Frequently asked questions
What Pony is, what a plan buys, and what an agent holding a key can do with it.
What is Pony?
A transactional email API. You send one HTTP request with a sender, a recipient, a subject and a body, and Pony delivers it and tells you what happened to it. It is built for the messages an application sends by itself — receipts, password resets, alerts — rather than for newsletters or campaigns.
What does a plan include?
Pro is 50,000 emails every 30 days with no daily cap, for $19. Scale is 100,000 emails every 30 days with no daily cap, for $79. Both include the full API, webhooks and message logs, and both renew every 30 days until you cancel. A plan is a fixed 30-day window rather than a calendar month, so a year is about 12.2 windows rather than 12.
What happens when I run out of sends?
The next send answers 402 Payment Required. A paid plan renews automatically at the end of its 30-day window and the volume comes back then; sooner than that, the billing page in your dashboard is where you move to a bigger plan.
Is there a free plan?
There is a free tier, and you do not buy it: a team with no paid plan is on it automatically. It is 3,000 emails per calendar month, resetting on the first, capped at 100 a day, with no card. It carries the full API, webhooks and message logs, and you send from a domain you verify yourself, the same as on a paid plan.
Which SDK should I install?
None, because there are none. Pony publishes the integration itself rather than a client per language: a plain text file at /llms.txt, a Claude skill, tool schemas for OpenAI and Gemini, and an MCP server. Read one and write the client in whatever language you are already using.
Do I need to set up DNS before I can send?
Yes, on every plan and on the free tier. Add a domain you own, publish the four DNS records the API returns, and Pony polls your registrar until they land. Nothing sends from an address Pony provisioned for you, because it provisions none.
How do delivery events reach my application?
Register an endpoint and Pony posts signed events to it: delivered, bounced, complained, opened and rejected. The signature is an HMAC-SHA256 over the payload with a timestamp. Delivery is at-least-once with a dead-letter queue, so deduplicate on the delivery id header rather than assuming each event arrives once.
What does Pony deliberately not do?
Attachments, open and click tracking, templates, contact lists and audiences. It is a transactional send API only. If you need a campaign tool, this is the wrong product.
What an agent can do with a key is on the page for agents. Every endpoint, error name and header is in the API documentation. What a plan costs is on the pricing section, and what happens if you want your money back is in the refund policy.