Free for Everyday Users, Paid for Automation and API Access
Free for everyday users, paid for automation and API use. The Mail.cx API is now $9.9 a year — less than $1 a month — while the website stays free and ad-free.
Today we're making an important change to Mail.cx: the API is now a paid service, at $9.9 per year.
The temporary email service on the website is still free to use, and we still want to keep it ad-free, simple and clean.
Why are we doing this?
The reason is simple: servers cost money.
As Mail.cx has grown in users and API calls, we've taken on more costs for mail servers, bandwidth, storage, domains, monitoring and abuse prevention.
Until now the API has always been free, and many developers have integrated Mail.cx into their own projects as a result. We're grateful to those developers, and we want their projects to keep using Mail.cx.
But if the website has no ads and the API is free forever, the service is hard to sustain in the long run.
So in the end we chose a simple approach:
Everyday users keep using Mail.cx for free. Developers and automated programs pay a small fee to use the API.
The API is currently priced at:
$9.9 / year
That works out to less than $1 a month.
We hope this price won't be much of a burden for indie developers, small projects, automated testing and AI agents, while helping us pay for servers and ongoing development.
How it compares with other email APIs
Below are some publicly listed prices for developer email / temporary email APIs, just to give a rough sense of the market:
| Service | Starting paid price | Approx. per year |
|---|---|---|
| Mail.cx API | $9.9 / year | $9.9 |
| testmail.app | $9 / month (billed annually) | ~$108 |
| Mailsac | $18 / month | ~$216 |
| MailSlurp | from $19.99 / month | ~$240 |
Prices are taken from each service's current public pricing page. Features and usage limits differ, so this isn't a strict feature-for-feature comparison. testmail.app's Essential plan is currently $9/month (billed annually), Mailsac's Indie Plan is $18/month, and MailSlurp Starter is $19.99/month.
Our thinking is actually simple:
Keep the API cheap enough, while keeping the service running for the long term.
For everyday users who only need a temporary inbox now and then, the Mail.cx website stays free.
For developers who need to create inboxes in bulk, read mail programmatically, run automated tests or let AI agents receive email, we hope $9.9 a year is a fair price.
Thank you to every user and developer who has used and supported Mail.cx.
We'll keep making Mail.cx more stable and faster, and do our best to keep it simple and ad-free.