# What MakiSend costs

MakiSend is free. You pay Cloudflare only if you go past its free plan, and your SMTP provider for the mail it sends. Nothing is charged per email on top.

Last updated: 2026-11-01. Web page: https://makisend.lixalistudio.tech/pricing/

## Three bills, one of them zero

| Who | What you pay |
|---|---|
| MakiSend | $0. Open source under the MIT license, no subscription and no per-email fee |
| Cloudflare | $0 on Workers Free. $5 a month on Workers Paid, for volume |
| Your SMTP provider | Its own price. Often a mailbox you already pay for, or a sending service's plan |

## On Workers Free

Everything MakiSend uses (Workers, static assets, D1, Queues, Workflows and Cron Triggers) is on Cloudflare's Workers Free plan, so the Deploy button works on a free account and nothing is billed. The free plan sets a daily volume. The tightest quota is Workflows steps: a delivered email runs 3 steps (prepare, send, record), and every SMTP retry adds one.

| Free plan quota (per day) | What it means for MakiSend |
|---|---|
| Workflows: 3,000 steps | Hundreds of delivered emails a day: the binding limit |
| Queues: 10,000 operations | Not the limit: 3 operations per email (write, read, delete) |
| Workers: 100,000 requests, shared with Workflow runs | API calls, dashboard and deliveries together |
| D1: 100,000 rows written, 5 GB stored | Logs, history and encrypted bodies |
| Cron Triggers: 5 per account | MakiSend uses 2 (SMTP health check, key rotation) |

> Limits from Cloudflare's [Workflows](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workflows/reference/pricing/), [Queues](https://developers.cloudflare.com/queues/platform/pricing/), [D1](https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing/) and [Workers](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/) pages.

## On Workers Paid

Workers Paid is $5 a month for the whole Cloudflare account. It includes 500,000 Workflows steps and 1 million Queues operations a month; past that, steps cost $0.80 per 100,000, and there is no daily cap. Nothing changes in MakiSend: same Worker, same configuration.

We have not measured a real volume yet, so we give no per-email figure for the paid plan.

## What the free plan does not cover

- Cloudflare Email Service sends to any recipient only on Workers Paid. On a free account, use another SMTP provider.
- CPU time is capped at 10 ms per invocation and per Workflow step. MakiSend mostly waits on the network, which does not count, but a very large HTML body takes longer to sanitize.
- Your SMTP provider has its own limits: Gmail and Google Workspace cap what one mailbox sends per day.

## On your own server

The same MakiSend also runs from one Docker image on any VPS: one container serves the API and the dashboard, and the database is a SQLite file in a volume. Cloudflare's plans then do not apply; you pay for the server and your SMTP provider. It is one instance with no failover and no Cloudflare Email Service, so use any SMTP provider on port 465 or 587. The [VPS guide](https://github.com/lixalistudio-oss/makisend/blob/main/docs/SELF_HOST_VPS.md) covers HTTPS with Caddy, updates, backups and limits.

## Compared with Resend

Resend is free up to 3,000 emails a month (100 a day), then from $20 a month (resend.com/pricing, October 2026). MakiSend gives you the API, retries, templates and logs for free and sends through your own provider, which can be Resend's SMTP. [MakiSend vs Resend](https://makisend.lixalistudio.tech/compare/resend/) covers the rest.

## MakiSend Cloud

A hosted version is planned: email, webhooks, SMS, WhatsApp and push through one API, priced low. No price is published yet. [Join the waitlist](https://tally.so/r/Yj5XaN). The open-source MakiSend stays free to run yourself.

## Questions

### Is MakiSend free?

Yes. MakiSend is open source under the MIT license, with no subscription and no per-email fee.

### How many emails a day can I send on Cloudflare's free plan?

Hundreds. The limit is the Workflows quota of 3,000 steps a day: a delivered email takes 3 steps, and each SMTP retry adds one.

### When do I need Workers Paid?

When you need more than the free daily quota, or Cloudflare Email Service to send to any recipient. Workers Paid is $5 a month and removes the daily cap.