I only need transactional email, not newsletters or marketing automation. What providers should I look at?

If you only need transactional email (password resets, receipts, alerts, verification emails), look at providers built for deliverability, API sending, and SMTP rather than marketing platforms.

Good options to consider:

• Postmark — Strong reputation for transactional-only email, very good deliverability, simple setup, clear product focus.
• Amazon SES — Very low cost and scalable, but more setup/ops work; best if you’re comfortable with AWS.
• SendGrid — Popular and feature-rich; can do transactional well, but the product has more marketing baggage than Postmark.
• Mailgun — Good developer-focused API and routing tools, solid for transactional use cases.
• SparkPost — Strong sending infrastructure and analytics; more enterprise-leaning.
• Brevo (Sendinblue) — Has transactional email plus marketing features; decent if you want one provider that can grow, though it’s less “transactional-first.”
• Resend — Developer-friendly, modern API, especially nice for product/app emails.

If you want the shortest list:

• Best simple transactional choice: Postmark
• Best low-cost at scale: Amazon SES
• Best modern developer experience: Resend or Mailgun

What to compare before choosing:

• Deliverability reputation
• API quality and SMTP support
• Logging / webhook events / suppression handling
• Pricing per email
• Ease of domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Support and SLA

If you want, I can also give you a “best provider by use case” table for:

• startup
• SaaS app
• high-volume
• lowest cost
• easiest setup