SendPulse is a multichannel marketing platform founded in Kyiv in 2015, with offices now in the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, and Ukraine and roughly 200,000 customers. The core product is marketing email plus chatbots, SMS, CRM, landing pages, and a course builder – the transactional SMTP relay covered on this page sits alongside those, not in front of them. That places SendPulse in the same product category as Brevo and Mailjet: a marketing-first platform where transactional sending is one channel among several, not the whole product like it is at Postmark, SMTP2GO, or MailerSend.
The free tier sends 12,000 emails per month, capped at 400 per day and 50 per hour, from up to three verified sender addresses on two authenticated domains. That is a much larger monthly ceiling than the transactional-first competitors publish for free (MailerSend at 500/month, Postmark at 100/month, SMTP2GO at 1,000/month), which is the honest selling point. The catch is that SendPulse gates the SMTP endpoint behind a manual profile approval that can take up to 24 hours – the account is created immediately, but the SMTP credentials will not authenticate until the review clears. That is unusual in this category and worth planning around if a site needs transactional email working the same day.
SMTP settings
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Host | smtp-pulse.com |
| Ports | 465 (SSL), 587 (STARTTLS), 2525 (fallback for hosts that block 587) |
| Authentication | Login (username and password) |
| Username | SMTP login shown in SendPulse account under Account Settings > SMTP > General |
| Password | SMTP password shown alongside the login |
SendPulse publishes three SMTP ports covering the two common encrypted paths – 465 for implicit SSL, 587 for STARTTLS – plus 2525 as a fallback when the host blocks 587. A host that blocks all three will not reach the relay; the WordPress email troubleshooter walks through the outbound-port test for that case. SMTP credentials are separate from the API USER_ID and SECRET used by the REST endpoint at api.sendpulse.com/smtp/emails and are generated per-account rather than per-domain.
If the sending domain already carries a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 include in its SPF record, the SPF merger folds SendPulse’s include:mxsspf.sendpulse.com into the existing string and counts DNS lookups against RFC 7208’s ten-lookup ceiling before you publish. Once the DKIM TXT record at sign._domainkey is live, the DNS auth checker reads it the way receivers resolve it, so a stale nameserver or a mistyped selector shows up before real traffic does. After that, verify with swaks that messages authenticate correctly.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Volume | Hourly cap | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 12,000 emails/mo | 50/hr | 400/day cap. 2 sender domains, 3 sender addresses. Profile approval required. |
| SMTP 25K | $7.85/mo | 25,000 emails/mo | 2,500/hr | 5 sender domains. |
| SMTP 50K | $14.85/mo | 50,000 emails/mo | 5,000/hr | 5 sender domains. |
| SMTP 100K | $69.85/mo | 100,000 emails/mo | 8,000/hr | Unlimited domains, dedicated IP included. |
| SMTP 200K | $114.85/mo | 200,000 emails/mo | 10,000/hr | Unlimited domains, dedicated IP. |
| SMTP 300K | $159.85/mo | 300,000 emails/mo | 15,000/hr | Unlimited domains, dedicated IP. |
| Enterprise 500K | $259.85/mo | 500,000 emails/mo | 20,000/hr | Unlimited domains, dedicated IP. |
Yearly billing is discounted 20% off the monthly rate; six-month billing is discounted 10%. Pay-as-you-go credit packs are also sold and remain valid for twelve months after purchase.
The pricing curve has one feature worth flagging up front: the step from SMTP 50K at $14.85 to SMTP 100K at $69.85 is a 4.7× price jump for a 2× volume jump. What the 100K tier buys beyond the extra volume is unlimited sender domains (up from 5) and an included dedicated IP – both real, but the site that needs 60K or 80K messages a month on a shared IP with the existing 5-domain quota lands squarely inside that cliff. The SMTP cost calculator compares SendPulse against SMTP2GO, MailerSend, Postmark, and Amazon SES at whatever monthly volume the site actually sends.
Free tier
Twelve thousand emails a month is a real free ceiling by the standards of this category – Postmark caps free at 100/month, MailerSend at 500 with vendor branding, SMTP2GO at 1,000. The 400/day and 50/hour sub-caps are the real limits for a busy site: a WooCommerce store that fires off order confirmations, shipping notifications, and password resets in the same afternoon can bump into 50/hour faster than the monthly total suggests.
Two other constraints matter. The profile-approval step means the free tier is not usable the moment the account is created – the SMTP endpoint refuses authentication until SendPulse’s review team clears the profile, which can take up to 24 hours. And only three sender addresses across two domains can send; a site running WordPress core email plus a WooCommerce store plus a support address is already at the ceiling.
The tier fits a low-traffic contact form, a small blog’s password reset traffic, or a WordPress dev environment where the 24-hour approval delay is not blocking. It does not fit a store that needs to ship transactional email the same day the account is opened, or a multi-brand site that needs more than two sender domains.
Paid entry ($7.85/25K)
SMTP 25K at $7.85 a month is cheap for 25,000 messages, cheaper per thousand than the equivalent tiers at MailerSend ($7 for 5,000), Postmark ($15 for 10,000), or SMTP2GO ($10 for 10,000). It also lifts the hourly cap from 50 to 2,500 and the sender-domain quota from 2 to 5 – both count for a real WordPress site. The trade-off is what the tier does not include: no dedicated IP (that starts at 100K), and the same manual profile-approval requirement applies before sending begins.
WordPress integration
For the step-by-step install order (verify the sending domain, wait out the profile approval, copy the SMTP credentials from Account Settings, wire the mailer plugin, first test send), see SendPulse plugin for WordPress. The section below is the plugin-path comparison; the how-to is the setup walk-through.
The WP mail config generator takes a SendPulse SMTP credential pair and returns a paste-ready block for the plugin below, so the choice becomes which mailer, not which fields to populate.
SendPulse does not publish an SMTP-only WordPress plugin. Its WordPress plugin catalogue covers the marketing side (a newsletter subscription form, a popup builder, web push, a WooCommerce sync, a live-chat/chatbot embed) – none of those routes wp_mail(). The transactional relay is reached through a generic mailer plugin in “Other SMTP” mode.
Two paths in practice:
WP Mail SMTP with Other SMTP – WP Mail SMTP does not ship a dedicated SendPulse mailer, but its Other SMTP option reaches smtp-pulse.com:587 with the SMTP credentials copied from the SendPulse dashboard. Pick it when the site benefits from WP Mail SMTP’s plugin-side logging, fallback, and per-sender routing on top of SendPulse’s own reporting.
Generic SMTP – FluentSMTP and Post SMTP also reach smtp-pulse.com:587 with the same credentials. FluentSMTP is the pick for a site that wants a free, open-source mailer with cleaner per-address routing than WP Mail SMTP’s free tier. Post SMTP is the pick when a bounced send needs to page an operator through Chrome, Slack, Teams, or SMS. See the WordPress mailer plugin list for the full comparison.
SendPulse publishes a 
MailPoet-specific setup guide, but MailPoet is a newsletter/campaign plugin, not a wp_mail() mailer. For transactional email a generic mailer plugin is the right layer.
Assessment
SendPulse’s transactional SMTP tier is a side-product of a marketing platform, and the pricing reflects that. At the low end it is cheap – $7.85/month for 25,000 messages is competitive with or below the transactional-only specialists, and the 12,000-a-month free tier is larger than any of the transactional-first competitors publish. If a site already runs SendPulse for marketing email or chatbot flows, adding transactional to the same account for free (or for $7.85 at 25K) is a reasonable operational choice.
The cases where SendPulse is not the right fit are also predictable:
- The 24-hour manual profile approval before SMTP activates rules it out for anyone who needs transactional email working the same day the account is opened. SMTP2GO and Postmark both activate SMTP immediately once the sending domain is verified.
- The steep step from 50K ($14.85) to 100K ($69.85) means a site sending 60K to 90K transactional messages a month is paying $69.85 for volume it does not use. MailerSend at $35 for 50K and $68 at 100K on a smoother slider is priced more evenly through that range.
- A site that needs a US-resident sending endpoint should look elsewhere – SendPulse’s SMTP relay resolves into AWS’s Frankfurt region and the platform describes its transactional infrastructure as EU-based. If EU residency is a requirement, that is a plus; if the site’s data policy requires US residency, it rules SendPulse out.
For a WordPress site that already runs SendPulse for marketing email, or one that values the 12,000-a-month free ceiling and can live with the profile-approval delay, SendPulse’s transactional SMTP tier is a defensible pick. For a site that is choosing a transactional relay in isolation and needs it working immediately, a transactional specialist is a better fit.
For the broader setup that places SendPulse inside the WordPress email stack, see the WordPress email setup guide.
Pricing verified 29 September 2026 against sendpulse.com/prices/smtp. SMTP host, ports, DKIM selector, and SPF include verified against SendPulse’s SMTP knowledge base (sendpulse.com/knowledge-base/smtp).