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Comment by richwater | Hacker News Reader

> Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects.

With a pricing structure like that it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam. Unfortunately I don't blame them.

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$10/year for 10,000 messages/year is 10 cents per message. (Or some other volume at 10 cents/message.) Surely too high for spammers but cheap enough for an app with a low message volume.

It's not about optimizing for low volume side projects.

Barrier to entry for (12 * $20) is much higher than $10/year and they figure that was worth the tradeoff of losing small fish customers.

Well, I was responding to your claim that "it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam" is the reason for killing their low-volume free tier. It's a different story if they dropped the free tier to focus on large-volume customers.

$10/year for 10,000 messages is a tenth of a penny per message

isn't this done automatically?

Sure, and then the spammers figure out how to fool the checks. And sendgrid has to figure out how to detect the new and improved spammers. Then the spammers figure out how to fool the new and improved checks... and so on.

The part where sendgrid has to keep figuring out how to make new and improved validation is expensive.

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