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Three SMTP providers people commonly plug into a form backend, compared honestly on deliverability, setup effort, and cost — so you can pick based on your actual submission volume.
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Postmark is the best fit if deliverability matters most and you're willing to pay more for it. Amazon SES is the cheapest option at real volume but takes the most setup. Brevo has the most generous free tier and is the easiest choice for low-volume forms that don't want to touch AWS.
FormBridge's custom SMTP setting doesn't care which provider you plug in — host, port, encryption, username, password. The provider you pick changes deliverability, cost, and how much setup you're signing up for. Here's how the three most common choices actually differ.
Postmark built its reputation specifically on transactional email deliverability — it deliberately separates transactional traffic from marketing/bulk sending so one doesn't tank the reputation of the other. For a form that needs to reliably land in an inbox (a support request, a lead form for sales), that focus matters. The tradeoff is cost: Postmark generally runs pricier per email than Brevo at similar volumes, and its free allowance is modest. Setup is straightforward — verify a sending domain, grab SMTP credentials, done.
SES is usually the cheapest option once you're sending real volume, since AWS prices it close to raw infrastructure cost rather than a bundled SaaS plan. The catch is everything around it: you need an AWS account, you have to verify your sending domain through Route 53 or your DNS provider, and new accounts start in a sending sandbox that only allows mail to pre-verified addresses until AWS approves a production access request. That review can take a day or more. Worth it if you're comfortable in AWS and volume justifies the savings — overkill for a single low-traffic contact form.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the most approachable of the three for someone who just wants a form's notification emails to reliably send without fully committing to AWS. Its free tier is roughly the most generous of the group, and SMTP credentials are quick to generate from its dashboard. It won't out-deliver Postmark at scale, but for a form doing dozens to low hundreds of submissions a month, that gap rarely matters.
Match the provider to volume and tolerance for setup: Brevo for low-volume and fast setup, Postmark when deliverability is the priority and budget allows, SES when volume is high enough that per-email cost dominates the decision. Whichever you pick, connect it the same way — under Account → SMTP Configurations in FormBridge, a Pro-plan-and-above feature — and remember each form still needs its own notification email address set for custom SMTP to actually take effect.
Brevo is generally the fastest to get working — sign up, grab SMTP credentials, done. Postmark is close behind. Amazon SES requires the most setup: an AWS account, domain verification, and typically requesting production access since new accounts start in a sending sandbox.
Amazon SES is generally the cheapest per email once volume is meaningful, since it's priced close to raw sending cost rather than bundled into a SaaS-style plan. Postmark and Brevo are typically more expensive per email but require far less setup.
No. Postmark, SES, and Brevo are outbound email delivery providers, connected to FormBridge as the custom SMTP sender. Spam protection on incoming submissions — CAPTCHA, honeypot, authorized domains — is a separate, form-level setting inside FormBridge itself.
One email when we publish something worth reading. No spam — appropriately enough, we'd know.