The SendGrid alternative
that is still free.
SendGrid's permanent free plan is gone; what is left is a 60-day trial at 100 emails a day, then $19.95 a month. Sendsprite is a self-hosted email API with a typed SDK, an SMTP relay for everything that speaks only SMTP, and signed webhooks — sending through Amazon SES in your own 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 SendGrid
What you give up staying on SendGrid.
SendGrid is the incumbent for a reason: enormous scale, dedicated IPs, marketing campaigns and a contacts product in the same bill. If you need a vendor with a sales team and an SLA, it is still on the shortlist.
The free plan is a 60-day trial now
SendGrid replaced its free tier with a 60-day trial capped at 100 emails a day. Self-hosted Sendsprite is free for as long as you run it, and the limit is your SES quota.
$19.95 a month for what SES sells for $5
Essentials starts at $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails and shares that volume between transactional and marketing mail. At SES's $0.10 per 1,000 that is $5, and you decide which sends count.
Three days of activity history
SendGrid's email activity feed keeps a few days unless you buy extended history. Sendsprite writes every event to your Postgres and keeps it as long as you say.
SMTP relay, without the SendGrid SMTP quirks
Point cron jobs, printers and legacy apps at port 587 with an API key as the password. Same queue, same suppression list, same logs as the API. Modern HTTP clients get a REST API and a typed SDK.
02 — Side by side
Sendsprite vs SendGrid (Twilio).
| SendGrid | Sendsprite | |
|---|---|---|
| Price at 50,000 emails / month | From $19.95 (Essentials) | $0.10 per 1,000 at Amazon SES — about $5 for 50,000 — plus the box it runs on |
| Free tier | 60-day trial, 100 emails / day, then paid | Free to self-host, for ever. No email cap: the only limit is your SES sending quota |
| Event retention | Days by default; extended history is paid | Your Postgres, your retention. Keep events for a day or for ten years |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes — one container plus Postgres, installed with one command |
| Your own AWS account | No — Twilio'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 | Event webhook | Signed webhooks for delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click, plus a live SSE stream |
| Campaigns and contacts | Yes, on the same volume cap | Yes — contact books, campaigns, unsubscribe pages, on your own database |
| AI agents | — | MCP server included, scoped by the same API keys |
SendGrid figures are list prices from sendgrid.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
SendGrid alternative, asked plainly.
- Is there a free alternative to SendGrid?
- Sendsprite is free to self-host with no email cap of its own; you pay Amazon SES $0.10 per 1,000 emails and the server. SendGrid no longer has a permanent free plan, only a 60-day trial.
- Does Sendsprite support SMTP like SendGrid?
- Yes. Every instance runs an SMTP relay on port 587 that accepts an API key as the password, so anything that could send through SendGrid's SMTP can send through Sendsprite by changing the host and credentials.
- Can I do marketing email as well as transactional?
- Yes. Sendsprite has contact books, CSV import, campaigns, unsubscribe pages and merge fields, and they share the suppression list with your transactional sends.
- How do I migrate from SendGrid?
- Install Sendsprite, connect AWS with the one-click CloudFormation stack, verify your domain, then swap the SMTP host or API base URL and key. Webhook events are documented for the bounce and complaint handlers.
04 — Also compared