Comment by pipnonsense | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pipnonsense | Hacker News Reader

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I hope their customer support continues to be good.

I had a hit on HN with a side-project last year [0]. It delivers public domain books in chapters to your email. So I was needing to send over 1,000 emails a day from day one basically.

I initially used SendGrid for my project, but SendGrid's free trial had a limit of 100 emails a day. Well, I just needed to upgrade, right? Wrong. Sendgrid had a rule where it was impossible to upgrade from the free trial until the trial period was over. So 90% of my emails were not being delivered because I wasn't in a paid plan and I couldn't upgrade to a paid plan.

The worst part is that it wasn't very straightforward to understand I was in that catch 22. It took me about 4 or 5 days of sending their customer support messages and them taking too long to reply and not being very clear in their replies to understand the whole issue. And even proving that my traffic was legit (the HN post was enough evidence that I was not sending spam I think) was not enough for them to allow me to upgrade.

So I immediately changed to MailGun. They had similar worries about a new account with significant email traffic, but I sent an email to customer support right after signing up, they replied in an hour or so already allowing me to upgrade. Never had an issue with MailGun and I am very happy with their tech and service.

I am now creating a business on top of email delivery and staying with them. Hope this acquisition doesn't change much in that front.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752

> I initially used SendGrid for my project, but SendGrid's free trial had a limit of 100 emails a day. Well, I just needed to upgrade, right? Wrong. Sendgrid had a rule where it was impossible to upgrade from the free trial until the trial period was over. So 90% of my emails were not being delivered because I wasn't in a paid plan and I couldn't upgrade to a paid plan.

I feel like there's a business lesson in there somewhere, but can't quite put my finger on it.

“Never get in the way of someone wanting to give you money”

SendGrid was still right imo, and I hate shitty customer service. What they could've done better is explain that $$$ for sending @1000 emails/day isn't worth sidestepping procedures which are wholly designed to stop spammers that can have %% impact on bottom line by degrading email IP reputations.

Sorry for the winded explanation. I think the gist is there.

Sendgrid took the time to go back and forth and ended up doing nothing. Why not spend that time vetting the legitimacy of the emails?

That's my biggest issue.

One day at the front page of HN of a single page where the only thing you can do is sign up to receive emails is enough to justify 1,000 emails a day IMO. Without knowing anything else, I think the customer support person that took the time to reply me a few times to explain the issue, could have made the decision that likelihood of my service being spam is ~0%.

edit: that's exactly what they did at Mailgun btw. The first reply came with a "I'll need to check with other team". Hours later, without any followup from me, came the second reply with "Thanks for providing the information. We have removed the limitations to your account." (copied pasted). Excellent execution in both getting the account and keeping the risk of delivering spam through their service very low. Compare this to Sendgrid, with three or four cryptic replies, and a lost account.

Check Amplitude's CEO HN thread about what drove the success of the company to the IPO. Among other things, making it easy/free for small companies to use Amplitude, even though their sole business model was to aim at big corporate accounts. For a few small companies that would turn into big corporate accounts or that were acquired by big corporations that would then adopt Amplitude and become big corporate accounts.

I think it would make strategic sense for SendGrid to greenlight my account. It was not a sensible, necessary anti-spam policy IMO, it was just poor execution.

> making it easy/free for small companies to use Amplitude, even though their sole business model was to aim at big corporate accounts. For a few small companies that would turn into big corporate accounts or that were acquired by big corporations that would then adopt Amplitude and become big corporate accounts

I'm glad you shared that, because I've been all but completely against free trials lately. The advice is model dependent, but you've definitely made me think twice about considering free/low-cost options when I would've otherwise completely discounted the ideas due to the usual headaches(spam, abuse, etc).

It never ceases to be amazing how often I have to bite my tongue and not say that during meetings.

Someone wants to give us money, for our product, at a price that will make us a profit. Let them.

Every once in a while that profit will come at a large opportunity cost - so you can't commit freely to every such offering... but yea if you find yourself frequently turning down opportunities like this then you need to examine why your business direction doesn't seem to match customer needs.

Ghost just won't let users upgrade from a complimentary plan right now and it's _maddening_ because I had to comp a bunch of people who would probably be happy to pay me if it wasn't a hassle, because of a billing error.

I wish more businesses knew this lesson :(

Have you tried https://sendwithses.com or https://sendy.co/ ?

It's not the same as what Mailgun does. Mailgun lets you send emails programmatically. Sendy/Sendwithses lets you send campaigns from an interface (using your SES).

I changed at the time to Mailgun and I am happy there, so not looking into other options for now.

But at the time I look at those and preferred a solution with less upfront configuration required and less things to manage in general. It was a side-project that required a very quick solution. Mailgun was perfect for this.

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