Why we do not charge for contacts

Most email pricing has two meters. Transactional is priced by emails sent. Marketing is priced by contacts stored. The second meter is an inherited accident, and it does real damage, so SendRaven does not have it: it is an email API priced per email sent, never per contact, and campaigns, automations and transactional mail all run on that one meter.

The meter measures the wrong thing

A contact is a row in a database. It costs the provider close to nothing to keep, whether it is mailed weekly or never. Pricing by contacts is a proxy: it approximates how big a customer you are, not what you used.

The proxy lands hardest on exactly the customer a product wants. A list that grows is the point of building an audience, and contact pricing charges most for growth whether or not the growth is mailed. It also invites the worst kind of housekeeping: deleting people who asked to hear from you, to get under a tier.

We charge for emails sent. That is what costs money to deliver, it is what you chose to do, and it is the only number that goes up when you use the product more.

What a list costs elsewhere

These are published list prices, checked on 7 September 2026. Each company changes its price list, and the comparison pages carry the date each one was last read.

• Resend sells marketing as a second plan priced by contacts, from $40 a month for 5,000 to $650 a month for 150,000, on top of the transactional plan priced by volume. A 150,000-person list costs $650 before a campaign goes out.
• Mailchimp prices every plan by contacts. The free plan stops at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, and transactional mail is a separately billed add-on.
• Loops prices by subscribed contacts and does not meter sends at all, which is the mirror image of SendRaven: the same list mailed once a month or once a day costs the same, and a list that grows costs more even if it is mailed less.

Against that, on SendRaven a contact is free, an audience of any size is free, and a monthly newsletter to 150,000 people is 150,000 emails on the same meter as your password resets: $60 that month. Never send it and the list costs nothing; the month is the plan's $19 minimum, whatever the size of the list.

One meter means one plan

Because contacts are free, there is no reason for marketing to be a second product with a second price. On SendRaven, transactional mail, campaigns, automations and inbound are on the same plan, under the same key, with the same meter.

The technical separation between them is real and we keep it. A domain gets two sending identities, mail. for transactional and news. for campaigns, each with its own reputation, so a campaign's complaint rate cannot reach your password resets. Suppressions are scoped the same way: a marketing opt-out never blocks a receipt.

The commercial separation is the accident. When marketing costs more than transactional, customers relabel campaigns as transactional to save money. That defeats the reputation isolation and strips the unsubscribe link, which is the one thing a campaign must carry. Charging the same for both removes the incentive to lie.

Replies are free

Inbound mail costs us something to receive and parse. We do not meter it, because charging for the reply discourages the half of email that makes it a conversation. If your agent reads replies, threads them and answers, the only thing you pay for is what it sends.

What happens at the limit

On Free, which includes 3,000 emails a month, sending pauses. You are never billed for something you did not agree to, and a free plan that silently bills is a support problem waiting to happen.

On the paid plan, Standard, sending continues and the price follows one published curve: $19 a month covers 50,000 emails, then $35 at 100,000, $109 at 250,000, $199 at 500,000 and $379 at 1,000,000, with each extra thousand between those points at $0.50 until the next published price is reached. There is no tier to pick and nothing to switch on. Stopping a customer's password resets to protect a few dollars of margin would be the wrong trade. A spend ceiling is yours to set if you want one, and by default it pauses campaigns and leaves transactional mail alone. (Updated 19 September 2026: pricing changed on 18 September from two paid plans to this one.)

A campaign larger than your remaining allowance is refused whole rather than half-sent, so you never have to work out who received it. And the refusal is an HTTP 402, not a 429: retrying will not help, upgrading will, and a client that backs off on 429 would otherwise retry forever. Over MCP, get_usage tells an agent how much room is left before it starts a batch.

Why usage pricing, not tiers

Tiers step. Cross a boundary and the price jumps to the next bucket, which is a cliff. Usage pricing does not beat tiers at the boundaries; it beats them in the middle, and the middle is where most senders live.

The included allowance covers a normal month. Beyond it, a flat rate per thousand, lower on the larger plan. No boundary to plan around and no reason to hold back a campaign until the first of the month.

What this does not include

Attachments count. Each message carries up to 10MB of them, measured after decoding rather than as base64, which would quietly make the limit 7.5MB. Anything larger belongs behind a link.

The plans, the overage rates and what each includes are on the pricing page, with the competitor prices we checked and the date we checked them.

FAQ

Does SendRaven charge for contacts? No. Contacts, audiences, segments and topic preferences are free on every plan, including Free. The only meter is emails sent, and it is the same meter for transactional mail, campaigns and automations.

Which email APIs do not charge per contact? Resend, Mailgun and SendGrid price sending by volume and sell marketing as a second product priced by contacts: Resend's marketing plans, Mailgun's Mailjet, SendGrid's Marketing Campaigns. Postmark is the exception among them, and the one worth knowing about: its broadcast stream is priced by volume like the rest of its sending, with no audiences or automations behind it. SendRaven is priced by emails sent for both, so a list of any size costs nothing until it is mailed. (Corrected 18 September 2026: this said each of the four sells marketing by contacts or not at all, which is wrong about Postmark. Postmark's cells were last read on 16 September 2026.)

What happens when I go over my plan's allowance? On Free, sending pauses at 3,000 emails a month. On Standard it continues along the published curve, at $0.50 per 1,000 between one published price and the next. A single campaign larger than the remaining allowance is refused whole with an HTTP 402, never sent halfway.