Left SendGrid's free plan? Free alternatives

SendGrid ended its permanent free plan in 2025: today there is only a 60-day trial with 100 emails per day, and paid plans start at $19.95/month. Among alternatives with a free plan that does not expire, Pidgely gives 6,000 emails per month (up to 200 per day) and Resend gives 3,000 (up to 100 per day). This post lays out the real limits, what the daily cap means in practice, and how to switch over SMTP in an afternoon.

What changed in SendGrid's free plan?

According to the Twilio changelog, SendGrid retired the permanent free plan (Free Email API and Free Marketing Campaigns) on May 27, 2025. Free users had 60 days to decide, then had to move to a paid plan. Free accounts with more than 100 contacts had the extra contacts deleted.

Today, the Email API pricing page (checked Nov 2, 2026) offers a 60-day free trial with 100 emails per day, no card. The first paid plan, Essentials, starts at $19.95/month; the final price depends on volume and features. If your project sent a few emails a month and fit the old free plan, the bill went from zero to about $20 a month at least.

Which alternatives have a free plan today?

Limits side by side. All numbers come from each service's official pages, checked Nov 2, 2026.

Sources: Pidgely pricing, Resend pricing and SendGrid pricing. Paid plans at the same volume are not exactly comparable: check features and limits before you decide.

Both free plans fit small projects, prototypes, early-stage apps and system emails (sign-up, password reset, alerts). Pidgely also includes campaigns and contacts in the same plan, so you do not need a second product for a newsletter.

Does the daily cap get in the way?

It depends on how you send. Pidgely Free's 6,000 per month come with a cap of 200 emails per day. For transactional email, which spreads over the month, that is usually enough: 200 a day adds up to 6,000 in 30 days. If you fire a burst of 1,000 emails at once (a notice to your whole list, say), the free plan cannot hold it: that would be five days of sending. In that case Starter, at R$ 39 a month with 50,000 emails, is the way to go.

The same reasoning applies to Resend (100 per day). Before migrating, look at your busiest sending day in the last 30 days in your current dashboard and compare it with the daily cap.

When you hit the limit, sending pauses until the next day (or month, for the monthly limit). The free plan never bills overage.

How do I migrate from SendGrid over SMTP?

If your app uses SMTP, the switch takes 30 to 60 minutes, with no change to your sending code:

1. Create the free account at app.pidgely.com. No card needed.
2. Verify your sending domain. Pidgely shows the SPF and DKIM records to publish in DNS. To understand each record, see the SPF, DKIM and DMARC guide. Keep DMARC published and aligned.
3. Create an API key and change your app's SMTP credentials: host smtp.pidgely.com, user pidgely, password = the API key.
4. Test with a real send to a mailbox of yours (Gmail, for example) and check in "Show original" that SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed.
5. Raise volume gradually. If you had a lot of volume, do not move everything at once: read about IP warm-up and move part of the traffic first.
6. Only after delivery is confirmed, remove the old SendGrid credentials.

If your app uses SendGrid's HTTP API instead of SMTP, Pidgely accepts the same request format as Resend; see the docs.

For the full feature comparison (campaigns, dedicated IP, webhooks), see Pidgely vs SendGrid.

When should I stay on SendGrid?

SendGrid is still a reasonable choice in some cases:

• You send very high volumes and want a provider with a long track record at that scale.
• You already use Twilio for SMS or voice and prefer one vendor and one invoice.
• You rely on a Twilio-ecosystem feature that is not available elsewhere.

If none of these is you and what you need is a real free plan for a small project, it is worth a try.

Next step

Create the free account and send your first test email today: create a Pidgely account (6,000 emails a month, no card). If you change your mind later, SMTP is a standard and you can switch back whenever you want.