The Brevo Alternative for People Who Only Wanted an API
Brevo is a marketing suite with a send endpoint attached. If all you need is transactional email, you are paying for a CRM, a chatbot and a VoIP phone system, and accepting an unsubscribe link on every password reset.
5,000 emails a month free, then plans from $19/mo with a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails.
Why Teams Look for an Alternative
Brevo is a good deal if you want the whole marketing suite, and its EU-only hosting is an advantage we match only on request. The teams that come to us from Brevo are the ones who never wanted the suite. They wanted an API, and they found that the transactional path carries the marketing platform's assumptions with it, all the way into the headers of a password-reset email.
An unsubscribe link on every transactional email
Brevo appends a List-Unsubscribe header to everything sent over its API or SMTP relay, transactional included, and link tracking cannot be turned off. Swapping in List-Help is Enterprise-only. Brevo's own head of deliverability explained the reason plainly: campaigns can be sent through those interfaces too, so every message is treated as though it might be one. Customers have reported recipients unsubscribing from password resets and support tickets.
Paying money shrinks the contact limit
Brevo ties stored contacts to the email tier. The free plan allows 100,000 contacts. The $9 Starter plan at 5,000 emails allows 500. At 10,000 emails, 1,500. The ceiling does not reach 500,000 until you are buying 20,000 emails a month. Moving down a tier means deleting contacts first.
There is no overage, so sending stops
Brevo has no per-email overage rate. Hit the plan limit and sending is suspended until the cycle resets; queued mail is discarded after 72 hours; unused emails expire monthly. The free plan holds up to 1,000 emails past its 300-a-day cap in a retry queue. Brevo's own documentation says anything beyond that queue is not delivered. Mailfully keeps sending at $0.40 per 1,000.
Suspension is automated, and the billing continues
Brevo suspends on a hard bounce rate over 2%, an unsubscribe rate over 1% or a complaint rate over 0.2%. It samples new campaigns and can suspend the whole account within one to three hours. A second suspension cannot be reversed. Brevo's own FAQ says the subscription does not pause while the account is suspended. Transactional suspension has no self-serve path at all.
Mailfully Compared With Brevo
| Mailfully | Brevo | |
|---|---|---|
| Unsubscribe header on transactional mail | Only on marketing sends, by declaration | Added to everything over API and SMTP; List-Help is Enterprise-only |
| Link tracking | Per-domain toggle, off if you want | Cannot be disabled |
| Stored contacts | Not metered, not tied to send volume | 500 at the 5,000-email tier; 100,000 on the free plan |
| Over the plan limit | $0.40 per 1,000, and sending continues | Sending suspends; queued mail discarded after 72 hours |
| 50,000 emails a month | $19 | $56 on Starter |
| Test mode | Test keys run the real path into a simulator, fully logged | A sandbox header that writes no log row to inspect |
| Webhook signing | Signed, Svix-compatible, with replay | No payload signing; a 5xx from your endpoint discards the event |
| Dedicated IP | $29 add-on on any paid plan | Professional ($499/mo) and Enterprise only |
| Log retention | 30 days, 60 on Growth, 90 on Scale | Indefinite by default, but API queries are capped at one month a call |
| Data residency | United States by default, EU on request | EU only, France and Germany with backups in Belgium |
| Certifications | No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 today | ISO 27001:2022, and its terms say that is the only one it holds |
Brevo figures checked in September 2026 from its own published pricing and documentation. Published prices change; check both before you commit.
What the Same Volume Costs
| Emails a month | Mailfully | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $0 | $0 |
| 50,000 | $19 | $56 |
| 100,000 | $39 | $82 |
| 150,000 | $49 | $179 |
| 500,000 | $149 | $429 |
Brevo figures take the cheapest plan that reaches each volume: Starter up to 100,000, then Standard, which is where the ladder jumps because Starter stops there. At 5,000 a month both are free, though Brevo's free plan is a 300-a-day cap rather than a monthly allowance, so an uneven send pattern hits it sooner than the arithmetic suggests. Neither Brevo column includes the CRM, SMS, WhatsApp or landing-page add-ons. Checked September 2026.
What Mailfully Does Better
- Best in Class Pricing
- Overage is a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails at any volume. Email keeps flowing when you pass your limit; nothing is queued and left to expire.
- Get Real Human Support
- Every paid plan includes support from a real person. When an email goes missing, our team pulls up the message, reads the log, and tells you what happened. Brevo offers phone support only on its $499 Professional plan.
- Extremely Fast Email Delivery
- Your API call returns instantly and the email goes out right behind it. Our servers run in the same AWS region as Amazon SES, so there is no queue to wait in.
- Detailed Logging and History
- Every email keeps a complete history, down to the exact reply from the receiving mail server. When a customer says a receipt never arrived, you see what Gmail said about it. Logs are kept for 30 days on Starter, 60 on Growth, and 90 on Scale, available from the API and the dashboard. Test sends are logged too, so you see exactly what would have gone out.
Moving Over
Brevo nests the sender and recipients as objects with capitalized keys and authenticates with an api-key header; Mailfully takes flat snake_case fields under a Bearer token. The relay swap is a host and credential change. Anything in your templates that worked around the forced unsubscribe header or the tracking you could not turn off can be deleted.
// Before — Brevo
// await api.sendTransacEmail({
// sender: { email: "you@yourdomain.com" },
// to: [{ email: "customer@example.com" }],
// subject: "Welcome aboard",
// htmlContent: "<p>Thanks for signing up!</p>",
// });
import { Mailfully } from "@mailfully/node";
const mailfully = new Mailfully({
apiKey: process.env.MAILFULLY_API_KEY,
});
const { data, error } = await mailfully.emails.send({
from: "you@yourdomain.com",
to: "customer@example.com",
subject: "Welcome aboard",
html: "<p>Thanks for signing up!</p>",
});
if (error) return retryLater(error);Questions
- I need EU data residency. Can you do that?
- Yes, but not by default and not self-serve. Our standard infrastructure is in the United States, and we provision an EU region, with sending infrastructure and message-log storage kept in the EU, on request. If you want residency as a checkbox rather than a conversation, Brevo's EU-only posture is the stronger answer, and we will say so.
- Do I lose marketing email by moving?
- No, but it is narrower. Mailfully sends marketing email from the same plan and the same allowance, with one-click unsubscribe and a per-environment opt-out list. What we do not have is Brevo's automation builder, segments, landing pages or CRM. If your marketing runs on those, keep Brevo for campaigns and move only the transactional traffic.
- Can I move my blocklist over?
- Yes. Export the blocked and unsubscribed contacts from Brevo and import them before your first send, so nothing Brevo already learned was bad gets mailed again. Note that Brevo keeps marketing and transactional suppression on separate lists, so export both.
- What happens when I hit the plan limit?
- You keep sending. Overage is $0.40 per 1,000, and the dashboard warns you on the way up. Nothing is queued and then discarded, and nothing stops because the month has a lot of traffic in it.
Send the First One Free
5,000 emails a month on the free tier, no card. Paid plans start at $19/mo with a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails beyond the allowance.
Start free