

Ask HN: How does Sendgrid stack up on deliverability vs. SES? - joshdotsmith

I've been a (mostly happy) user of Sendgrid for the last several months. As a startup, one of our big pain points is burn. And with Amazon's new SES, we're looking to spend 20x less on transactional emails than we're currently spending with Sendgrid. This seems like a no-brainer.<p>But before I make the switch, I'm wondering how SES compares to Sendgrid on deliverability. Sendgrid touts their credentials on getting emails delivered.<p>So how do they compare?
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ambirex
Since they announced it today, it is probably a little early to know how it
actually performs compared other services.

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joshdotsmith
Of course, though I was hoping to see a breakdown of what one offers over the
other in terms of deliverability. Actual performance is obviously asking too
much, but I don't understand the ins and outs of deliverability (whitelisting,
etc.) as much as others might. SendGrid may well offer certain services that
Amazon doesn't that are currently discernible from their documentation.

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joshdotsmith
By the way, I'm still having huge deliverability issues when using Sendgrid.
Emails sent to Gmail accounts go straight to spam. I'm still not sure how to
resolve that, and am hesitant to blame Sendgrid for the problem. We do, after
all, own a 15-year-old domain name.

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KimJangoMail
It's still early to tell, but we believe it is likely that they will struggle
with their deliverability. Delivery is as much an art as it is a science, and
it takes experience and constant focus to stay on top. I work for JangoSMTP
and we often have clients come to us from minimalist services similar to
Amazon SES because of their deliverability issues.

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saurik
(arguably offtopic) What made you choose SendGrid over competing services like
AuthSMTP?

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joshdotsmith
I have to admit that I had just done a bunch of searching around to see what
people said about solutions like AuthSMTP, and found more praise for SendGrid.
It was cheap, easy to set up, and they seem incredibly knowledgable about
deliverability.

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saurik
The concern I had is that SendGrid seemed to simply be "better at Web 2.0" and
therefore had more "hip web developers" talking about, whereas the few people
I found who tried to do objective deliverability comparisons seemed to always
favor AuthSMTP. SendGrid is also much cheaper, which again made me feel it was
difficult to trust simpler "Google fight" comparisons.

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saurik
(sidenote) I really wish users didn't get so critical of people and companies
who are, well, critical. Like, I'd really love to see "our opinion of our
competitors, no holds barred" right on these websites, so I can try to compare
something other than a lot of marketing copy or sketchily done third-party
statistics.

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Diegoterra
Hard to compare as I haven't tried SES. SendGrid works great. Love it.

