Mailjet is cheaper per email than we are, at every tier we have measured, with no crossover point where that reverses. We are not going to argue about it, and any comparison table you see that says otherwise is worth distrusting. This page is about the bundle, and it starts by correcting something we got wrong about them.
Key takeaways
- They win the per-email price outright. There is no tipping point and we concede it.
- Unlimited contacts start at their second paid tier, not the first. Our own brief said otherwise and was wrong.
- The comparison is between a sending platform and an audience system, which are different products.
The correction, first
Our internal competitor brief said Mailjet offered unlimited contacts from the first paid tier. On 21 August 2026 we rendered their pricing page in a headless browser at the default slider of 15,000 emails a month, and it said something else.
| Tier | Price | Emails per month | Contacts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 dollars | 6,000 | 1,000 |
| Starter | 9 dollars | 8,000 | 2,000 |
| Essential | 17 dollars | 15,000 | Unlimited |
| Premium | 27 dollars | 15,000 | Unlimited |
Unlimited contacts begin at the second paid tier. We had it wrong, we corrected it that day, and it is printed here because a comparison page that only corrects errors in its own favour is an advert.
The rest of the brief held. Their price per email is genuinely low, and it stays low as volume rises, which is what a specialist sending business is supposed to do.
What a sending platform is, and what it is not
This is the whole argument and it is not a criticism.
A sending platform's job is to take a list you already have and deliver messages to it, reliably, at scale, cheaply. Mailjet does that well. The API is good, the deliverability infrastructure is real, and developers put it into products without complaining.
What it does not do, because it was never the point, is create the list. There is no capture surface that turns a tap into a named contact, no source tag written at the moment of capture, no consent record attached to the person, and no channel beyond email and a bolt-on for SMS.
| A sending platform | An audience system | |
|---|---|---|
| The input | A list you already have | Nothing. It produces the list |
| The unit of value | A delivered message | A person, over years |
| What it stores | Addresses and send history | Source, consent, behaviour, attendance |
| Channels | Email, primarily | Email, SMS, RCS (social DMs coming soon) |
| What breaks without it | Your sending | Your ability to segment at all |
| Who it is for | Anyone with a list and volume | Anyone whose audience arrives in bursts |
Both columns are legitimate products. They are not competitors so much as neighbours, and plenty of companies run both.
The comparison that actually matters
Not price per email. Two other numbers.
Cost to create a contact. A sending platform charges you nothing for this and also does nothing for it, so the real cost sits in whatever you built or bought to fill the list. Count that, then add it to the invoice.
Cost to keep a contact you are not messaging. On their Essential tier and above this is zero, which is genuinely good and worth saying. Below that tier it is a hard cap, which for a festival adding twelve thousand people in nine days matters more than the monthly price.
We have set out our own position on the per-email axis in full in we are second on email price, on purpose. Nothing here contradicts it.
Who should buy which
Buy the sending platform if you already have a list, you need to send a lot, and the contacts arrive from a system you control elsewhere. Also buy it if you are a developer putting email inside a product, where the API matters more than the interface.
Buy an audience system if your problem is that the list does not exist yet, or exists as four exports in a shared drive, or exists but has no source and no consent record and therefore cannot be segmented or defended.
Buy both if you are large enough that transactional email and audience marketing are genuinely separate jobs. That is a common and sensible setup.
The four costs that never appear on a sending invoice
Comparing per-email prices compares one line of a total. These four sit outside the invoice and are usually larger than the gap between vendors.
| The cost | Where it lands | Why it is invisible |
|---|---|---|
| Building the list | Whatever you paid to fill it | Charged to a different budget, or to somebody's evenings |
| Losing the list | The next platform change | Only visible once, and by then it is a sunk cost |
| Not being able to segment | Every send, forever | Shows up as a slightly worse open rate, never as a line item |
| The second channel | An extra subscription | Only appears the first time email is the wrong medium |
The third is the quiet one. A list with no source and no history can only be mailed as a whole, so every message is written for everyone, and the cost is a permanent tax on performance that no invoice records.
Deciding in five minutes, without a spreadsheet
Answer these three out loud. The combination points at one answer and it is rarely ambiguous.
- Where do the contacts come from today? If the answer is a system you already control, you need a sender. If the answer is nowhere yet, a sender will not help.
- How many channels do you need this year? One means a sender. Two or more, and the tool that unifies them stops being a luxury.
- What is the largest segment you have ever sent to that was not everyone? If the honest answer is that you always send to everyone, you do not yet have an audience problem that a sender can cause, and you do have one that segmentation would solve.
Two answers pointing at a sender means buy the cheap one and stop reading comparisons. Two pointing the other way means the per-email price was never the number that mattered.
Where HIIPE fits
Not as a cheaper sender, because we are not one. HIIPE is the layer that produces and holds the contact: capture links that return a name, a channel and a source tag, a fanbase that keeps the consent and the history, and campaigns that go out across email, SMS and RCS from one screen with contacts unlimited on every plan, including the free one. The plans are priced on sends for that reason.
If all you need is the delivery, the cheaper sender is the right purchase and we would rather you made it than resented us later. What the rest of the bundle is for is set out in what a 10,000 contact list really costs.
Read next : We are second on email price. On purpose · Email marketing cost: what a 10,000 contact list really bills you