Elastic Email Review: Affordable Email Sending for WordPress

Why Your WordPress Site Needs a Proper Email Service

Every WordPress site sends email — password resets, order confirmations, form notifications, and potentially newsletters. The problem is that WordPress's default mail function is unreliable and frequently lands in spam folders. You need a dedicated email sending service, and choosing the right one means weighing four key factors: inbox deliverability, secure API-based connections, cost effectiveness, and ease of setup.

Transactional email covers one-to-one messages your site sends automatically, like receipts or password resets. Bulk email is when you send newsletters to your list using a plugin like Autonami or FluentCRM. Both need to actually reach the inbox, and both need a solid sending infrastructure behind them.

Amazon SES has long been a go-to recommendation for cheap email sending, and its deliverability is solid. But if you've ever tried to set it up — especially for multiple clients as an agency — you know it's a nightmare. The sub-account system is convoluted and time-consuming. That's where Elastic Email steps in as a compelling alternative.

Elastic Email Pricing: How It Compares

Elastic Email offers two main plans worth looking at. The standard Email API plan charges just 10 cents per 1,000 emails — the same rate as Amazon SES — plus 50 cents per day (roughly $15/month). For a single website, that's extremely competitive pricing that won't break the bank even at moderate volume.

The Email API Pro plan costs more per email and runs a dollar per day, but it unlocks the features that make Elastic Email genuinely special: sub-accounts with client billing and quota management. If you're running an agency, this is the plan you want. You can bundle email credits into your care plans, set monthly refill amounts, and charge overage fees.

Compared to alternatives like Postmark or SendGrid, Elastic Email is significantly cheaper. It's not quite as dirt-cheap as raw Amazon SES, but the ease of use and agency features more than make up the small price difference. For most WordPress site owners sending transactional email, the total monthly cost will be negligible.

Domain Verification and WordPress Setup

Getting Elastic Email connected to your WordPress site is straightforward, especially compared to the headache of configuring Amazon SES. The process starts with verifying your sending domain inside the Elastic Email dashboard. Adding the full domain (rather than just a single from-address) lets you send from any email address on that domain.

Domain verification requires three DNS records. First, you need to update your existing SPF record — since you can only have one SPF record per domain, you'll add Elastic Email's include statement to your current record rather than creating a new one. Second, you add a DKIM TXT record, which lets receiving servers verify your emails are authentic. Third, a CNAME record for open tracking, which lets Elastic Email monitor your open rates. If you're on Cloudflare, make sure to turn off the proxy for the tracking CNAME.

On the WordPress side, Elastic Email provides its own plugin. Install it, grab an API key from your Elastic Email dashboard (use the "plugin" permission level for security), paste the key into the plugin settings, choose whether you're sending transactional or marketing email, and set your from name and address. The connection test should confirm everything is working within seconds.

Deliverability testing with mail-tester.com returned a perfect 10 out of 10 score — SPF, DKIM, and Spam Assassin all passed cleanly. That's exactly what you want to see before trusting a service with your business email. No blacklist issues, no configuration problems, just a clean bill of health right out of the gate.

Agency Reseller Features: Sub-Accounts and White Labeling

The reseller capabilities on the Pro plan are where Elastic Email really differentiates itself. The sub-account system lets you create separate accounts for each client, complete with their own login credentials and customizable email quotas. You can assign a starting credit balance, set monthly refill amounts, and cap daily sending limits so one client can't burn through their entire allocation in a single blast.

Quota management is flexible. You might give a client 10,000 credits per month with a daily cap of 2,000 — enough for their transactional email and modest newsletters without risking runaway sends. You can also set a maximum email size to prevent clients from trying to attach massive files to their campaigns. One particularly smart feature: you can allow clients to purchase their own dedicated IP address. If a client's sending reputation tanks due to high bounces or spam complaints, their private IP keeps them isolated from your other clients' deliverability.

Always require clients to verify their own sending domains. Without this setting, unverified senders fall back to your default domain — and you definitely don't want client emails going out under your primary business domain. The custom branding option takes the white-label experience further. You can set up a branded email portal on your own subdomain (like mailportal.yourdomain.com), add your logo, configure custom SMTP server names that hide any mention of Elastic Email, and even enable single sign-on so clients don't need separate credentials.

The sub-account management dashboard gives you a bird's-eye view of all your clients: sending reputation, spam rates, abuse reports, remaining credits, and general activity stats. For agencies managing dozens of WordPress sites, this level of visibility and control is a massive upgrade over wrestling with Amazon SES's sub-account system.

Final Verdict: Is Elastic Email Worth It?

Elastic Email checks all four boxes for a WordPress email sending service. Deliverability scored a perfect 10/10 on mail-tester.com. The API-based connection is secure and handles retries gracefully. Pricing is competitive with Amazon SES at 10 cents per 1,000 emails. And setup is dramatically easier — you can go from zero to sending verified email in under 15 minutes.

For single-site owners, Elastic Email is a solid, affordable choice that's far simpler to configure than Amazon SES. For agencies, it's a game-changer. The sub-account management, quota controls, white-label branding, and client billing features solve real operational headaches that other transactional email providers simply don't address. If you're running WordPress care plans and bundling email services for clients, Elastic Email's Pro plan deserves serious consideration.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.