The Postmark Alternative That Costs a Third as Much
Postmark earned its deliverability reputation and we are not going to argue with it. We will argue with the bill: $55 a month for 50,000 emails against $19 here, and $1.80 per thousand over the line against $0.40.
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
Postmark has the best deliverability reputation in transactional email, and even its unhappiest reviewers concede the mail arrives. The complaints are about everything around the sending: the price at every volume, what the cheapest paid plan quietly excludes, and what has happened to support and shipping cadence since ActiveCampaign acquired the company in May 2022.
The price, at every volume
Postmark is the most expensive mainstream option and its own customers say so first. 50,000 emails is $55 a month on Basic against $19 here. 125,000 is $115 against $49. Past the allowance Basic charges $1.80 per 1,000 where we charge $0.40. There is no annual plan and no prepay discount, so none of that comes down if you commit.
The free tier is 100 emails a month
Not 100 a day. One hundred emails a month, with overage disabled, so it stops dead. The next rung up is $15 for 10,000, and there is nothing in between. Mailfully's free tier is 5,000 a month with a 200-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, no two-factor authentication, and no way to buy the retention add-on. The free plan allows more sending domains, servers, streams and users than paid Basic does. Every Mailfully paid plan carries the whole product.
Inbound, test sends and every CC are billed
Postmark counts an inbound message, a sandbox test message and each CC or BCC address as one email against the monthly quota. Broadcast sends draw from the same number. Mailfully never meters a test send, because test keys run the mailbox-simulator path.
Mailfully Compared With Postmark
| Mailfully | Postmark | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 5,000 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 |
| Annual discount | Available | None offered, monthly only, no prepay |
| Test sends | Never metered, never billed | Sandbox messages count against the quota |
| Two-factor authentication | Every plan | Pro and above |
| Dedicated IP | $29 add-on, no volume floor | $50 per IP a month, needs 300,000 sends a month, Pro and up |
| Log retention | 30 days, 60 on Growth, 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 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 | Postmark |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $0 | $15 |
| 10,000 | $19 | $15 |
| 50,000 | $19 | $55 |
| 125,000 | $49 | $115 |
| 300,000 | $109 | $245 |
| 500,000 | $149 | $379 |
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 exactly 10,000 emails Postmark's $15 plan undercuts our $19, because our free tier stops at 5,000 and the next step up is Starter; that is the one rung where Postmark is cheaper, and it stays cheaper only until about 12,000. At 300,000 Mailfully is Growth plus 150,000 of overage, and Postmark at 500,000 is its $245 plan plus 200,000 of overage at $1.70 per 1,000. Postmark also bills inbound mail, sandbox test sends and each CC and BCC against the same number, so a like-for-like workload often lands a rung higher there than here. Checked September 2026.
What Mailfully Does Better
- Best in Class Pricing
- Straightforward plans, published in full. Overage is a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails 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.
- 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.
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/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
- 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?
- Mailfully does not offer inbound parsing today, and it is a feature we do not match. On Postmark it is Pro and above and bills against the send quota, but it exists.
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