A SendGrid alternative
without your own infrastructure

SendGrid solves a problem of scale: millions of messages, its own address pools, delivery analytics. Its complexity is the price of that scale. If you send hundreds rather than millions, you pay for it for nothing and take on someone else's job as well: the reputation of a sending domain and of shared IPs.

Other services change their features and pricing — check their own sites before deciding.

About shared IPs

On a shared pool, reputation is the sum of everyone sitting on it. A neighbour gets blocked and your delivery sags too, though you changed nothing. A dedicated IP fixes that, but it needs weeks of warmup and a steady volume, or it performs worse than a shared one.

Sending from your own Gmail does not have this problem at all: you build the address's reputation yourself and share it with nobody. In exchange you get a hard daily ceiling that money cannot lift.

When moving makes sense

• Campaigns to your own list — customers, subscribers, attendees — rather than transactional mail from code.
• It matters that the recipient sees a real address and can simply reply.
• You would rather not own a sending domain, its warmup and pool reputation.
• The list lives in a Google Sheet and is edited by hand.

When it will not fit

• Product mail: receipts, codes, notifications. They need delivery with no human involved and no daily ceiling.
• More than a couple of thousand messages a day — Gmail's quota will not take it.
• You need designed templates from a builder, A/B tests and deep delivery analytics.
• The mail is sent by server code, not by a person in an app.

What is the same: deliverability

No service beats a spam filter on its own. The same things work everywhere: List-Unsubscribe with one-click opt-out, an honest list, a steady pace and a low complaint rate. The only difference is who is responsible for them. See staying out of spam and, for what Gmail and Yahoo require, the page on SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Other comparisons