Share your experience using SendGrid

They provide the APIs. So either you can use their platform to send the emails, or you can use the APIs, and you can connect it with your existing EMS, your Email Marketing Software. With that connection, you can send emails through the APIs.

I work with multiple clients. Based on their needs, my company uses this product. Basically, it is for sending bulk emails to customers. It is a legit bulk email - not any kind of spam. SendGrid is pretty restrictive on that. We follow all the compliance requirements and send via SendGrid.

There are lots of things that are quite good with SendGrid as compared to other platforms. For example, it is very easy to set up, and it is very clean and simple to use. The email integration is fairly easy, and I can say it is reliable. 

It also allows you to implement services from other platforms as well. So you can have multiple things in a single place. We're using the API. They provide certain add-ons, like Azure add-ons. You can connect with Azure as well.

They have decent support in terms of any issues. 

They have a nice dashboard as well. It gives almost all information in a single place, and it is scalable.  

The reporting part needs improvement. They give us the reports on the dashboard, yet it is still very limited. In 2016, the reporting was straightforward. They have made some changes nowadays; however, they should be more comprehensive. We need to do a lot of manual work. After fetching the report, we have to do the data analysis by ourselves. It should be done by the platform.

It's been more than five years now. I started using the product in 2016 - more than five years ago.

The solution is stable and robust. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'd rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

Right now, I'm using two IPs (per sub-users), with ± one million sends per day. However, if the requirement is to send 10 million in the coming months. I can easily upgrade and scale it up and add more IPs.

Anyone related to the email delivery part would use the solution. Anywhere from 30 to 40 people are using the solution right now.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

Sometimes there are some gaps, so we have to wait for a longer period. Once we get a response, they end up solving issues very fast.

Positive

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. 

Their documentation is pretty good. If you go through that, you'll be able to easily set it up properly.

The first part of the deployment is a bit tricky. When you apply and fill in the signing form, they review it to see whether or not you are registered - which is a good thing since, nowadays, people are spamming a lot. 

If a spammer gets access to a platform like this, they will be able to send multiple emails, and it could harm people. That's why they do due diligence, and they would like to know your history, how you want to send the email to people and whether the people you are sending to signed up with you or not. If they find that you are a legit sender, then only they will approve your account. That's the part that takes some time. Once it is approved, then it hardly takes a single day or two to finish the rest of the setup.

I am a specialist, an MTA specialist, so I don't need anybody to help me with the setup or integration. I do it by myself.

They have different plans, like Essential Pro and Premier support. We are on the Pro plan. The basic plan starts at €90 per month. You can do add-ons. For example, the number of emails that you want to send could be one million or more than 1.5 million plus emails per month. You will maybe need to use more emails and need Premier support. They will let you know, based on your volume, what specific plan would work for you.

There are extra items you can buy to add to SendGrid. If we need to clean up the list we got from the Synapse pages, we can definitely clean it up. They have their own tool they provide that costs an extra amount.

For some accounts, we have been paying more than $1,000 a month, based on the volume that we are sending to. It's worth it based on the open rate that we get thanks to the infrastructure. They provide very good IPs, and their technical team is very good at implementing email. It's worth the money.

I'm a customer and end-user.

Our company decided to use this solution due to the fact that it's a stable and easy integration. Also, from the user perspective, when we talk about our email delivery people, they are not tech-savvy people. Therefore, if I ask them to do a complex configuration, they will get confused. However, this product makes everything very simple. At least with our platform, we did not face any issues. We followed the documentation and integrated it with our CRM. 

Apart from that, SendGrid provides lots of things within the tool. 

They have a feature called Auto Warmup IP, so we don't have to do it for every single client manually. We have the Auto Warmup feature enabled, and it will automatically warm up all the IPs. It also supports sub-user management. We can have 30 or 40 people working on the same thing and we can create multiple users and give them their own credentials to work on a separate account. It makes it very easy to track everybody to see who is doing what.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

John Abelardo Manangan II:

Within the first three years, I only used SendGrid for email sending and for the custom applications I made previously. There are transactional emails and some of the marketing parts in the first three years. Then I got a client that wanted to transition into using SendGrid because they have been using Klaviyo, which is expensive on their budget. I think in 2020, and then I asked them how they wanted to use SendGrid. They told me that they wanted to use the solution for their email marketing. Also, they are an e-commerce store. They have an e-commerce store, so they want all the transactional emails that are related to their customer orders, and order updates, they want to be integrated with SendGrid.

I used the solution with WordPress. It's easy to integrate the solution with WordPress. My supervisor asked me if maybe it's possible to segment the customers from each other because they have several stores. I recommend using a contact list. For each signup form, and each campaign they want, we make a separate contact list, and then they ask me to integrate this with custom coding.

The most valuable feature is the conditions in automation. At each interval, each email can have something like a condition if a certain contact matches the condition, it will proceed to send in the email under the automation.

The contact limit alerts need to be improved. The way that I see the limits and the way they implement the limit alerts in the current month will be billed on the next month and it's just not really accurate if you check on the alerts.

The data field of contacts can use improvement, they are just straight labels and values. It would be better if you have the option to add an object that can be added to the custom field of contact. It will be better to display something on the email templates, and then the conditioning or logic in the automation.

I have been using the solution for seven  years.

The solution is stable. I haven't encountered any downtime. Most of the time, the emails are sent properly, and then I can also see the email deliverability, and I can see the status of each email.

The solution is scalable and we send about 20,000 plus emails.

The solution has excellent technical support and I always contact them whenever I need to implement something that the client wants.

Positive

We switch to SendGrid to lessen the expense of the email solutions because we already tried Klaviyo and Amazon SES previously and they didn't work well. We always use the spam rate and the reports that SendGrid has.

The initial setup is easy. Actually, The deployment takes 10 minutes to one hour. It depends on the domain and the type of the domain. Most of the time, when you add a domain on SendGrid, it seems like it's real-time. I have no problem with it.

The deployment was completed in-house with the help of the SendGrid technical support team.

We are using the Advanced plan,10K. That is about $100 per month but sometimes we do go over the limit of the plan. The license is not based on the number of users.

I give the solution a seven out of ten because it is the most reliable email sending I have been using for the past few years, and seven also because there are some features that are not available in the SendGrid, but it is also seven because other competitors are more advanced or they have more tools to cater. A seven also because of the pricing. SendGrid is the most cost-effective solution that I have been using.

Using the solution in the first two years was okay because my client was using credit from SendGrid. They are a startup and it came from venture capital. They were granted credit and we made use of it. Once the credits were all exhausted, my client told me that we needed to adjust the budget for the plans on SendGrid, and this is where we have something to do with SendGrid. My client's website and stores have colossal traffic every day, so they have trouble with contacts exceeding the plan limit. They asked me to solve the contact issue with the alert level showing on the dashboard on SendGrid which is a little bit of a hassle to do for clients who don't want to upgrade their plan. I think SendGrid is not ready with the email marketing part because, unlike Klaviyo, which has a diagram that you can drag and drop what happens to an email, and then there is also conditioning. SendGrid is all plug-and-play. You can add something like an interval on each email. I think that's the SendGrid automation. You can just set which contact list to use for the automation. I think it's not really that possible with email marketing. I think the easiest way to work with SendGrid is with segmentation and the deeper filtering of the emails when you want to send to some customers that already have this, or already received their orders. Also in the filtering of different emails or contacts that have something like data that might be unique from each other contact. 

We are a startup company and all of our stores use SendGrid which is made up of three users.

If you are thinking of using the solution for the first time you can start with the SMTP if you are just testing. If you want to have a dedicated IP so that your emails can have almost 100% deliverability, you can sign up for their plan, and also buy the dedicated IP. If you want to automate the emails for your customers, I advise you to use the automation feature in SendGrid.