The Resend alternative for people who want their own SES
Resend has the more polished API and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What they do not offer is a way to keep your sending inside your own AWS account. That is the whole of it.
Use Resend if you want shared infrastructure and the best-documented onboarding in this category - they publish "no sandbox mode, no approval process, and no waiting period," which is a real advantage. Use SendFleet if your recipients' addresses and message bodies must never reach a third party's servers, or if you want a flat monthly price with no volume ceiling on your own SES. Below 100,000 emails a month we are also simply cheaper: $5 for 5,000 against their $20 for 50,000.
What actually differs
| SendFleet | Resend | |
|---|---|---|
| Sending infrastructure | Yours (BYOC) or ours (Managed), your choice per domain, on one endpoint. | Resend's, only. |
| Can you use your own cloud account? | Yes. BYOC sends through your AWS SES account with an IAM role and short-lived credentials, and nothing about your mail reaches our database. | No such option is published. |
| What they store | BYOC stores nothing: no recipient, no subject, no body, no attachment. Managed stores an email log for 14 days. | Email logs and event data on their infrastructure. 3,000 emails a month free tier (source). |
| Free tier | 50 emails a month on Free BYOC. Permanent, no card. | 3,000 a month, capped at 100 a day. Permanent. source |
| Cost at 5,000 emails a month | $5 a month on Managed Starter, or $9 on BYOC plus your SES bill. | No published tier below 50,000 at $20 (source). |
| Cost at 50,000 emails a month | $15 a month on Managed Growth, flat. | $20 a month on Resend Pro. |
| Cost at 100,000 emails a month | $59 a month on Managed Pro. | $35 a month on Resend Pro. (source) They are cheaper than us here and we would rather you knew that. |
| Annual billing | Monthly. | No. Their own words: "Self-serve plans are billed monthly only. There are no annual plans and no discount for paying annually." source |
Competitor figures read from 2026-10-04. Resend: pricing, docs, production approval.
Where we are not the right answer
- **Resend's API is the more polished one**, and if you only need shared infrastructure you should probably use them. We are not going to argue otherwise.
- **At 100,000 emails a month they are cheaper than us.** $35 against our $59. Managed Pro is priced for people who want the logs and the BYOC option in the same place, not for people who want the cheapest shared send.
- **Our free tier is 50 emails a month and theirs is 3,000.** That is the weakest thing about us and it is not close.
- **They have no sandbox and no production approval** (<a href="https://resend.com/docs/knowledge-base/does-resend-require-production-approval.md" rel="noopener">source</a>), which is a real advantage if you are starting out. BYOC inherits AWS's sandbox, and you have to get out of it before this works for you.
Start here
Create a free account. 50 BYOC emails a month, no card, no expiry. Or read the quickstart first.