SendGrid - Is It Okay to Stay on the Free API Tier?

[Joy Rex]

So to solve my email woes, I went ahead and signed up for SendGrid via the Community Enhancements section of the ACP on their Free tier.

All's been well, but I got a notice from SendGrid that my API was expiring and I would be limited to 100 emails per day, which should be fine for my site/usage.

Question is - is anyone else doing this, and what are the downsides (if any) of remaining on the free tier?

[IPCommerceFan]

What were your email woes, out of curiosity?

We had major email deliverability issues earlier this year, but solved them by fixing up our DMARC / DKIM settings with our hosting provider.

I ask because we also almost considered switching to a service like SendGrid.

[opentype]

57 minutes ago, Joy Rex said:

what are the downsides (if any) of remaining on the free tier?

Possibly a worse deliverability compared to not using an external service, since the IP is shared with other customers and you might get blacklisted for their newsletters or spam. 

[Joy Rex]

On 10/31/2019 at 12:26 PM, IPCommerceFan said:

What were your email woes, out of curiosity?

We had major email deliverability issues earlier this year, but solved them by fixing up our DMARC / DKIM settings with our hosting provider.

I ask because we also almost considered switching to a service like SendGrid.

That is exactly what I think our woes were - any outgoing email (validation emails, etc.) were disappearing down a black hole, and I didn't have the resources to learn/sort out the DMARC stuff so SendGrid seemed like a good alternative.

On 10/31/2019 at 12:41 PM, opentype said:

Possibly a worse deliverability compared to not using an external service, since the IP is shared with other customers and you might get blacklisted for their newsletters or spam. 

I'm not sure what you mean - I'm on SendGrid's free tier, and continue to be - why wouldn't it be the same (sans volume allowances) as their paid tiers?

[opentype]

31 minutes ago, Joy Rex said:

I'm not sure what you mean - I'm on SendGrid's free tier, and continue to be - why wouldn't it be the same (sans volume allowances) as their paid tiers?

The answer was in what you quoted already. “since the IP is shared with other customers and you might get blacklisted for their newsletters or spam.”

[IPCommerceFan]

Yeah, disappearing down a black hole is pretty much what was happening to our emails too.  

I think the big thing that worked for us was adding 'd=https://www.ourdomain.com' to our DKIM record.

We also signed up with mxtoolbox and have been using their DMARC monitoring services to keep an eye on things.  We are at 100% deliverability, and our reputation is about ~89--90% due to spoofers still sending bad emails that aren't actually from us.

For what its worth, this is what our records look like, with sensitive info changed or removed:

DKIM TXT record:

Quote

Host:
default._domainkey

TXT Value:
v=DKIM1; d=ourdomain.com; k=rsa; p=<key>;

TTL:
1 Hour

DMARC TXT record:

Quote

Host:
_dmarc

TXT Value:
v=DMARC1; p=none;

TTL:
1 Hour

The above could be useless to you, or could contain something that helps.  Hoping its the latter!
 

[Joy Rex]

19 hours ago, opentype said:

The answer was in what you quoted already. “since the IP is shared with other customers and you might get blacklisted for their newsletters or spam.”

Ah, okay - so you're saying that SendGrid's Free Tier has a shared IP used by all their Free customers, and if someone on there behaves badly (intentionally or not), it could affect everyone else. Gotcha.

[Lucas James]

1 hour ago, Joy Rex said:

SendGrid's Free Tier has a shared IP used by all their Free customers, and if someone on there behaves badly (intentionally or not), it could affect everyone else

Exactly. Refer: https://sendgrid.com/blog/shared-and-dedicated-ips-which-should-you-choose/

[Joy Rex]

On 11/4/2019 at 4:37 PM, IPCommerceFan said:

Yeah, disappearing down a black hole is pretty much what was happening to our emails too.  

I think the big thing that worked for us was adding 'd=https://www.ourdomain.com' to our DKIM record.

We also signed up with mxtoolbox and have been using their DMARC monitoring services to keep an eye on things.  We are at 100% deliverability, and our reputation is about ~89--90% due to spoofers still sending bad emails that aren't actually from us.

For what its worth, this is what our records look like, with sensitive info changed or removed:

DKIM TXT record:

DMARC TXT record:

The above could be useless to you, or could contain something that helps.  Hoping its the latter!
 

This is super helpful - thanks - I might implement this and then stop using SendGrid (if this solves my email woes I had previously).