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MailChannels Email API uses a straightforward volume-based pricing model. You start on a free developer plan with no credit card charge, and move to a paid tier when your sending volume grows. This page explains how emails are counted, what happens when you reach your limit, and how billing is handled so there are no surprises.

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Free developer plan

The free plan lets you send up to 100 emails per day at no cost. It is designed for testing, development, and low-volume transactional use. The free plan is fully functional for API sending but does not include features like open and click tracking.
Until you add a payment method, sending is restricted to addresses belonging to verified users on your account. Add a user, click the link in the verification email, then use that address as the recipient.
The 100-sends-per-day limit resets at 00:00 UTC each day, regardless of your time zone. Paid plans use a tier-based pricing model based on the number of emails you send per month. You choose a plan that matches your expected monthly volume.
  • The entry-level paid plan covers up to 10,000 emails per month.
  • Higher tiers are available for larger volumes, each with a fixed monthly price.
  • Annual billing discounts may apply.
  • All plans include the full set of core Email API features.
There is currently no official paid tier between the free plan (~100 emails/day) and the 10,000 emails/month plan. If you need more than the free tier allows, the next step up is the 10k/month plan.
Visit the MailChannels pricing page to see current volume tiers and costs.

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How emails are counted

MailChannels counts the number of sends, not the number of API calls. If you use the personalizations field to send one message to 100 different recipients in a single API call, that counts as 100 sends — not 1.
Plan your volume estimates around the total number of recipient deliveries, not the number of requests you make to the API.

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What happens when you exceed your limit

If you reach your daily limit (free plan) or monthly limit (paid plan), MailChannels pauses further email delivery. Subsequent API calls to send messages will fail.
MailChannels never silently holds or drops messages that were already successfully submitted via the API. If a send call returned a success response before you hit the limit, that message will be delivered.
When you hit your limit, you have two options:
  1. Wait for your quota to reset at the start of the next billing cycle.
  2. Upgrade to a higher volume plan to immediately increase your send limit.
If you upgrade mid-cycle, MailChannels applies a pro-rated charge for the increased volume cap for the remainder of the month.
Monitor your usage. Upgrading before you hit the limit avoids any interruption to your critical emails.

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Unused quota does not roll over

Unused emails from one billing cycle do not carry over to the next. Each month you receive a fresh allotment based on your plan. For example: if your plan allows 50,000 emails/month and you send only 30,000 this month, you still have 50,000 available next month — not 70,000.

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Billing

  • Your card is charged at the start of each billing cycle (monthly by default, unless you are on annual billing).
  • If you upgrade mid-cycle, the additional charge is pro-rated for the remaining days in the month.
  • Payments are processed by a PCI-DSS certified payment partner — MailChannels does not store your card number directly.
  • If a payment fails, MailChannels will notify you to update your payment details to avoid service interruption.
  • You can manage billing and view invoices in the MailChannels Console.

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Rate limits and burst sending

There is no fixed messages-per-second cap on the outbound Email API. You can send at high throughput as long as you stay within your monthly quota. However, if your account suddenly sends an unusually large burst — especially on a small or free plan — the anti-abuse system may temporarily rate-limit your sending speed to protect system health. This is only triggered by abnormal patterns, such as a compromised system attempting to send millions of messages in a short window. For normal use cases, your monthly volume quota is the primary constraint. If you have a use case requiring very high burst rates, contact MailChannels in advance or spread the send out over time.

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Click tracking URLs

When you enable click tracking for outbound emails, MailChannels automatically replaces HTTP and HTTPS links in your message body with custom tracking URLs. These URLs let you monitor recipient engagement and track click events in real time. MailChannels uses a stateless encoding system for tracking links. The tracking URL has this structure: 
https://[BASE_DOMAIN]/[CUSTOMER_HASH]/[SID_HASH]/[ENCODED_TOKEN]?v=2
  • BASE_DOMAIN — the MailChannels click-tracking service domain, e.g. click.mailchannels.net.
  • CUSTOMER_HASH and SID_HASH — SHA-256 hashes of your customer handle and Sender ID, used for routing without exposing your account details.
  • ENCODED_TOKEN — a URL-safe Base64-encoded package containing the destination URL, the Message ID, and an HMAC-SHA256 digital signature.
  • ?v=2 — tells MailChannels servers to decode the token inline.
Because the destination URL and Message ID are embedded directly in the token and signed with HMAC-SHA256, there is no database lookup on click — redirects are fast and reliable. Tampered URLs are automatically rejected: if even a single character of the destination is changed, the signature check fails and the server returns a 404 Not Found. The system also supports key rotation via the Key ID field, so MailChannels can update signing keys without breaking links already sent to recipients.
Click tracking is not available on the free developer plan. Upgrade to a paid plan to enable it.