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Comment by ejwcom | Hacker News Reader

This was a good response, if a little arrogant. But they have a right to be arrogant. SendGrid is an amazing story. The execution has been exciting to watch from afar. A great example. I have been a customer since they launched.

My issue is the pricing model, where you pay for 50k (or whatever) emails "per month" but don't get them. If I send 45k one month, and then 55k the next, I have to pay more for those extra 5k emails. I will pay a premium for a premium service, but this is irritating. Irritating enough that I have been monitoring the space waiting for a viable competitor. And with this policy, they are certainly not earning any loyalty on my part. I would leave in a heartbeat.

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Have you checked out our "pay for what you use" model at http://postmarkapp.com?

For sure. Definitely aware of it.

Postmark do not allow bulk email, such as newsletters, and hence are not a comparable product.

There's a reason for that - ISPs throttle delivery based on message type - bulk vs. transactional. We work very hard to make sure that transactional emails have NO reason to fail to be delivered, or even delayed. By allowing bulk sending, your message is likely to get through eventually - but it might end up behind a several hundred thousand/million message bulk email queue - meaning that your customers' "forgot password" email or account verification message could take hours to show up. For our customers, that's simply not acceptable.

We've got 5+ years of experience with our bulk email service, Newsberry, to back this up. Not only are our IP reputations carefully monitored and maintained, but we keep bulk and transactional as far away from each other as we can because they're treated SO differently by ISPs.

I've been sending both transactional and bulk email using SendGrid. If I understand you correctly the only downside to that approach is that transactional email may be delayed because it is coming from an IP that also sends bulk email?

I was aware of Newsberry, but I still think that it is not comparable to SendGrid.

Even when we concentrate on bulk email, on one hand there is Newsberry, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, etc. And on the other are SendGrid, AuthSMTP, and now Amazon. The former provide an all inclusive solution: WYSIWG editing, templates, subscriber management, analytics, etc. while the latter are an order of magnitude cheaper, but offer a bare-bones solution that doesn't have much in the form of niceties and UI.

SendGrid is somewhere in the middle actually (and so is their pricing). They have analytics (and subscriber management if you wish) and even a crude UI where you can define email campaigns and newsletter templates (although clearly not their core business.) These feature put them above and beyond AuthSMTP which is basically an SMTP server. If Amazon has per campaign analytics (from my very brief look they do), then SendGrid should really be shacking in their boots, because Amazon has just undercut them big time without compromising on core competencies.

We certainly didn't mean to come across as arrogant - just confident. While your frustration on the pricing structure is understandable/reasonable, we don't have immediate plans to make significant changes. If there is anything else we can do to earn your loyalty, we'd be grateful to hear what it is.

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