Resend vs SendRaven at 100k, 250k and 1M emails a month

Correction, 11 September 2026. The first version of this post said 250,000 emails a month on Resend cost $350, the price of the 500,000 tier, and that the two prices were more than four times apart. That was wrong. Resend publishes an overage rate on every paid plan: with pay-as-you-go turned on, 250,000 emails on Pro is $35 plus 150,000 extra at $0.90 per thousand, which is $170. The table, the excerpt and the section on where the gap comes from are corrected below. The gap at 250,000 is about two times, not four and a half.

Updated, 19 September 2026. SendRaven's pricing changed on 18 September 2026: the two paid plans became one, priced on a single curve. Our column, the arithmetic and the section on where the gap comes from now use the new prices, which are higher than the ones this post first quoted. Resend's column is unchanged.

At 100,000 emails a month Resend and SendRaven cost the same: $35. At 250,000 Resend costs $170 and SendRaven $109. At 1,000,000 Resend costs $650 and SendRaven $379. Those are both companies' list prices, re-checked on 18 September 2026, at the cheapest way each sells that volume. The rest of this post is where the gap comes from, where it closes, and what neither number includes.

The three numbers

Resend sells a tier and an overage rate. Pro is $20 for 50,000 emails and $35 for 100,000, and each extra thousand costs $0.90. The Scale tiers are $160 for 200,000, $350 for 500,000 and $650 for 1,000,000, with overage at $0.80, $0.70 and $0.65 per thousand. Overage is opt-in: you turn on pay-as-you-go in team settings, and without it you are asked to upgrade instead.

SendRaven sells one paid plan on one curve. Standard is $19 a month and covers 50,000 emails. Past that the price is published at each step, $35 at 100,000, $109 at 250,000, $199 at 500,000 and $379 at 1,000,000, and between those steps each extra thousand costs $0.50 until the next published price is reached, where it stops. There is no tier to choose and no overage to switch on. The arithmetic for the table:

           Resend                          SendRaven
100,000    $35 (Pro)                       $35  (published step)
250,000    $35 + 150 × $0.90  = $170       $109 (published step)
1,000,000  $650 (Scale 1M)                 $379 (published step)

At 250,000 the cheapest Resend option is Pro with overage. Scale 200,000 plus overage is $200, and the 500,000 tier is $350. At 1,000,000 the tier itself is cheapest.

We built the pricing page around the same function the dashboard uses to estimate a bill, so the number you see there is the number you will be charged, not a marketing rounding of it.

Where the gap comes from

The gap is the rate between the published prices. Resend charges $0.90 per thousand once you are through Pro's 100,000. We charge $0.50, and only until the next published price, where the meter stops until the step after. At 100,000 both price lists land on $35. Every thousand after that widens the gap by forty cents, and each of our steps widens it again.

This matters more than it looks, because most products do not sit on a tier. They grow through it, and what a month costs in between is set almost entirely by the rate past the last step. A product sending 150,000 emails pays Resend $80 and SendRaven $60. At 300,000 it is $215 on Resend against $134.

On Resend's own tiers the difference is similar. At exactly 500,000, Resend is $350 and SendRaven $199. At exactly 1,000,000, $650 against $379. That is about one and three quarter times, and it is the fairest reading of the two price books: compare the tier rows if your volume sits on one of Resend's tiers and stays there, and the rows above if it moves.

Marketing is where the two stop being comparable

Everything above is transactional mail. Resend sells marketing as a second product, priced by contacts: the plans run from $40 to $650 a month by list size, and a list of 150,000 people costs $650 before a single campaign goes out. That is on top of the transactional plan.

SendRaven does not charge for contacts. A contact is a row in a database and costs us nothing to keep, so the meter for a campaign is the same meter as everything else: emails sent. A 150,000-person list that receives one newsletter a month is 150,000 emails, which is $60. Send it twice and it is $134. Never send it and the list costs nothing: the month is the plan's $19 minimum, whatever the size of the list.

The reason this matters beyond the bill is what contact pricing does to behaviour. When marketing costs more than transactional, teams relabel campaigns as transactional to save money. That strips the unsubscribe link, mixes the campaign's complaint rate into the reputation that carries password resets, and is the single most common way a healthy sending domain gets itself throttled. Charging the same for both removes the incentive to do it. We keep the technical separation, two sending identities per domain with two reputations, and drop the commercial one.

What Resend's price buys that ours does not

Correction, 18 September 2026. This section first said Resend has nine official SDKs. Its SDK page lists eight languages plus a Laravel package, and the line below now says so. The comparison post was corrected on 16 September and this one was missed.

Resend is the default choice for a developer who needs to send email from a product, and it earns that. If the product only sends, some of the $35 is buying things SendRaven does not have.

• Official SDKs for eight languages, plus Laravel. SendRaven has REST, an MCP server and an OpenAPI document. If you want a typed client this afternoon, Resend has it.
• React Email. Templates as components, rendered by the same code as your app. SendRaven stores templates with escaped variables instead.
• Three domains on the free plan against our one, and a dedicated IP as a Scale add-on.
• A sending reputation built over years, and an abuse team to match. SendRaven is new and will not quote a deliverability figure it has not earned.

None of those change at 250,000 or 1,000,000. They are the same value at every volume, so they weigh most at 100,000, where the prices are equal, and least at the top, where the difference is a few hundred dollars a month.

What ours buys that theirs does not

The price is not the reason SendRaven exists. It exists because three of our five products are partly run by agents, and the email API they had could not do what an agent needs. Those things are included at every volume in the table, and on the free plan too.

• Replies come back as a thread. Inbound is joined to the message it answers on the Message-ID header, never on subject, with the quoted history stripped. Resend tells you a message arrived and leaves you to fetch it, with no thread object and no stripped text.
• Limits live on the API key. A key handed to an agent can carry a daily cap, a recipient allowlist and an approval hold, checked before anything is sent. A Resend key can be scoped to a domain and to send-only, but not capped or held.
• Unsubscribe is two writes. Suppress the address and cancel every scheduled send queued for it, so day six of a welcome sequence does not arrive after someone has opted out.
• Inbound is free and on the same plan. So are contacts, replies and campaigns.

The boundaries of this comparison

Resend's price list was re-read on 18 September 2026, and both companies change theirs: ours changed that same week, which is why this post was updated. The Resend comparison page carries the date it was last checked and the full feature table, and we would rather be corrected than quoted wrongly: this post was, and if a number here is out of date, tell us and we will fix the page and this post.

If you are moving, the send call is close to a rename: from, to, subject, html or text, and an Idempotency-Key header. Audiences import as a list. Templates move as stored templates with variables. Verify your domain on SendRaven first, then switch the key.

Pricing · Resend vs SendRaven · Start free