OpenEmail against
SendGrid
line by line.
Their list price is $19.95 / month for 50,000 sends, checked in September 2026. Ours counts domains and sends, never people, so set the dials below to your own team and volume.
What they are better at
The default choice for a decade. SDKs in every language, dynamic templates, and an event webhook a whole ecosystem already knows how to read.
Why people move
It sends and stops there. Replies go to some other mailbox, and Inbound Parse only posts the raw message to your endpoint. OpenEmail is the API and the mailbox, so the reply lands in a thread you can open, and your SendGrid code keeps working against it.
most mailboxes bill per seat; two or more needs Starter
ours steps at 1, 50 and 500; Proton, HEY, Resend, Fastmail, Postmark and Mailgun charge more
Sending APIs and Mailchimp bill by volume; mailboxes cap it per seat
unlimited on every plan of ours; Proton and Fastmail tie them to seats
Forward EmailTeam
OpenEmailStarter
FastmailBusiness Standard
Google WorkspaceBusiness Starter
SuperhumanStarter + WorkspaceMost of these sell one piece of the job: a mailbox, a sending API, a campaign tool or an app that needs a mailbox from somebody else. The OpenEmail price is the whole job, with mailboxes on your own domains, sending and receiving, the full API and the AI assistant on every plan. So this is not even a fair comparison: every other bar buys one piece, and ours buys all of it.
Line by line.
SendGrid is not a mailbox, so it is not on this table. The table compares the places mail actually lands, which is the choice SendGrid sits beside rather than replaces.
| Compared | OpenEmail Starter | Fastmail Business Standard | Proton Mail Mail Essentials | Google Workspace Business Starter | HEY for Domains per person | Superhuman Starter + Workspace |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you actually pay for | One plan per workspace | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person, twice |
| Five people, every month | $20 | $30 | $39.95 | $42 | $58 | $192 |
| Twentieth person costs | $0 | $6 | $7.99 | $8.40 | $12 | $38.40 |
| Hosts the mail itself | a client on top of Gmail or Outlook | |||||
| Catch-all on your own domain | yours to switch on | paid plans | via a routing rule | aliases; catch-all not documented | whatever the host does | |
| Free on your own domain | one domain, unlimited addresses | trial only | custom domains are paid | trial only | no trial on domains | trial only |
| Drafts, subjects and answers from AI | writing assistant only | Gemini | Business tier | |||
| Your own agent can work the inbox | MCP server | JMAP API | API, no MCP | |||
| End-to-end encryption | between OpenEmail mailboxes | their whole point | enterprise tiers |