SendGrid – Reliable Email Delivery for Businesses

Making sure important emails are getting through to their intended recipients is of the utmost importance to all entrepreneurs – and especially web-application developers – since confirmation emails, friend requests, and shipment notifications that get stuck in spam folders can make even the best web-app seem unreliable. SendGrid offers an online email infrastructure that promises to put an end to undelivered emails, once and for all.

Few small business owners can afford to pay for the servers and email delivery experts required to prevent their messages from being marked as spam, even though they understand how important email delivery is to their companies. If you’re one of these entrepreneurs, then you can replace your current email infrastructure with SendGrid and let the web-app handle all the technical challenges related to ISP monitoring, domain keys, SPF, and feedback loops. After signing up for an account, you’ll get a cloud-based SMTP email infrastructure and a dedicated IP address. Within minutes, you can integrate with SendGrid’s API via an SMTP relay and feel secure knowing your important transactional emails aren’t getting lost or blocked before they reach their intended recipients.

To help you feel even more secure about the performance of your emails, SendGrid provides you with real-time analytic tools that track clicks, unsubscribe requests, spam reports, and bounce rates. The application will automatically adjust as your email volumes change over time, to make sure your email infrastructure is always working at optimal capacity.

Practical Uses:

• Send email confirmations to people who download your mobile app
• Make sure the shipment confirmations you send out are going through
• Cut down on the number of marketing emails that get stuck in your subscribers’ spam folders
• Ensure friend notifications are reaching your users’ inboxes

Insider Tips:

• SendGrid users get unique IP addresses
• Separate email campaigns can be categorized and tracked on their own
• SendGrid users can choose from an SMTP API, Web API, or Event API
• Businesses with High Volume plans get access to dedicated account managers

What we liked:

• Thousands of popular web-apps are already using SendGrid’s technology
• Developers can save money by using SendGrid, rather than purchasing their own servers
• Businesses can get access to real-time email analytics
• SendGrid customer service reps are available by phone, email, or online chat

What we didn’t like:

• Smaller businesses with Bronze and Lite plans don’t get access to spam filter testing and a handful of other useful features

Alternatives:

• Dyn – http://dyn.com
• Elastic Email – http://elasticemail.com
• Mailjet – http://www.mailjet.com

Company Info:

• Launched: December 2009
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Boulder, Colorado
• Founded by: Isaac Saldana, Tim Jenkins, and Jose Lopez
• Web site: http://sendgrid.com

Costs:

• Pricing plans range from $9.95 to $399.95 per month