Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) has one of the more unusual free tiers in email: instead of a monthly quota, it meters sends per day. That single design choice creates quirks — no roll-over, a retry queue for transactional mail, and a Requeue dance for campaigns — that most guides gloss over. This guide walks through every documented limit, straight from Brevo’s help center and pricing pages.
What the Brevo free plan actually includes
Brevo’s free plan costs USD 0, has no time limit, and requires no credit card. It includes email campaigns, a drag-and-drop editor, custom templates, transactional email and SMS (SMS as an add-on), outbound webhooks, two interface languages, and email support. Here is exactly what ships free — and what is locked behind paid plans — according to Brevo’s free-plan FAQ.
Included on Free:
- Email campaigns with the drag-and-drop editor and custom templates
- Transactional email (API and SMTP); SMS is available as a paid add-on
- Outbound webhooks
- Two interface languages
- Email support
Not included on Free:
- Email A/B testing
- Dedicated IPs
- Landing pages
- Popups
- Mobile and web push
- Sales workflows
- Phone support
The package is broad — it’s a marketing platform plus a transactional sender, not just an SMTP relay. If you only need transactional delivery with a clean API, our Resend free tier guide covers a developer-focused alternative, and the Mailtrap free tier guide covers a testing-first option.
The 300/day limit: how it really behaves
The free plan allows 300 email sends per day. Unused sends do not roll over to the next day, and once the daily limit is hit you cannot schedule a next-day campaign. These three rules, documented in Brevo’s free-plan FAQ, shape everything else about the free tier.
In practice, “300 sends” counts every email that goes out the door that day — campaign recipients and transactional messages alike share the budget. If you send a newsletter to 250 contacts in the morning, only 50 sends remain for transactional mail until the next day’s reset. And because there’s no roll-over, sitting on a quiet day’s unused capacity buys you nothing tomorrow.
The scheduling constraint is the one that catches people: once you’ve burned through 300 sends, Brevo won’t let you schedule a campaign for the next day. You have to wait until the limit resets before you can queue up new sends. Plan your send days accordingly if your list is bigger than 300.
Transactional email: the 1,000-message retry queue
When the 300/day limit is reached, up to 1,000 additional transactional emails sit in a retry queue and are delivered as capacity frees up. Beyond 1,000 queued messages, transactional emails are simply not delivered. This behavior, documented in Brevo’s free-plan FAQ, is the free tier’s most important safety net.
The queue means password resets, order confirmations, and verification emails won’t silently fail the moment you hit the daily ceiling — they’ll wait for the next day’s capacity and go out then. That’s a real grace period, but it has a hard edge: message 1,001 and beyond are not delivered at all. For a low-traffic app, 1,000 queued messages is a comfortable buffer. For a spike-heavy product, it’s a cliff.
Design around it by monitoring your daily send count and keeping transactional volume well under the combined 300-plus-1,000 envelope. If password-reset emails sitting overnight is unacceptable for your product, that’s a signal the free tier has stopped fitting — Brevo’s pricing page shows paid tiers that remove the daily limit entirely.
Campaigns: no recipient cap, but the Requeue dance
Free-plan campaigns have no recipient cap per campaign, but only 300 contacts receive the campaign on send day. The Requeue option lets you reach remaining contacts on subsequent days as the daily limit resets. This workaround, described in Brevo’s free-plan FAQ, is how free accounts deliver to lists far larger than 300.
The workflow looks like this: you build a campaign for, say, 2,000 contacts and hit send. Brevo delivers it to the first 300 contacts that day. The rest wait, and each day you use Requeue to push the campaign to another batch of 300 as fresh capacity opens up. Over roughly a week, your full list gets the email — in daily slices.
Two constraints matter. First, the process is manual: you’re re-queuing batches as the limit resets, not setting it and forgetting it. Second, once the daily limit is reached you cannot schedule a next-day campaign, so your Requeue cadence depends on when the reset actually frees capacity. For list-building and drip-style rollout, it works. For time-sensitive announcements to a big list, it doesn’t.
Contacts, automations, and the built-in CRM limits
The free plan stores up to 100,000 contacts, but only 2,000 unique contacts can be active in automations. The bundled sales tools are capped at 1 user, 1 marketing seat, 1 connected calendar, 1 connected inbox, 50 open deals, 1 pipeline, and 1 deal currency. Every cap here comes from Brevo’s free-plan FAQ.
The 100,000-contact storage figure is the headline: Mailtrap’s free Email Marketing plan, by comparison, caps at 500 contacts. But storage is not the same as activation. If you build automations — welcome sequences, abandoned-cart flows, re-engagement drips — only 2,000 unique contacts can be flowing through them at any time. A list of 20,000 with an active welcome automation means most of your list never touches it.
The CRM caps tell you the built-in sales tools are single-operator territory: one user, one marketing seat, one connected calendar, one connected inbox, 50 open deals, one pipeline, and one deal currency. That’s fine for a solo founder running a lightweight pipeline inside the same tool as their email, and a hard stop once a second person joins the team.
| Limit | Free plan value |
|---|---|
| Stored contacts | Up to 100,000 |
| Active automation contacts | Up to 2,000 unique |
| Users / marketing seats | 1 / 1 |
| Connected calendar / inbox | 1 / 1 |
| Open deals / pipelines / deal currencies | 50 / 1 / 1 |
Reporting and the “Sent with Brevo” sticker
Free accounts get basic statistics only; heatmaps and geography reports require Standard or higher. Every free-plan email carries a “Sent with Brevo” sticker, removable only on Starter with the add-on or a higher plan. Both rules come from Brevo’s free-plan FAQ and the pricing article.
Basic statistics will show you the essentials — opens, clicks, the broad shape of campaign performance. What you won’t get is the deeper layer: click heatmaps that show where in your email readers engage, or geography reports that break performance down by region. Those land on Standard and above.
The sticker is the more visible constraint. Every email sent on Free — campaigns and transactional mail alike — carries a “Sent with Brevo” badge. Removing it requires the Starter plan plus the sticker-removal add-on, or a higher plan. For transactional emails especially, third-party branding on password resets and receipts reads as unpolished. If white-label transactional mail matters on day one, a dedicated transactional provider like Resend (see our Resend free tier guide) is worth comparing.
Brevo Free vs Resend Free vs Mailtrap Free
Brevo is not the only generous free tier in town. This section places Brevo’s free plan beside Resend’s and Mailtrap’s free tiers, side by side, so you can pick the right free tool for transactional mail versus marketing campaigns. Brevo cells use Brevo’s documented limits; Resend and Mailtrap cells summarize their StacksFree guides.
Brevo Free vs Resend Free vs Mailtrap Free (2026)
| Feature | Brevo Free | Resend Free | Mailtrap Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price and time limit | USD 0, no time limit, no credit card | Free tier, no credit card needed (Resend guide) | $0 API/SMTP plan, no credit card needed (Mailtrap guide) |
| Email send volume | 300/day, no roll-over | 3,000/month, capped at 100/day (Resend guide) | 4,000/month, 150/day shared with receiving (Mailtrap guide) |
| Over-limit behavior | Up to 1,000 transactional emails queued for retry; beyond that, not delivered | Daily cap of 100; resets the next day | Further sends fail until the quota resets or you upgrade |
| Stored contacts | Up to 100,000 | Not covered in our guide | 500 contacts (Email Marketing plan) |
| Transactional email support | Yes (API) | Yes (REST API and SMTP relay) | Yes (API and SMTP) |
| Branding on free emails | “Sent with Brevo” sticker always present | Not covered in our guide | Not covered in our guide |
| Reporting on free | Basic statistics only | Open and link tracking on all plans | Not covered in our guide |
| Paid entry point | Starter from USD 9/month | Pro at USD 20/month (50,000 emails) | Basic at USD 15/month (10,000 emails) |
Resend and Mailtrap figures are taken from their StacksFree guides, which cite each vendor’s pricing page; Brevo figures are sourced from Brevo’s help center and pricing page.
The short version: Brevo’s free plan bundles campaigns, automations, and a contact store with its sending. Resend and Mailtrap’s free tiers center on developer sending and testing. Pick them when you need developer tooling rather than marketing features, and read their guides for exact quotas.
Sending your first transactional email: API quick reference
Brevo’s transactional API accepts a POST to https://api.brevo.com/v3/smtp/email with an api-key header. The body requires a registered sender, at least one recipient, a subject, and htmlContent, textContent, or templateId; optional parameters cover variables and a tags array. The response returns a messageId. Full details live in the transactional email docs.
The shape of the request:
- Endpoint:
POST https://api.brevo.com/v3/smtp/email - Header:
api-keywith your account API key - Required body fields:
sender,to,subject, plus one ofhtmlContent,textContent, ortemplateId - Optional fields: parameters for template variables and a
tagsarray for tracking - Response: includes a
messageIdyou can use to reference the send
One prerequisite trips up newcomers: the sender address must be registered and verified in your Brevo account before the API will accept the send. Register the sender first, then wire up the call. The templateId route is worth using once your emails have any complexity — design the template in Brevo, then send with variables filled from your app.
When to upgrade: the paid tiers at a glance
Starter begins at USD 9/month with no daily limit (its first tier is 5,000 emails/month with up to 500 contacts). Standard starts at USD 18/month, adding A/B testing, advanced reporting, one landing page, and unlimited automation contacts. Professional runs from USD 499/month for 150,000 to 10M emails/month. All figures are from Brevo’s pricing page and the pricing article.
Match your trigger to the tier:
- Hit the 300/day ceiling regularly, or transactional delays hurt? Starter removes the daily limit — that’s its core value, starting at USD 9/month.
- Need A/B testing, advanced reporting, a landing page, or automations beyond 2,000 contacts? Standard at USD 18/month covers all four.
- Sending at serious volume? Professional starts at USD 499/month and scales from 150,000 up to 10M emails/month.
Note also that removing the “Sent with Brevo” sticker requires Starter plus the sticker-removal add-on, or a higher plan — so brand-conscious senders may hit the paid wall earlier than the send-volume numbers alone suggest.
FAQ
Does Brevo’s free plan expire or require a credit card?
No. The free plan costs USD 0 with no time limit and no credit card required, according to Brevo’s free-plan FAQ. You can stay on Free indefinitely, keep up to 100,000 stored contacts, and send up to 300 emails per day without ever entering payment details.
What happens to my emails after I hit the 300/day limit?
Transactional emails queue for retry — up to 1,000 of them — and are delivered as daily capacity frees up; beyond 1,000 queued, they are not delivered. Campaigns stop at 300 contacts on send day, with the Requeue option to reach the rest on later days. Once the limit is hit, you also cannot schedule a next-day campaign.
Can I remove the “Sent with Brevo” sticker on the free plan?
No. Every email sent on the free plan carries the “Sent with Brevo” sticker, and it cannot be removed there. Removal requires the Starter plan with the sticker-removal add-on, or a higher plan, per Brevo’s free-plan FAQ. Budget for that add-on if white-label branding matters to you.
The Bottom Line
Brevo’s free tier is generous for list-building: 100,000 stored contacts, 300 sends per day, no expiry, and no credit card — with campaigns, automations, a built-in CRM, and transactional email all under one roof. The dealbreakers are equally clear: the daily ceiling with no roll-over, the 2,000-contact automation cap, basic-only statistics, and a permanent “Sent with Brevo” sticker. It fits solo bootstrappers building a list, low-volume senders, and developers tinkering with transactional mail. It doesn’t fit scaling products that need white-label transactional email, deep reporting, or multi-seat collaboration — for pure transactional needs, compare our Resend free tier guide and Mailtrap free tier guide.
How This Guide Was Built
This review is based on official documentation and pricing pages — we did not run the tool hands-on. Every number comes from Brevo’s free-plan FAQ, the pricing article, brevo.com/pricing, and the transactional API docs, all cited inline. No account was created and no test emails were sent during research. Resend and Mailtrap comparisons draw on our existing Resend free tier guide and Mailtrap free tier guide.