per email than the last, which is why upgrading beats staying put. ![What Resend Scale costs at each included volume tier](https://ap-marketing-media.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/16f3825c-8418-4455-a14c-235c2d66863c/resend-pricing-2026-free-tier-plans-and-limits-s-578f95ee.svg "Source: Resend") Climb the tiers and the overage rate falls the same way. It's $0.90 per 1,000 at the 100k tier, then $0.80 at 200k, $0.70 at 500k, $0.65 at 1M, $0.52 at 1.5M and $0.46 at 2.5M, so higher volumes get meaningfully better rates. ### Resend upgrade crossover point for each plan To find the crossover, divide the price step by the overage rate and add the result to the tier's included volume. Using the published numbers: | Staying on | Next tier | Price step | Overage rate | Upgrade wins past | |---|---|---|---|---| | 100k ($90) | 200k ($160) | $70 | $0.90 | about 177,800 emails | | 200k ($160) | 500k ($350) | $190 | $0.80 | about 437,500 emails | | 500k ($350) | 1M ($650) | $300 | $0.70 | about 928,600 emails | | 1M ($650) | 2.5M ($1,150) | $500 | $0.65 | about 1.77M emails | Each crossover sits well below the next tier's included volume. At 150k emails a month, the 100k tier costs $135 ($90 plus 50 × $0.90), and the 200k tier costs $160 for the same mail, which means you'd pay more by upgrading. ![Activepieces pricing page displaying four subscription tiers with features and costs.](https://ap-marketing-media.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/841ec84e-02e4-4761-aca2-e92f6d457f41/self-host-mistral-ai-enterprise-deployment-guide-c7d7dca9.webp) For the 1.5M tier, Resend's page gives a $0.52 overage rate, but the monthly price for that tier is not among these figures. A crossover into or out of 1.5M can't be calculated here without guessing, so confirm that price before planning around it. ## Resend limits that apply beyond monthly volume Moving up isn't only about volume. A plan can stop you on a limit that never shows on the invoice. The limits are chiefly the daily sending cap, the domain count, the retention window and the API rate limit. ### Daily sending caps and rate limits Count emails sent per day, not per month. A monthly allowance can look generous and still fail you if your traffic arrives in bursts. A single product announcement or a batch of password resets after an outage can exhaust the day while the month is barely touched, because the free tier carries a daily cap on top of its monthly allowance. ![A row of 30 small identical boxes, each holding a few envelopes.](https://ap-marketing-media.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/b3934678-225e-4f17-b35e-e8a71b7191ac/resend-pricing-2026-free-tier-plans-and-limits-i-aa2f10f4.webp) For a production app, that means **the free tier is a testing tier**, whatever its monthly number suggests. Separately, the API rate limit is a ceiling measured in requests per second. It shapes how you write your sender: a loop that fires one request per recipient will hit it long before a batch endpoint would. Check whether your peak, not your average, fits under it, and queue sends rather than assuming a higher plan lifts it. Activepieces can send your signup, billing and alert emails through Resend and watch for the bounces that come back, and it charges by the run: 1 credit per flow run, whether the flow has two steps or ten, where Zapier bills per task and Make per module. A flow that sends, checks bounces and suppresses bad addresses costs the same as a bare send, so splitting the work into smaller, safer steps never raises the bill, and the free plan's 1,000 credits a month come with unlimited flows. Every email the flow sends still counts against your Resend daily and monthly limits. ### Resend domain, seat and retention limits by plan If you run one product, domains never matter. If you're an agency, or you separate staging, marketing and transactional sending onto their own domains to protect reputation, the domain count can choose your plan before volume does. Domains are counted per plan, and the count steps up sharply between tiers. When a customer says a receipt never arrived, a short retention window means you may have nothing to check. Retention decides how far back you can look at logs and message events. ![A shop owner holds up a single blank slip before a long shelf of logbooks where only the last two are present, the rest of…](https://ap-marketing-media.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/e1329aaf-d1bc-426b-8b47-430729241966/resend-pricing-2026-free-tier-plans-and-limits-i-cafb2221.webp) Price it as a support cost. If you debug deliverability complaints after the fact, pay for the window that covers how long your customers take to complain. ### Resend dedicated IP and add-on pricing A dedicated IP is sold as an add-on to the higher tier. It only pays off when your sending volume is steady enough to build the IP's reputation. Last, read the attachment size limit. It caps what a single message can carry, so an app that emails invoices or exports should test its largest realistic file before choosing a plan, or link to the file instead. ## Resend versus Postmark, SendGrid and SES pricing Per email, once volume is high, Amazon SES is usually the cheapest of the four. But it charges you in setup and upkeep. Resend, Postmark and SendGrid cost more per message and bundle more of the work. I've left out dollar figures because I haven't confirmed current rates, and email pricing changes often enough that a stale number is worse than none. A plan priced per thousand emails still costs more than its sticker if you must add suppression handling, bounce tracking or log storage on top. | Provider | What is metered | Billing shape | Mostly bundled | Mostly left to you | |---|---|---|---|---| | Resend | Emails sent per month | Free tier, then monthly plans with limits on domains and log retention | Developer-friendly API, dashboard, logs | Dedicated IP, higher limits on a bigger plan | | Postmark | Emails sent per month | Monthly volume tiers | Deliverability tooling, message streams, activity history | Dedicated IP, moving up a tier when you outgrow one | | SendGrid | Emails sent per month | Monthly plans by volume, with features split across plans | Marketing and transactional sending under one account | Dedicated IP, features gated to higher plans | | Amazon SES | Individual emails sent | Pay as you go, no monthly plan | Raw sending infrastructure | Bounce and complaint handling, dashboards, log storage, sandbox exit request | The consequence is that the three plan-based vendors are cheaper when your volume sits comfortably inside a tier and you would otherwise spend engineer hours on tooling. Their risk is the step between tiers: a spike past your plan's volume, or a retention or domain limit, can force an upgrade whose cost is out of proportion to the extra emails. No such step exists on SES, so a spiky or very high-volume app pays only for what it sends. When nobody builds and watches the bounce pipeline, SES loses on price; it wins when someone will. ## What Activepieces does about this The trouble this article describes is that the limit you hit is rarely the one on the invoice. It's the daily cap, the burst, the unnoticed overage. Activepieces is where you put the logic that keeps sends under those limits. A flow can keep a running count of the day's sends in its Storage step, branch when the count nears your cap, and hold the rest behind a Delay step until the next day. ![A small turnstile with a counter dial on top.](https://ap-marketing-media.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/122c26a6-78bd-4b7f-977c-a4c430ec7128/resend-pricing-2026-free-tier-plans-and-limits-i-0a0daa2f.webp) It can also message you in Slack or email before the cap stops a password reset. That turns the advice to compare your peak day against the daily limit into something you can enforce. A batch import or a retry storm gets spread out by the flow instead of dropped by the API. Activepieces is open source under the MIT licence, so you can self-host the flows that guard your Resend limits and inspect every step. Flows are unlimited on the free plan, which means a throttle, a counter and an alert cost no more than the one send they protect. Resend still sets the limits and Activepieces doesn't raise them. What it does is let you find out you're approaching a ceiling before the ceiling finds you. ## Frequently asked questions The answers below cover the questions that decide whether a plan fits, and each one comes back to the same test: will you hit the limit? ### Is Resend free for production use? Yes, for a small app. **The free tier is permanent, not a trial**, so a low-volume production service can run on it indefinitely. The catch is the daily sending cap, which is what you'll actually hit. If your app is a password-reset and receipt flow for a small user base, it fits. A launch day, a bulk notification or a retry storm can exceed the cap in one afternoon, and that's the point at which a paid plan stops being optional. ### What happens when I go over my Resend email limit? On paid plans, overage is billed pay-as-you-go, so volume past your plan's allowance raises the bill instead of stopping your mail. The daily limit is separate from that monthly allowance. A burst can run into the daily cap even when your monthly total is nowhere near the plan's ceiling. Check both numbers against your busiest day, not your average one. You can switch Resend plans from the billing settings, but don't assume how the current month is prorated. Read the confirmation screen before you commit. The practical rule is to move up before a known spike, such as a launch or a migration, rather than after the overage has already been metered. ### Does Resend charge for failed or bounced emails? Plan on bounced mail counting toward your volume. Resend accepted the message and attempted delivery, so **a bounce is still a send** against your allowance. Bounces also damage sender reputation, which costs you in deliverability on top of the metered cost. Clean your list and suppress hard bounces so you're not paying to send to dead addresses. Confirm the exact treatment of each failure type in the current billing documentation. Most small apps don't need a dedicated IP on Resend. A dedicated IP only pays off when your volume is high and steady enough to keep the address warm and its reputation yours. At low or spiky volume, a shared pool is usually the safer choice. Add one when you have the sending history to justify the extra line item, not as a default. ## Related reading - [Cohere Pricing 2026 for Trial, Production and Enterprise](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/cohere-pricing-2026-for-trial-production-and-enterprise) - [Resend Inboxes: Draft and Agent API Endpoints (2026)](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/resend-inboxes-draft-and-agent-api-endpoints-2026) - [ADP Payroll Pricing for Small Businesses in 2026](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/adp-payroll-pricing-for-small-businesses-in-2026) ## References - [Resend](https://resend.com/pricing)