SendGrid alternatives: five senders, what each costs, and how to move

Why teams leave SendGrid

• No standing free tier on the API. The free trial lasts 60 days at 100 emails a day. Afterwards you pay at least $19.95 a month, with taxes and overages possible according to the page.
• Essentials is thin on seats and logs. The feature table gives Essentials 1 teammate, 2 event webhooks and 3 days of searchable email activity. Pro moves to 1,000 teammates, 5 webhooks and 7 days.
• The next step costs a lot. At 100,000 emails a month the selector shows Essentials at $34.95 and Pro at $89.95. Dedicated IPs, subuser management, single sign-on and email content testing (60 credits a month) are all Pro features, so wanting any one of them means paying $55 more.
• Marketing and API are two products. Marketing Campaigns has its own free plan (2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails), Basic from $15 and Advanced from $60, with contact-based limits, which makes the bill harder to forecast than a flat email count.
• Suppressed sends still cost credits. The suppression documentation says each attempt to mail a suppressed address consumes one credit, so a stale list costs real money until you clean it.

What each alternative costs at real volumes

All of these come from each vendor's own page: Postmark, Resend, Mailgun, Amazon SES and SMTP2GO. For SES, the page lists $0.16 per 1,000 emails on its Essentials tier, so the cells above are multiplication, not quotes, and exclude dedicated IPs ($24.95 a month per standard IP on the a-la-carte list), data transfer and the engineering time to build suppression handling and reporting. Postmark's Basic plan is the $15 cell at 10,000, and its Pro and Platform plans cost $16.50 and $18 at that volume.

Who should switch to what

A product that sends receipts, resets and alerts. Postmark is the sender built around that traffic, and its Basic plan lists 45-day data retention. Resend suits a team that wants a modern API: Pro is $20 up to 50,000 emails and $35 at 100,000, and Scale is $90 for 100,000 and $160 for 200,000. Resend vs Postmark sets the two against each other, and Postmark vs SendGrid covers the move away directly.

A team that sends a very large volume and has engineers to spare. SES is the cheapest line in the table, and the AWS page quotes 250,000 emails on Essentials as 250,000 x $0.16 / 1,000 = $40.00. You must build or buy the dashboards, templates and suppression workflow yourself, so it rewards teams who would otherwise write that code anyway.

A small site that just needs SMTP to work. SMTP2GO offers a free plan of up to 1,000 emails a month, Starter at $10 for 10,000 and Professional at $75 for 100,000. It is a relay rather than a developer platform, which can be exactly right for a WordPress site or an office printer.

A team that needs inbound routing, EU data or a dedicated IP bundle. Mailgun's page says you can send through the US or the EU from one account, and one dedicated IP is included with Foundation 100k, Growth and Scale. SendGrid vs Mailgun lays out the rest.

A marketer who uses SendGrid Marketing Campaigns. You are really shopping for a newsletter tool, so look at Campaign Monitor alternatives and EmailOctopus alternatives, which price by contacts instead.

The option nobody lists: keep the sender, change the editor

SendGrid's feature table gives Essentials a dynamic template editor and Pro an editor with testing. If the editor is what you dislike, leave it alone and build in a separate tool. Postcards' pricing page names SendGrid among the platforms it exports to directly, and any builder that gives you HTML can feed a template that uses Handlebars tags. A separate builder subscription costs far less than moving the delivery service, and your domain reputation, suppression lists and webhooks stay put. See Beefree alternatives and Stripo alternatives for builder prices.

What to move first, in order

1. Suppressions. Export blocks, bounces, invalid emails, spam reports and both unsubscribe types and import them into the new sender before anything else. SendGrid's suppression documentation says each attempt to mail a suppressed address uses a credit, and the new sender knows nothing about your history.
2. Domain authentication. Add the new sender's SPF and DKIM records alongside SendGrid's, so both can sign during the overlap. Do not remove the old records until the last message has gone.
3. Templates. Convert Handlebars variables such as {{name}} to the new syntax and re-test conditionals. SendGrid's dynamic template guide shows {{#if name}} blocks and {{#list items}} loops, which may have no direct match.
4. Webhooks. Re-point the event webhook that records opens, bounces and spam reports. Essentials includes 2, Pro 5, and the payload shape will differ at the new sender.
5. Dedicated IPs. If you rely on one, ask the new vendor about warm-up before you cut traffic over. SendGrid's feature list includes automated warm-up, and the replacement may not.
6. Traffic. Send a tenth of the volume through the new sender for a week, compare bounce and complaint rates in your own logs, then move the rest.

Stay if…

• You use Pro's dedicated IP, subusers or single sign-on, and nothing cheaper gives you the same bundle.
• Marketing Campaigns and the API share one login for a team that would not tolerate two vendors.
• Your volume sits at 50,000 to 100,000 emails, where Essentials at $19.95 to $34.95 is as cheap as any managed service in the table.