Brevo

Brevo is the trading name of Sendinblue SAS, founded in Paris in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, who still runs it, with about 1,000 staff and 600,000 customers by its own count. It became a unicorn in December 2025 when General Atlantic and Oakley Capital each took 25 per cent in a €500 million round, with Bpifrance and Bridgepoint holding 24 per cent and management and staff 26 per cent. We found no Russian or Chinese link. Transactional email here is not a separate product: the API, SMTP relay and webhooks are included in every marketing plan, which is the point of listing it and also the caveat, because the reputation of your receipts shares a platform with everyone else's newsletters.

Prices are in pounds as shown to a UK visitor on 9 September 2026, VAT basis not stated. Free is 300 emails a day, about 9,000 a month, with full API and SMTP access and email support. Starter is £6 a month, or £5.42 a month billed annually, from 5,000 emails a month; Standard is £13 or £11.67 and adds automation and A/B testing; Professional is £429 or £386.25 from 150,000 emails a month with phone support, ten seats and three hours a year of a deliverability specialist; Enterprise is quote-only and is where dedicated IPs, single sign-on and a customer success manager live. Paying monthly costs about 11 per cent more than annual. A pay-as-you-go credit option exists but its price is not on the page, and a stale FAQ on the transactional page still quotes US-dollar figures that do not match the live widget.

The developer surface is broad: official SDKs for Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Java and C#, a CLI, documented rate limits (1,000 requests a second on the general tier, 2,000 from Professional), idempotency keys with a 30-minute window and batch sending of up to 1,000 emails a request, plus templates with A/B testing and webhooks. A hosted MCP endpoint on the developer portal is described as an AI-client integration for reading the docs; we could not confirm it takes live actions. Email sending runs from servers in France and Germany under ISO 27001, while the general privacy policy allows account data to move to the US and India under safeguards.

The record is mixed. Trustpilot is 4.0 on 7,201 reviews, 76 per cent five-star and 13 per cent one-star, and the recent one-stars are about account suspensions with templated explanations and one long-term customer moved to a far dearer plan without notice. The status page history shows transactional sending delays or halts on 22, 24 and 30 June, 1 and 16 July and further degradations in late July, August and on 8 September 2026, all resolved within hours; Brevo claims 99.9 per cent uptime and 99 per cent deliverability, neither independently tested.

Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, documentation and third-party reviews. Saaskly has an affiliate link for Brevo through PartnerStack, disclosed on this page; it was added after the score was set and did not change it.