Several years ago, the customer service got worse, and the fixes / solutions stopped coming. I don't hold my breath that this (or any other issue) will be solved any time soon sadly.
What service do HN recommend these days?
Postmark does have a lower $10/mo starting price for 10k emails per month. But the next jump is $50/mo for 50k emails.
I'm currently working on a project and intended to use SendGrid, so I'm wondering if there's any benefits of Postmark.
We reported it to SendGrid and their only option was to upgrade to their $89.95 plan to get a dedicated IP. That plan comes with 100K monthly sends and we are nowhere near that.
So, the choice was to have a significant portion of important transactional emails, like registration, not go through or overpay for a plan that is wildly overmatched for us.
Email is hard, but this borders on unethical. Customers pay for and integrate a service that simply doesn't work as advertised. They make no offer to mitigate (e.g. change to a new shared IP). It's just "oh yeah, if you want the service to actually work reliably, you need to pay us 6X more".
Amazon SES shared IP pool isn't better than Sendgrid or Mailgun but their dedicated IPs are only $25/month. If your volume is low that might be the only cost since they offer 62k/month completely free and after that it's $0.1 per 1000 emails.
Unfortunately not a lot of providers offer dedicated IP option on lower level plans.
I think the main problem I have with SendGrid here is that they knowingly offer a paid product with such abysmal shared IP deliverability out of the gate, then offer no meaningful mitigation except to upgrade to a plan that includes the dedicated IP at a 6X premium, along with features many customers don't need (primarily send volume). Many customers will say "that's overkill, I don't need that send volume".
Very much a bait-and-switch feel to it. If they're going to offer the lower cost plans, then they need to be forthcoming about the disparity in deliverability. Instead, they say vague things like "own your reputation with a dedicated IP", when the truth is actually "12%-15% of your emails may suddenly stop being delivered unless you choose a dedicated IP plan".
Publish metrics and let people choose.
Migrated to Postmark right away and we've been a happy customer for 2+ years now.
They need to do a better job of managing their shared IP pool. As it is, they are offering paid plans that are unsuitable for many common use cases. Really, unless you have control of all possible receiving domains (e.g you're using it for an internal app), you're rolling the dice.
Else, at a minimum, they should disclose deliverability metrics on their various plans so customers can make informed choices. As it is, their marketing is deliberately misleading.
Thanks for the feedback on Postmark. I'll have another look at them.
EDIT: Just glanced at Postmark and they're already looking much stronger than SendGrid, and with much better pricing. The "deliverability without a dedicated IP" language seems to be directly aimed at providers like SendGrid. Are they able to live up to that promise?
Also like their policy around content retention.
Will be exploring switching costs.
Postmark product manager here, so I'm a little biased but... yes we are! You can see our Time To Inbox stats on our status page: https://status.postmarkapp.com/
We also have a handy migration guide here: https://postmarkapp.com/migration-guides/sendgrid
I use Postmark for everything that is very important that it gets through. I actually use mailgun for mass emails, marketing, announcements, etc.
Sendgrid is not friendly.
Before being acquired, SG's support was fantastic. There are also various oddities that have cropped up, such as how they're currently hitting our webhook endpoint with the same event every 20 seconds for the past 8 days (a similar problem occurred last year too). They also seem to have suffered some dings to their IP reputation in numerous places due to, I assume, this: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-fro... .. I continue to encounter numerous systems that flat out refuse any email from any IP I can muster at Sendgrid and we have a bunch on different subnets. So anyone who works at Red Hat, Packt, Akqa, Zendesk, etc.. they're not getting our mail.
We use Postmark as a fallback for users when we get the inevitable error messages back, and they have been pretty good, although I find their API a little too slow to move everything over to them and SG has a fantastic "delayed send" feature which is a must for deliverability to iCloud addresses.
Pragmatically I prefer Sendgrid, but Postmark is very good and feels somewhat more wholesome to use, particularly if your levels are low. I'd use Postmark for the same reason I'd rather use a local bakery than buy presliced at a supermarket.
Postmark product manager here... I'd love to know more about this. We publish our API response times on our status page (https://status.postmarkapp.com/), so this is a surprising comment. Can you email support@postmarkapp.com with your account details and we'll look into this for you?
Our email system is custom and does all of its own merging on a per subscriber basis, so we send a distinct request for every email, so even an otherwise minor difference between a 30ms and 85ms round trip "feels" slow at scale. I believe PM has a "batch" call available, but this requires some extra dev time at our end if it would resolve our issues (and it may!)
I will get in touch, though, in case there are ways to help mitigate this problem or if the batch mechanism will solve it all. We have previously encountered similar performance issues with SG from time to time due to DNS sending us to unsuitable endpoints, etc. so it can be a universal problem to some extent based on how we've approached the problem.
(Edit: Actually, that status page maybe demonstrates what I'm talking about, since the average API response time shown is 437ms. Even with 5 concurrent threads that would take 2.42 hrs to send 100,000 emails - so I am guessing the batch API is the way to go with PM :-))
I am not familiar with products mentioned above but SendGrid is often discussed as a source of spoofed messages. They allow sending as 3rd party domains, or at least allowed it until recently. I suspect that this may be affecting their deliverability.
On the other hand, postmark is a bit more flaky - I track delivery RTT and had had a few cases in my first year with them where Postmark had > 30m delays (and no outage reported). Sendgrid has always been bombproof on delivery times over many years of usage.
I still prefer Postmark on balance.
Postmark product manager here... I'd love to know more about this. We publish our Time To Inbox on our status page: https://status.postmarkapp.com/
The only time emails might sit for longer than a few seconds is if there is some issue with the account (such a accidental spam being sent due to form abuse). If you have specific examples, can you please email support@postmarkapp.com and we'll look into it for you?
Sometimes for SAAS products with a huge userbase or freemium pricing model is super difficult to keep the bounce rate so low for transactional emails.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channe... [2] https://postmarkapp.com/support/article/1137-servers-faq
Natural email decay rate is 2-3% per month so the goal is to stay close to this range, but the lower the better.
I wish Cloudflare would launch an email API service, seems a good fit for them.
Looks like they were recently aquired by another company trying to compete with Twilio. So maybe things will improve?
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/30/sinch-acquires-pathwire-th...
The company I work for was bought by PE. Within weeks, most our hireable people left. Perhaps they were scared, perhaps they've seen it before, who knows. Some good people stay, but usually the comfortable ones, not the ones changing the world. How do I know, because I consider myself one of the competent comfortable ones, just being honest. But I'm leaving this year, it weighs on your soul. I barely do anything. At first it sounds like a dream, then you realize you're bored, not learning, and not working your brain.
Then, those useless asskissers you assumed wouldn't last long rise like cream to the top. They have no idea what they are doing, but are good at placating, and take positions of power.
From my perspective, it's easy to think PE people are dumb to let that happen. Maybe they are. Or maybe they don't care. Or maybe they are smart because they know these placaters will help 'sell' the company when it comes time to dump it. Make no mistake. PE exists to dump your company on some sucker.
What really sold me personally as a bootstrapper was how they offer initial credit for their services to help get going.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/01/mailgun-changes-hands-agai...