SendPigeon

What SendPigeon is

SendPigeon is an email API for developers. It sends the transactional email an application triggers, and it also covers newsletters and broadcasts, inbound email, an SMTP relay, templates, embeddable contact forms and a test mode. The home page headline is "One API for all your email", and the product overview says transactional emails, newsletters, inbound, SMTP, templates, forms and testing all come "from one API key". The site's structured data calls it "The email API that grows with your side projects", and the footer tagline reads "Email for everything you build."

Delivery runs on Amazon's sending service. The footer says "Delivery powered by AWS SES", and the FAQ answers the question of whether SendPigeon is production-ready by saying it "runs on AWS SES infrastructure with automatic bounce handling, DKIM signing, and real-time delivery tracking." The same answer adds that emails go through "the same infrastructure used by thousands of production applications." What SendPigeon adds on top is the developer tooling, the dashboard, the marketing features and the pricing.

Sending by API, SDK or SMTP

The main route is a REST API with official SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Go and PHP, and the home page lists Next.js, Node.js and the plain REST API among the stacks it works with. The Node package installs with npm install sendpigeon. The sample code creates a client with a live API key (prefixed sp_live_) and calls a single send function with a from address, a to address, a subject and an HTML body; the call returns a data object and an error object, so the application can check the result straight away. The section heading is "Send your first email in 5 lines", with examples for plain fetch, Node.js, Python and Go.

Getting to a first send takes three steps on the site's own account. The customer verifies a domain by adding two DNS records ("Verified in under 5 minutes"), takes an API key that has test and live modes and works across all of the customer's projects, and sends through the REST API or an SDK, with real-time delivery logs from day one. The site sums the process up as "No approvals. No waiting."

For software that cannot call an API, the SMTP relay takes over. Any SMTP client can point at smtp.sendpigeon.dev, and the home page says this "Works with legacy apps, WordPress, and any language." That covers a WordPress site's mail plugin as well as an older application that already speaks SMTP.

The FAQ also addresses switching providers. It says SendPigeon has an API similar to other modern email providers and that, with the four SDKs, "most migrations take less than an hour."

Testing without real sends

Test mode is the feature the company leads with. API keys with the sp_test_ prefix capture every email in the dashboard instead of delivering it, so a staging environment or a CI pipeline can run the full sending code without mailing real people. The FAQ describes it as "Zero config needed": the application uses a test key, and every message is intercepted and visible in the logs.

The company's blog adds a local option. A command-line tool, started with npx @sendpigeon-sdk/cli dev, runs a local SMTP server on the developer's machine that catches all outgoing email, with no Docker and no external tools. The blog also points out that the same SDK runs in development and production, so nothing in the code changes between environments. The footer lists a Local Dev Server and an Email Builder among the company's tools.

Broadcasts, sequences, inbound and forms

Beyond one-to-one sending, SendPigeon covers the basics of marketing email. Broadcasts let a customer import contacts, build campaigns and manage unsubscribes. The feature list marks broadcasts "Starter plan and up", while the Free plan card also lists "Broadcasts & contacts". Sequences, the drip side of the product, appear on every plan card, and the blog's reading list points to a Drip Email API for running sequences in code.

Inbound email arrives by webhook. The home page says received messages can be forwarded to Slack, piped into an application or stored for processing, and the blog links to an inbound email parsing API built on those webhooks.

Contact forms are the no-code piece: a customer embeds a form on a website and the submissions land in the inbox, with "no backend required."

Templates, tracking and domains

Templates are built in a visual drag-and-drop editor with variables, slash commands and instant test sends, and the blog notes that the editor is included on all plans. Tracking covers delivery, bounces, opens and clicks as real-time webhook events with verified payloads. Every plan supports custom sending domains with full DKIM authentication, and the Pro and Scale plans add a custom tracking domain.

Plans and pricing

The pricing section, headed "Simple, predictable pricing", lists five plans priced per month by included email volume. The entry tier is a permanent free plan rather than a trial, and the section closes with "No credit card required. Cancel anytime."

• Free, $0 a month: 3,000 emails, 1 domain, 3 templates, 3-day log retention, webhooks and tracking, sequences (1 sequence with 100 enrollments), broadcasts and contacts, and inbound emails. The FAQ adds open and click tracking and full API access.
• Starter, $10 a month: 10,000 emails, 10 domains, 10 templates, 7-day log retention, webhooks and tracking, sequences and broadcasts, and 1k inbound emails a month.
• Growth, $15 a month: 30,000 emails, 20 domains, 25 templates, 14-day log retention, webhooks and tracking, sequences and broadcasts, and 5k inbound emails a month.
• Pro, $39 a month: 100,000 emails, 50 domains, 100 templates, 30-day log retention, sequences and broadcasts, 25k inbound emails a month and a custom tracking domain.
• Scale, $89 a month: 300,000 emails, 100 domains, 250 templates, 60-day log retention, sequences and broadcasts, 100k inbound emails a month and a custom tracking domain.

The pricing section does not say what happens when a plan's monthly email allowance runs out.

The company's blog states its own figures the same way: a free tier of 3,000 emails a month, a cheapest paid plan of $10 a month with 10 domains included, 4 SDKs, and a built-in sandbox, a CLI dev server, marketing campaigns and inbound email all marked as included. The same post is candid about two tradeoffs: SendPigeon is a newer service with a smaller community, and it offers fewer SDK languages than some competitors.

Who it suits

SendPigeon fits developers and small product teams who want one account for the email an application sends: transactional messages through the API or SMTP, occasional newsletters to users, and incoming mail routed to a webhook. The free plan is a real starting point for a side project, with 3,000 emails a month, full API access and test mode, and the paid steps are small, from $10 to $89 a month. Teams that test heavily get the most out of it, because test keys and the local dev server keep test mail out of real inboxes while the code stays the same.

Its marketing tools are the essentials (contact import, campaigns, unsubscribes and sequences), which suits product updates and onboarding mail more than elaborate, heavily segmented campaigns. The largest listed plan, Scale, includes 300,000 emails a month, so the price list is written for small and mid-sized senders.