Yes, is FREE, and there is nothing wrong using FREE services. Only those who never spend effort looking for FREE stuff will always say “there is no free lunch under the sky“.
Refer to my “Email Marketing Blueprint“, I had mentioned that I experience email marketing since 2006, launch a few marketing campaigns along 2016 for a newly set up business, by sending a cold email, and make a lucrative side income for that year. Best thing is, I am using FREE SMTP Relay Service (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) on those email marketing campaigns, and basically, my investment is close to zero.
Well, as a newbie or startup, If you don’t have an additional budget to spend, try to reduce your OPEX, below is the list of 3rd party FREE SMTP Relay service that you must make use for your email marketing campaign. You may even leverage all of them to send many emails every month with no cost.
List of FREE SMTP Relay Service that I recommended
Sparkpost SMTP
For the FREE plan, Sparkpost offer 15,000 emails for 30 days including 30 day’s customer support, after that, subsequence month 500 email per month forever.
If you require sending more email, the next available plan is 50,000 per month for $9, and exceed 50,000 will cost you $0.75/1000 email.
More info: www.sparkpost.com
Amazon SES SMTP
Want to send 62,000 emails for FREE? Sign up Amazon free tier, set up an ec2 VM, and send 62,000 emails out from the VM every month for 1 year without charges. >>Find out more about Amazon Free Tier<<
Amazon doesn’t offer a free plan except using the above method. Charges for the SMTP services is pretty cheap across the market, Amazon charge $0.10/1000 email you send.
Elastic Email SMTP
Elastic offer a FREE trial, allows you to send up to 100 emails per day without charges.
For their paid plan, there had an unlimited monthly plan and also play as you go (pre-paid), I had subscribed their pay as you go plan, top up as low as $5, may start to use their services and their fees is very competitive compared to Amazon SES, $0.09/1000 email.
More information: visit www.elasticemail.com.
Mailgun SMTP
Mailgun offers 5,000 SMTP per month for 3 months on FREE plan. After that, if you choose the Pay as you go plan, it will be $0.80/1000 email.
(Valid as at Dec 2020)
More information: www.mailgun.com
Mailjet SMTP
For Free plan, you can send 6,000 emails per month, the limit at 200 emails per day.
For the paid plan, starting at $8.69 for 30,000 emails and no limit per day, the email you send out will not have Mailjet’s logo.
More info: www.mailjet.com Get a FREE account and enjoy 6,000 FREE SMTP per month.
SendGrid SMTP
SendGrid uses to be my favourite SMTP provider, but their free plan has reduced quota. Now they offer 40,000 emails for the first 30 days, then 100 emails per day forever on their Email API, while they also an email marketing platform, allow you to send marketing campaign, store 2000 subscriber and send 6000 marketing email per month on FREE plan.
In my opinion, it is good to use by blogger; I connect SendGrid with my WP Mail SMTP plugin, and let the website send daily backup notification, update notification, and any SMTP mail related, as long you don’t require to send 100 email per day, FREE plan from SendGrid is good for you!
On their paid plan, starting at $14.95 for 100,000 email SMTP.
(Valid as at Dec 2020)
More info: www.sendgrid.com
TurboSMTP
TurboSMTP also known as ServerSmtp offer 6,000 SMTP per month on FREE account, daily sending limit is 200 email.
For the paid plan, you may start at Basic, $14.95 for a 50,000 relay.
More info: www.serversmtp.com
OutboundSMTP
OutboundSMTP offer FREE 1,000 Email per month.
More info: www.outboundsmtp.com
Conclusion
As a summary, if you are using desktop senders such as Sendblaster pro, Ultramailer or using self-hosted email systems such as Mailwizz, Interspire or any cloud base autoresponder, you can integrate all this SMTP and start your email marketing campaign free of charge.
If you look for email contact, you might want to find out how to scrape LinkedIn’s email from Google. Please note that SPAMMING will not help much, and I am always encouraged running a cold email campaign, mean only send targeted content to the targeted audience.
There is plenty more FREE SMTP relay service out there, some provide a high number of a free trial, I will constantly update this post for new SMTP that I personally tested 🙂
Update:
outboundsmtp.com, FREE 1000 Email
