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Pidgeon vs Resend
Resend is a sender that has learned to receive; Pidgeon is a mailbox that also sends. Here is which one an agent needs, and when to use both.
The short version
Resend is the email API many developers already send with: a clean REST API, React Email, nine official SDKs and plans that scale to millions of messages. It also receives mail, and in a private beta it has started building inboxes for agents.
Pidgeon starts from the other end. Resend is a sender that has learned to receive. Pidgeon is a mailbox that also sends. Every Pidgeon address keeps its mail, threads it, opens in a mail client over IMAP, and can be handed between an agent and a person — generally available, on every plan, today.
Choose Resend if your agent mostly sends: notifications, receipts, outreach at volume, marketing email. Choose Pidgeon if your agent has to hold a conversation — read a reply, answer in the same thread, and let a person step in.
At a glance
Prices and limits as published on 17 October 2026. Resend prices in US dollars, Pidgeon in euros.
| Pidgeon | Resend | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 3 mailboxes, 1 custom domain, 3,000 sent a month | 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, 3 domains, 3 inboxes |
| First paid plan | €20 a month: 10 mailboxes, 10,000 sent a month | $20 a month: 50,000 emails, 10 domains |
| Does received mail use the quota | No — receiving is never metered | Yes — mail sent or received counts towards the sending quota |
| Inboxes as an object | Every plan, generally available | Private beta; $1 an inbox a month after three |
| Threads | Built for every message | In the inbox beta; on plain receiving you set the reply headers yourself |
| How long mail is kept | Until you delete it, within the plan's storage | 30 days on every plan below Enterprise |
| IMAP for mail clients | Every plan, with an app password | Not offered; SMTP is for sending |
| Hand-off between agent and human | Thread owner and assignment events | Assignment in the inbox beta |
| Mail that tries to steer the agent | Firewall verdict on every inbound message | A skill guide for your own checks |
| MCP server | Hosted and npm | Hosted and npm; inbox tools beta |
| Marketing email | No | Yes, priced separately by contacts |
Where Pidgeon is different
The mailbox is the product, not a beta
A Pidgeon address is a mailbox from the moment it exists: mail arrives, is stored, threaded and searchable, and stays until you delete it. Resend's receiving is generally available, but its email.received webhook carries no body — your code fetches each message — and mail is kept for 30 days. Its inbox API, with threads and folders, is in private beta and says its response shape may change before it ships.
Receiving costs nothing
On Resend, every email an inbox receives counts towards the same quota as the ones you send. On Pidgeon, receiving is never metered. An agent that reads far more than it writes — a support inbox, a sign-up flow, a monitor — pays only for what it sends.
A person can open it
Every Pidgeon mailbox opens in Apple Mail, Outlook or anything else that speaks IMAP, with an app password scoped to that one mailbox. Thread ownership — human, agent or automation — is one call to change, and thread.assigned tells your agent to stop. The hand-off guide walks through it.
A verdict before your agent reads
Pidgeon Firewall marks every inbound message with what it found — hidden text, instructions addressed to an AI, look-alike senders — so your agent can check before it acts. Resend publishes a good guide to doing these checks yourself.
Where Resend is ahead
- Sending at volume. 50,000 emails for $20, plans up to 2.5 million a month, dedicated IPs on Scale, and four sending regions.
- React Email and an embeddable template editor, which nothing else matches for building mail in code.
- Marketing email. Broadcasts, contacts and segments, on their own plans.
- SDKs. Official libraries for Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, Go, Java, Rust and .NET. Pidgeon has TypeScript, Python and a CLI.
- Paperwork. SOC 2 Type II, a DPA and SSO. Pidgeon does not have a SOC 2 report yet.
Which should you choose?
- Your agent sends and rarely reads replies: Resend, or keep it for sending and add Pidgeon only where replies matter.
- Your agent has conversations — support, scheduling, sign-ups that email a code: Pidgeon.
- A person must be able to read along or take over: Pidgeon.
- You want both: they are not exclusive. Pidgeon can send for a domain while another provider keeps receiving its mail, and agents can live on a subdomain of their own.
Using both
Keep Resend for transactional and marketing mail on your main domain, and give your agents their own addresses on a subdomain such as agents.yourcompany.com on Pidgeon. The quickstart is about five minutes. Or paste one line into your coding agent:
Read pidgeon.ai/skill.md and get yourself an email address.
We make Pidgeon, so weigh this accordingly. Every claim about Resend comes from its own pricing page, documentation and product pages, checked on 17 October 2026. We re-check this page every month. If something here is out of date, write to support@pidgeon.ai and we will fix it.