Decision support · Reviewed 04 Apr · Owner: K. Mauer

Choosing a transactional email provider for Bracken HQ

We send 18k transactional emails a month, all behavioral (sign-ups, password resets, billing receipts). No marketing sends. Three candidates evaluated against the five things that actually matter at our scale.

Verdict

Go with Postmark.

Best deliverability on transactional-only sending, the cleanest webhook story, and pricing that's within $9/mo of SES once you account for the engineering hours we currently spend babysitting bounces.

Resend
$20/mo
50k emails · React Email DX
Postmark
$15/mo
10k emails · transactional-only IPs
Amazon SES
$1.80/mo
18k emails · BYO everything
Criterion Resend Postmark SES
Transactional deliverabilityinbox placement, last 90d benchmark
Solid; 97.2%. Shared IP pools.
Highest of the three; 99.1%. Separates marketing IPs entirely.
Variable; 92–98% depending on warmup and bounce hygiene.
What we'd need to do

Set up dedicated IPs, run our own warmup, monitor SNS for bounces and complaints, and quarantine senders manually. ~2 weeks one-time, ~2 hrs/month ongoing.
Webhook reliabilitybounce / complaint / delivery events
Webhooks land in ~30s; retries up to 8h.
Webhooks land in ~5s; retries up to 24h with backoff.
SNS-based; reliable but you're handling SNS subscription confirmation and signature verification yourself.
Templating & DXhow we author and version email bodies
React Email is a real edge; preview in dev, type-safe props, MJML under the hood.
Hosted templates with versions and Mustache; less ergonomic but no client library required.
None. BYO templating, BYO preview tool, BYO version control story.
True monthly costat our 18k/mo, fully loaded
$20 on the 50k tier; under-utilized.
$15 on the 10k tier, $25 if we cross. Slated cost.
~$2 in API costs but ~$200/mo of engineering time fully loaded.
How we arrived at the $200

Avg of 4 hrs/mo over the last quarter spent on bounce dashboards, complaint quarantine, and warmup babysitting × $50/hr blended. Not zero.
Migration riskdays of work, breaking changes
~2 days. SMTP-compatible drop-in for our existing nodemailer code.
~2 days. SMTP-compatible; we rewrite templates as a one-time chore.
~1 week. AWS SDK, IAM, SNS, dedicated IP request — none of it hard, all of it adds up.
Strong fit Acceptable Notable risk
What would change the call

Three things that flip this decision.