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17 Comments

SendGrid Free Plan

Hi IndieHackers,

I am currently using the SendGrid free plan (100 daily emails) since my site does not get a lot of traffic. When I log in to SendGrid, I get a red banner telling me that I have used all 100 daily emails. However, in Settings > Account Details > Your Products, it tells me that I have sent 61 emails today. Under Statistics > Overview it tells me that no emails have been sent today (which is true).

I have opened a support ticket with SendGrid on 12 October 2020 but the ticket has been degraded and I have not received an answer yet. Did any of you have the same problem with SendGrid? Am I missing something regarding the way SendGrid counts these emails? Thanks for any pointers.

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    A solution I had success with was applying for their Sendgrid for startups program. Got a ton of free credits via that. 👍👍

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      I have applied for the Twilio SendGrid Startups Program a few days ago and have been approved today. I got approved for credit worth $849.95 per month for 12 months. I won't be able to use all these credits in the next 12 months but at least I don't have to worry about paying for transactional emails.

      For anyone interested, here is where I signed up for their program:
      https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfcc7bGIqosjJ-vWdSi4iFW2oQ_lcCQh9JXNpREXPCkFBssRw/viewform
      or https://sendgrid.com/accelerate/

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    I'd recommend calling Twilio's Sales desk until you connect with a human being. Ask them to escalate your SG ticket to a P0 / high priority item on your behalf, and keep them on the line until the priority is updated on your end. Someone from SendGrid should respond within 24h.

    I have to go through this exercise whenever I encounter issues with SendGrid. Twilio cares more about customers than SG, so you can use that Twilio culture to drive progress with SG issues. SG customer service is probably tuned to whales / enterprise clients.

    I'd also track deliverability and prepare to upgrade to Premium whenever deliverability becomes a priority. Had issues with outlook / hotmail addresses until I bit the bullet and got a dedicated IP.

    If anyone finds an easy alternative with solid .NET SDK and analytics, I'm eager to switch!

    1. 1

      I will try this. Thanks for this great trick.

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    I left sendgrid in favor of mailgun.
    Sendgrid support is pretty bad, so I figured it was worth it

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      This comment was deleted a year ago.

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        Why did you leave MailGun in favor of SendGrid? MailGun's pay-as-you-go plan with the first three months for free seems pretty decent for my case.

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          Seconding what @Primer said. I'm getting ready to switch from Mailgun to SendGrid because of the developer experience. They've been eroding features from the free/cheap tier, it's hard to remember where things are in the UI, and the API and language bindings are pretty rough. Last I checked, their NodeJS docs point to a third-party library that's mostly unmaintained.

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          This comment was deleted a year ago.

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            That is so true. Even as a complete programming beginner I was able to setup SendGrid in a few minutes.

            As far as MailGun is concerned, I was a bit overwhelmed with all this domain and DNS stuff you have to do before sending emails. I just stopped with my onboarding process for MailGun as I didn't have that much time and today got approved for the Twilio SendGrid Startups Program. So I will be staying with SendGrid of course.

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    Hey Mathias,

    Would you be interested in joining Pigeon Post's closed beta? We have a significantly more generous free tier (1000 emails a month for free) and we only allow transactional emails so our IP reputation is extremely high.

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      Thanks for the offer. I was approved for the SendGrid Startups Program so I will keep using SendGrid. Checked out your service but your documentation link does not seem to be working: https://docs.pigeonpost.io/

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    I had lots of issues with the free plan, support and deliverability were much better once I upgraded to a paid plan.

    In general though , I’ve had less issues with mailgun.

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    SendGrid's free tier appears to be suffering from various issues recently. I had major problems with mail getting spam flagged just because the cloud instance SendGrid used for sending was on an IP already included in major spam block lists.

    Switched to MailJet and haven't looked back.

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      Didn't have any of these issues so far but I don't have many emails being sent yet so it's probably hard to say.

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    Been noticing the same thing for a few months now. I think the value is actually the monthly value.

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      Ah okay thats weird. Will check if it resets next month.

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    I have been seeing the same recently. I haven't sent any emails so it is definitely a bug!

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      Maybe a "bug" to get us to upgrade to a paid plan. It does not work.

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