Ask HN: Did Twilio abandon SendGrid? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did Twilio abandon SendGrid?

25 pointsleros19 comments

I've been using SendGrid for many years and it's always been a reliable solution. It still seems to be work just fine, but it feels abandoned.

Somewhere around a year ago, they put all old accounts under review with no communication about it.

There is a help article about it that says to contact customer service, but their customer service site is broken. For me at least, it has two different headers at the top of the page. One header shows me logged in and one shows me logged out. The button to contact customer service is disabled because I'm "logged out", but logging in via the "Sign out" link in the header that shows I'm logged out takes me back to the page in the same state.

I've tried several ways to reach customer service to no avail.

I've been reading around and it seems like other people are having the same experience.

Did Twilio just abandon SendGrid? I always thought SendGrid was a major player in the email space so it seems odd to see it in this state.

Super curious if you're evaluating options what you're finding on the market we (hedra.com) are evaluating options right now and the cost is astronomical when you go above 500,000 contacts. We're exploring Brevo (FKA sendinblue which allows unlimited contacts) vs. Salesforce.

I'm using this just for transactional emails. I have another solution for marketing emails.

I was using SendGrid's WYSIWYG templates for many emails, but I'm re-doing them in my own code so that I can more easily change providers in the future. I'll just need the ability to send HTML emails.

I'm trying out MailTrap.

If you are looking for just the visual email template builder part, check out EmailBuilder.js (https://github.com/usewaypoint/email-builder-js) - it's a free and open-source builder that also has a hosted playground.

I'm staying away from visual builders. I don't want to get locked into another solution.

Would you be willing to share your requirements?

tbh as a Twilio user I sometimes wonder whether they abandoned Twilio itself (SMS/Calls)

Me too. Was there some regulatory change that makes spraying SMS more difficult? It'd be great to hear from someone that works there or at Vonage which sees to have suffered the same fate.

There are some new 10DLC self-regulations coming down the pipes. The cell carriers and “demanding” action on spam SMS and instead of letting the FCC get involved, they all said “hey, we can do this ourselves!” And The Campaign Registry was born, and along with it 10DLC. Starting December 1 at the latest (some are Sept 1) cell carriers won’t accept non-10DLC SMS traffic to ingress into their networks. The 10DLC registration process includes setting up and verifying your “Brand” (company) and “Campaign” (what you’re doing with SMS). A large part of it is proving you have end user permission for SMS, opt in and opt out information, privacy policy, and the like. Once all of that is done, it goes to the provider where your DIDs are attached to the Campaign. Now, can’t wait to see how all this works in practice!

There are new rules and regulations in 2024.

https://clerk.chat/blog/tcpa-compliance/

We had to switch off Twilio for our integration and move to another provider that came with its own set of issues.

Which provider did you switch to?

Not the person you’re replying to but the company I work for switched to Bandwidth.com as our SMS/Voice provider.

To call Twilio’s 10DLC handling “incompetent” would be a major understatement. In general Twilio was horrible to work with, we’d jump through all their hoops and they’d still block our messages randomly.

If they only diversified to reduce their risk, by doing something like buying an email platform.

Oh interesting. Is Twilio suffering overall? I've Twilio for SMS in the past. I just assumed they were a rock-solid company.

Twilio still is rock solid IMO. The issue is when sprint and T-Mobile merged as well as the backlash from the carriers dealing stir shaken. They rushed to create the campaign registry. It’s effectively made many normal sms use cases nearly impossible. What’s happened is the industry is being bogged down in regulations self imposed and directed by the feds

I'm also a long-time (8+ year) Sendgrid user, and my accounts (one main account, 3 sub-accounts) were not put under review. I haven't needed customer support any time recently so I can't speak to that.

Interesting. My account is 4 years old.

I think they've simply continued going up market and care less about smaller players.

If you are looking for transactional emails with a tightly integrated template builder, check out Waypoint. We're an alternative and have some different approaches: https://www.usewaypoint.com/compare/sendgrid-email-api-alter...

We switched to Postmark after they froze our account without notice. Best decision we made

I had to check your post history to see if you are my coworker because we had the exact same experience.

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