Loops vs Resend: one SaaS email platform, or a developer API with marketing added

Price by audience size

This compares marketing email, where both vendors price by the size of your list. Loops' readouts come from its pricing slider on 7 October 2026 at positions just under the round numbers shown, and Resend's come from the marketing tab of its slider on the same date.

On marketing alone the difference runs from $8 to $19 a month through 25,000 contacts. The lower bill is Resend's, and the two are level at 50,000. The comparison is not like for like, though, because the two vendors count different things in the price.

What the price includes

• Loops. Paid plans include unlimited sends to subscribers, transactional sends to users outside your audience, all features, and no per-seat charge. Teams can send up to 1,000 emails per second on paid plans. Unsubscribed contacts do not count toward pricing.
• Resend. Transactional email goes through the /emails API and counts against a volume plan: Free at 3,000 emails, Pro at $20 for 50,000, Scale at $90 for 100,000. Marketing email goes through /broadcasts or the dashboard, is limited only by contact count, and does not count against the transactional limit. Broadcasts can only go to existing contacts.
• Automations. Loops includes them on every plan. Resend gives 10,000 automation runs free, then charges $0.0015 per run. A product whose onboarding automation fires 50,000 times in a month pays for 40,000 runs, or $60, on top of its plan.

A worked case: a SaaS with 10,000 subscribers sending 40,000 transactional emails a month plus a weekly newsletter. Loops covers all of it in one plan. On Resend, marketing for 10,000 contacts and transactional Pro for up to 50,000 emails sit on separate tabs of the pricing page. Added together, the two readouts come to $100. Confirm at checkout how the two combine for your account. The totals are close, so the real difference is whether you want one tool or two integrations.

Free plans

Loops' free Early Stage plan allows unlimited contacts but delivers to only the 1,000 newest of them, up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30 days with marketing and transactional counted together, at 10 emails per second, and with a small "Powered by Loops" footer. Resend's free tiers are split: transactional is 3,000 emails a month with a 100-a-day cap on three domains, and marketing is free up to 1,000 contacts with unlimited broadcast sending, 10,000 automation runs and 3 segments. For a pre-launch product that wants both, Resend's free allowance is larger, but it spans two products where Loops has one.

Which to choose

• Choose Loops if a non-engineer will build and edit onboarding and lifecycle sequences, you want transactional and marketing sends under one subscriber-based bill, and you do not want to count automation runs.
• Choose Resend if transactional email is the bulk of your sending, your engineers prefer to own templates in code, and you would rather pay for marketing only when you use it.
• Use both only if you want Resend's transactional API under your app and Loops for the lifecycle messages marketing owns. The cost of two bills buys a clean split of responsibility.

Moving from one to the other

1. Export contacts with their properties and subscription status. Import unsubscribed contacts as unsubscribed, never as active, so you do not re-mail people who opted out.
2. Rebuild segments and map your product events. On Resend, broadcasts reach only existing contacts, so import the list before any send.
3. Recreate sequences as automations, then run them in parallel with a test group before pausing the old ones.
4. Move transactional templates last, since these are the emails your product cannot afford to lose, and keep the old domain authentication in place until the new one has sent cleanly for a week.

Related reading: Loops vs Klaviyo, Loops vs Customer.io, Loops vs HubSpot, Resend vs SendGrid and Resend vs Postmark.