The Postmark Alternative That Costs a Third as Much
Postmark costs $55 a month for 50,000 emails against $19 here, and $1.80 per 1,000 past the allowance against $0.40.
3,000 emails a month free, then plans from $5/mo, with $0.40 per 1,000 emails past a paid plan's allowance.
Why Teams Look for an Alternative
Postmark is an established transactional email service, owned by ActiveCampaign since May 2022. Where it falls short is the price as volume grows and what its cheapest paid plan leaves out.
The price at higher volumes
At 125,000 emails, Postmark's Basic plan costs $115 a month. Mailfully costs $49.
The free tier is 100 emails a month
That is 100 a month, not 100 a day, and Postmark's pricing page says "No overages allowed" on that plan. The next plan up is $15 for 10,000, with nothing in between. Mailfully's free tier is 3,000 a month with a 100-a-day cap and no card.
Basic excludes more than you would guess
On Postmark's cheapest paid plan there is no inbound email, no dedicated IP, and no way to buy the retention add-on. The free plan allows more sending domains, servers, streams and users than paid Basic does. All Mailfully plans can receive email, Free included, and paid plans come with the full product.
Test sends are billed
Postmark counts a sandbox test message as one email against the monthly quota. Mailfully never meters a test send, because test keys run the mailbox-simulator path.
Mailfully Compared With Postmark
| Mailfully | Postmark | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 3,000 emails a month | 100 emails a month, overage disabled |
| 50,000 emails a month | $19 | $55 on Basic |
| Overage rate | $0.40 per 1,000 | $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic |
| Test sends | Never metered, never billed | Sandbox messages count against the quota |
| Dedicated IP | $29 add-on, no volume floor | $50 per IP a month, needs 300,000 sends a month, Pro and up |
| Inbound email | All plans, Free included | Free, Pro and Platform; not Basic |
| Log retention | 30 days, 90 on Scale | 45 days on every plan; the add-on is Pro and above |
| Recipients per message | No 50-address ceiling on transactional sends | 50 across to, cc and bcc combined |
| EU data residency | Available on request | No EU region, and no plans to add one |
| Transactional and marketing separation | One allowance, declared per message | Message Streams, on physically separate IP ranges |
Postmark figures checked in October 2026 from its own published pricing and documentation. Published prices change; check both before you commit. See how our free plan compares, line by line.
What the Same Volume Costs
| Emails a month | Mailfully | Postmark |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $5 | $15 |
| 10,000 | $5 | $15 |
| 50,000 | $19 | $55 |
| 125,000 | $49 | $115 |
| 300,000 | $99 | $245 |
| 500,000 | $99 | $455 |
Postmark figures are its Basic tier, the cheapest one, taken from its published ladder; Pro costs 10% more and Platform 20% more at every rung. At 300,000, Mailfully is the Scale plan. Postmark publishes no 500,000 rung, so its figure there is the 700,000 tier at $455, which costs less than the 300,000 tier plus overage at $1.70 per 1,000 ($585). Postmark also counts each sandbox test send toward the month's volume; a Mailfully test send never counts. Checked October 2026.
What Mailfully Does Better
- Best in Class Pricing
- Straightforward plans, published in full. Past a paid plan's allowance, extra emails are a flat $0.40 per 1,000 at any volume. No add-on for log retention, no per-domain DMARC fee, no separate plan for broadcast email.
- Get Real Human Support
- Every paid plan includes support from a real person. When an email goes missing, our team pulls up the message, reads the log, and tells you what happened. Postmark's support hours are 3am to 7pm Eastern, Monday to Friday.
- Detailed Logging and History
- Every email keeps a complete history, down to the exact reply from the receiving mail server. When a customer says a receipt never arrived, you see what Gmail said about it. Logs are kept for 30 days on Free, Starter and Growth, and 90 on Scale, available from the API and the dashboard.
Moving Over
Postmark takes capitalized JSON fields over an X-Postmark-Server-Token header; Mailfully takes snake_case under a Bearer key. That renaming is the bulk of the work, and it is mechanical. Templates move as HTML with the placeholder syntax swapped to double braces. Suppressions export from Postmark's API and import through ours, so you do not re-mail an address Postmark already knows is bad.
// Before — Postmark
// await client.sendEmail({
// From: "you@yourdomain.com",
// To: "customer@example.com",
// Subject: "Welcome aboard",
// HtmlBody: "<p>Thanks for signing up!</p>",
// });
import { Mailfully } from "mailfully";
const mailfully = new Mailfully({
apiKey: process.env.MAILFULLY_API_KEY ?? "",
});
const { data, error } = await mailfully.emails.send({
from: "you@yourdomain.com",
to: "customer@example.com",
subject: "Welcome aboard",
html: "<p>Thanks for signing up!</p>",
});
if (error) throw new Error(`${error.type}: ${error.message}`);Questions
- Will my deliverability drop if I leave Postmark?
- It depends on your mail, not on the vendor. Authentication, list hygiene and complaint rate do most of the work. We put you on a warmed shared pool and walk you through DKIM, SPF and DMARC alignment before your first send. A dedicated IP is $29 with no volume floor if you want your reputation entirely your own. Run both services in parallel for a week and compare your own numbers rather than ours.
- Can I move my suppression list over?
- Yes, and you should. Export from Postmark's Suppressions API and import through ours before you send anything, so the addresses Postmark learned were bad stay suppressed. After that, hard bounces and complaints are suppressed automatically.
- Do you have Message Streams?
- Not as separate IP ranges. Mailfully declares a type on each message, transactional or marketing, and the marketing path carries one-click unsubscribe and a single recipient per send. If physically isolated broadcast IPs are a hard requirement, Postmark's architecture does something ours does not.
- What about inbound email?
- Yes. All Mailfully plans, Free included, can receive email at a verified domain or at a mailfully.app address we host. Mail arrives by webhook and through the API, with attachments, SPF, DKIM and DMARC results, and spam and virus checks. Received email counts toward the same monthly allowance as sending, as it does on Postmark. Mail that fails the spam or virus check does not count. Postmark includes inbound on its Free, Pro and Platform plans but not on Basic.
Send the First One Free
3,000 emails a month on the free tier, no card. Paid plans start at $5/mo, with $0.40 per 1,000 emails beyond the allowance.
Start free