# The Five Pricing Models for High-Volume Email Source: https://wraps.dev/blog/email-pricing-models Comparing prices is easy and mostly useless. Comparing models tells you what your bill does in eighteen months. 6 min read•Wraps Team Two providers can quote the same $90 at 100,000 emails a month and bill you completely differently at 500,000, because they are charging for different things. Five models cover essentially the whole market. Each one is a bet about which number grows fastest in your business, and each has a behaviour it quietly encourages. 01 ## Per-email tiers A monthly plan includes a volume band, and going past it either moves you up a band or bills an overage per thousand. The most common model in transactional email. What it does to your behaviour Cost tracks sends, which is the thing you least want to discourage. Teams start suppressing useful mail to stay inside a band, and a traffic spike lands as a bill rather than a capacity problem. Used by: SendGrid, Resend, Postmark, Mailgun. 02 ## Per-contact You pay for how many people are in the database, whether or not you mail them. Sometimes billed on the high-water mark, so one import sets the price for the rest of the term. What it does to your behaviour It taxes the asset instead of the activity. A dormant list costs the same as an engaged one, and the rational move, deleting people who never open, is the one the pricing punishes you for delaying. Used by: Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Customer.io and most marketing automation platforms. 03 ## Per-event Billing follows tracked events (opens, clicks, custom events emitted from your app) rather than messages or people. What it does to your behaviour Instrumenting your product makes the bill go up, so teams under-instrument to stay cheap and end up with worse data than they started with. Watch for whether delivery events count or only custom ones. Used by: Usage-based analytics and messaging platforms. Wraps uses it in one place only: custom events on the free plan, capped at 5,000 a month. Paid plans do not meter events at all. 04 ## Committed volume An annual contract for a block of sends at a lower unit rate, usually with a minimum and usually negotiated. What it does to your behaviour You are forecasting a year of traffic. Undershoot and you paid for air; overshoot and the overage rate is rarely the rate you negotiated. Fine at truly large volume, a trap at medium. Used by: Enterprise tiers everywhere, typically above a few million a month. 05 ## Infrastructure pass-through The vendor charges for software and the cloud provider bills you directly for delivery. Two invoices: a flat platform fee, and AWS at its own list price. What it does to your behaviour The platform fee is predictable but the cloud bill is yours to understand, and it is not one number. You own the sandbox request, the reputation, and the AWS-side pipeline costs. Used by: Bring-your-own-cloud platforms, Wraps included. ## The question to ask instead of “how much” Pick the number in your business that will grow fastest over the next two years. For a consumer product it is usually contacts. For an API business it is sends. For anything with a usage-based product it is events. Then check whether your provider bills on that number. If it does, you are on a plan that gets more expensive precisely when things go well. That is not automatically wrong — it is exactly what a per-seat SaaS does, and people buy those happily — but it should be a decision rather than a surprise. ## Where Wraps sits, plainly Model five, almost entirely. The platform fee is flat per plan and does not move with sending volume. AWS bills you directly for delivery at its own rate. Sends, domains, contacts, templates and team members are unlimited on every plan, paid or not. Three things do carry a monthly allowance, and none of them is sending. Custom events posted from your own application are capped at 5,000 a month on the free plan and unlimited on paid ones. AI template generations run 10, 250 and 1,000 a month across Free, Pro and Business. Connected AWS accounts are one on Free and Pro, unlimited on Business. All three are our storage and our compute, not AWS's, which is why they are the parts we meter. The cost of that model is the second invoice. You have an AWS bill to read, an SES sandbox request to get through, and a reputation that is yours from day one. If a single predictable line item matters more to you than the unit economics, a per-email tier is a defensible thing to buy. ## Related What the markup on a per-email plan actually buys, and what changed in AWS SES's own plans this year. [Why providers cost more than SES](https://wraps.dev/blog/why-email-providers-cost-more-than-ses)[AWS SES pricing plans](https://wraps.dev/blog/ses-pricing-plans-2026)