Email API pricing can be deceptive. That $0.001 per email sounds cheap until you do the math at scale. We analyzed the real costs of popular email providers versus Bring Your Own SMTP (BYOS) solutions. The results might shock you.
The Real Cost Breakdown
Let us look at what 1 million transactional emails per month actually costs across different providers:
Monthly Cost at 1M Emails
The Hidden Markup
Traditional email APIs charge 8-10x more than AWS SES for the same underlying service. What are you paying for?
- • Infrastructure management — They run SMTP servers (which AWS SES already does cheaper)
- • Web UI & Analytics — Nice dashboards you could get elsewhere
- • SDKs & Documentation — Developer experience (valuable, but worth 10x?)
- • Brand & Support — Premium pricing for the logo on their homepage
The BYOS Advantage
With Void Relay's Bring Your Own SMTP model, you pay your SMTP provider directly (AWS SES, Gmail, etc.) at their rates, plus a small fee for our API layer. Here is the breakdown at 1M emails:
- • AWS SES: $100
- • Void Relay Pro: $2
- • Total: $102
Savings: $700-900 per month — That is $8,400-10,800 per year.
What About Features?
You might think the expensive providers offer something extra. Here is the reality:
| Feature | Traditional APIs | Void Relay + SES |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Webhooks | ✓ | ✓ |
| Analytics | ✓ | ✓ |
| TypeScript SDK | ✓ | ✓ |
| No Vendor Lock-in | ✗ | ✓ |
The Bottom Line
If you are sending more than 50,000 emails per month, BYOS (Bring Your Own SMTP) is a no-brainer. You get the same features, better control, and save thousands of dollars per year.
The traditional email API providers are essentially reselling AWS SES with a massive markup. Void Relay gives you the API layer without the markup—just $2/month for unlimited API keys, webhooks, and analytics.