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Comment by unclebucknasty | Hacker News Reader

Recently opened a SendGrid account on their $14.95 tier for a new project and found the shared IP blocked by MS domains (outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com). MS servers confirmed the reason in the SMTP negotiaton as owed to the IP/provider.

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".

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You often pay for "good company" when you choose a more expensive provider. So the cheaper the provider the lower quality of their shared IP pool due to the type of customers they tend to have on the platform. The free tier lowers the customer quality even more. IF you are sending mission critical email then dedicated IP makes a lot of sense, but probably not at a huge price multiple mentioned for Sendgrid.

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.

>Amazon SES shared IP pool isn't better than Sendgrid or Mailgun...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.

Same story here, but being a Sendgrid customer for 6+ years, suddenly the shared IP is blocked as well. After opening a lot of support tickets and getting no response, I had to nag someone here in HN who mentioned working for Sendgrid, he escalated but the response was the same: pay a lot more to get what you used to have.

Migrated to Postmark right away and we've been a happy customer for 2+ years now.

Off topic: What does "he scaled" mean in this context?

I'd guess "escalated", meaning engaged someone higher up in the company with more authority.

Yeah, I'd used SendGrid's higher tier on other projects for years, as the send volume justified it. So, generally had the dedicated IP address.

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.

> Are they able to live up to that promise?

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

Thanks for the heads up. You guys do a good job on documentation. A little redundant on the marketing side, but overall very clear. That migration guide is very well-done/thorough.

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