The free Resend alternative
you run yourself.
Resend made the email API pleasant again: a clean REST endpoint, a typed SDK, React for templates. Sendsprite keeps all of that and removes the part where the pleasant API meters your emails. It is one container on a box you already own, sending through Amazon SES in your own AWS account.
Install
curl -fsSL https://sendsprite.com/install.sh | shDocker + Postgres. Prompts for a domain, brings up the container, opens the setup wizard.
01 — Why leave Resend
What you give up staying on Resend.
Resend's free plan is generous for a side project — 3,000 emails a month — and its SDKs and dashboard are excellent. If you send a few hundred emails a month and never want to see a server, stay.
The free plan stops at 100 a day
Resend's free tier is 3,000 a month with a hard 100-per-day cap and 30 days of history. One signup spike and the day is over. Self-hosted Sendsprite has no cap of its own: your limit is your SES quota, which Amazon raises on request.
$20 a month is $5 of SES
Resend Pro is $20 for 50,000 emails and $0.90 per 1,000 after. The same 50,000 emails cost about $5 at SES's $0.10 per 1,000, and the marginal email costs a ninth as much. At 500,000 a month the gap is $350 against $50.
Your logs live for 30 days
Resend keeps events for 30 days on every plan short of Enterprise. Sendsprite writes every delivery, bounce, complaint and open to your Postgres, and the retention is whatever you set.
Same shape of API
POST /api/v1/emails with from, to, subject, html or react. A typed SDK, batch sends, idempotency keys, tags, scheduled sends and signed webhooks. Most Resend integrations move by changing the base URL and the key.
02 — Side by side
Sendsprite vs Resend.
| Resend | Sendsprite | |
|---|---|---|
| Price at 50,000 emails / month | $20 (Pro), then $0.90 per 1,000 | $0.10 per 1,000 at Amazon SES — about $5 for 50,000 — plus the box it runs on |
| Free tier | 3,000 emails / month, 100 per day, 3 domains | Free to self-host, for ever. No email cap: the only limit is your SES sending quota |
| Daily send limit | 100 on Free; none on paid plans | None beyond your SES quota |
| Event retention | 30 days (custom on Enterprise) | Your Postgres, your retention. Keep events for a day or for ten years |
| Domains | 3 Free, 10 Pro, 1,000 Scale; $20 per extra 100 | Unlimited |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes — one container plus Postgres, installed with one command |
| Your own AWS account | No — Resend's infrastructure | Yes — SES in your account, credentials never leave it |
| Source | Closed | Open source — MIT server, SDK, CLI and MCP server |
| SMTP relay | Yes | Yes — port 587 with an API key as the password |
| Webhooks | Yes | Signed webhooks for delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click, plus a live SSE stream |
| AI agents | MCP server | MCP server included, scoped by the same API keys |
Resend figures are list prices from resend.com/pricing on 2026-08-29. Amazon SES is $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails plus $0.12 per GB of attachments.
03 — Questions
Resend alternative, asked plainly.
- Is there a free alternative to Resend?
- Yes. Sendsprite is free to self-host with no email cap of its own. You pay Amazon SES directly — $0.10 per 1,000 emails — and whatever the server costs. A small VPS runs it comfortably.
- Is Sendsprite open source?
- Yes. The server, SDK, CLI, MCP server and shared packages are all MIT licensed. You can read, fork, self-host, modify and resell all of it.
- How do I migrate from Resend to Sendsprite?
- Install Sendsprite, connect your AWS account with the one-click CloudFormation stack, add your domain (Cloudflare DNS is written for you; other providers get a copy-paste list), then point your app at the new base URL with a new API key. The request body — from, to, subject, html, react, tags — has the same shape.
- Does Sendsprite support React email templates?
- Yes. The SDK accepts a React element for the body, and the dashboard has a template editor with merge fields and linked header/footer layouts.
- Is Amazon SES deliverability as good as Resend's?
- Resend and most email APIs send through the same class of infrastructure; your reputation comes from your domain's DKIM, SPF and DMARC and from your bounce and complaint rates. Sendsprite sets the records up for you and suppresses hard bounces and complaints automatically so the rates stay low.
04 — Also compared