Cheap to send. Expensive to land.

Cheaper to send, which is not the same as cheaper to land. Elastic Email's sticker price is genuinely low — pay-as-you-go around nine cents per thousand puts it near Amazon SES at the bottom of the market. But the price that decides value is cost per email delivered to the inbox rather than per email sent, and those diverge sharply when deliverability is low. A message that lands in spam cost you exactly what an inboxed one did and returned nothing, so a cheap send with poor placement can carry a higher real cost than a dearer send that actually arrives. The sticker is the start of the calculation, not the answer to it.

The honest version has a caveat. Independent testing in 2026 placed Elastic Email's average inbox placement near the bottom of the field, around the high-fifties percent, and Elastic's own support attributed the result to shared-IP reputation on the free plan. That caveat is fair as far as it goes — a free, shared pool is the worst case. But other providers achieve placement well above ninety percent on shared IPs by vetting senders carefully, so the shared-pool explanation does not fully excuse the gap; it points at who else is in the pool. On a dedicated IP with disciplined warmup and list hygiene, Elastic can do considerably better — but that requires you to run the deliverability work yourself, which is exactly the cost the low sticker hides.

It is close to a structural consequence of the pricing, not bad luck. Rock-bottom rates attract the highest-volume, lowest-margin senders, and a meaningful slice of those do not follow sending best practices — purchased lists, weak consent, careless hygiene. On shared IP pools, the reputation those senders earn is reputation you inherit, because mailbox providers judge the IP, not the individual tenant. So the very thing that makes the price low — a large, loosely vetted shared pool — is the thing that puts your mail at the mercy of strangers. A provider that charges more and vets harder, or one that puts you on dedicated IPs you own, breaks that link; the cheapest tier almost by definition cannot.

It is the sticker price divided by the share of mail that actually reaches the inbox. If you pay nine cents per thousand but only six in ten land, you did not pay nine cents per thousand delivered — you paid fifteen, because the four in ten that went to spam still cost you and earned nothing. Run the same arithmetic on a provider that charges more per thousand but lands ninety-plus percent and the two converge, often to within a rounding error, sometimes inverting outright. The calculator further down this page lets you put your own numbers in. The point of the method is to stop comparing stickers and start comparing the cost of an email that does its job.

You can — dedicated IPs start around twenty-eight dollars a month there — and it will lift you off the contaminated shared pool, which is the right instinct. But a dedicated IP is not a setting you switch on and forget; it is a reputation you have to build and defend. Warming it correctly over weeks on a per-ISP curve, watching blocklists, processing feedback loops, fixing authentication, responding to a dip — that is ongoing work, and on Elastic Email it is yours to do. EDP gives you dedicated IPs you own on infrastructure it runs, with that operational work included rather than handed back to you. Same hardware idea, dedicated IP; the difference is who keeps it healthy.

No, and that is a real point in Elastic Email's favour for some buyers. Elastic bundles a drag-and-drop editor, automation, forms, landing pages, and email verification into even its low tiers, which for a small business wanting cheap marketing-plus-transactional in one place is a genuine convenience. EDP builds none of that — it is sending infrastructure, not a marketing suite. If an all-in-one toolkit at a low price is what you need and your deliverability requirements are ordinary, Elastic Email is a reasonable choice and this page will not pretend otherwise. EDP is the answer when the sending itself is the thing that has to be right, not the campaign builder around it.

When sticker cost is the dominant constraint and the stakes on any individual message are low. A hobby project, an internal newsletter, a side business mailing an engaged opt-in list, a price-sensitive sender with the in-house skill to run a dedicated IP and manage reputation themselves — in all of those, Elastic Email's low rate and bundled features are a sensible fit, and paying several times more for managed deliverability would be overkill. The maths only turns against it when a message reaching the inbox carries real value — revenue, account security, a customer relationship — because that is when the gap between sent and delivered stops being a statistic and starts being money.

It would be, if the extra bought nothing but a logo — but it buys the deliverability work the cheap sticker leaves out. The higher price covers own infrastructure rather than a shared pool, dedicated IPs you own rather than rent a slice of, per-ISP warming, continuous reputation monitoring, blocklist and feedback-loop operations, and EU jurisdiction — the things that move placement from the high-fifties toward the high-nineties and keep it there. On a cost-per-delivered basis, and once you price in the engineering time a self-managed cheap setup demands, the gap narrows far more than the sticker suggests. You are not paying more for the same email; you are paying for the email to arrive.

It is a one-end change and we run the parts that carry risk. You export your suppression and contact data and your templates from Elastic Email, repoint your application's sending credential — SMTP host and authentication, or the API key — at EDP, and we provision and warm dedicated IPs for you while production traffic ramps on a gradual curve rather than a hard cutover, so reputation builds cleanly off whatever you are leaving behind. Because a fresh, well-warmed dedicated IP starts clean rather than inheriting a contaminated shared pool, the move itself is often where a placement problem quietly resolves. Migration assistance is included rather than billed as a separate project.