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Moving from sendgrid legacy to new subscription
Bought a new subscription from AWS marketplace but was never able to setup/configure the new subscription. The "click here to setup your account" always failed on the sso login, and nobody was able to resolve this. Ended up buying a new subscription from outside AWS marketplace and migrating all our templates etc.
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Does not include SSO
If you have are after SSO, do not use the reseller program. Sendgrid informed me, after I registered, that it was not available to resellers"
Shutdown the service after two years just because 9 mails in a week
What do you like best about the product?
Price and being an standard on lots of integrations.
What do you dislike about the product?
I have been using Sendgrid for years, since long before Twilio bought it. When twilio bought it, we started with bullshit, that insistence of theirs to force you to use 2FA, the "security" yes or yes and an interface that was getting more obsolete every day.
I also had my scares due to traffic peaks that I found difficult to analyze where they came from, but because of laziness I didn't change the service since I used it in dozens of places.
The last straw was when overnight (early Monday morning) they cut my service due to "malicious traffic from my endpoints", and asking me to fill out a super-exhaustive report, more than a dozen questions, to restore the service and all this, with response times to the incident of several days, meanwhile, everything stopped. That means, literaly, all my webs and services without being able to send emails.
Talking to their support, they told me that it is normal, that they had seen that one of my websites had probably been breached, and that at such a signal they would cut to the chase.
We are talking about less than a dozen emails in a week, in a contracted service of 50,000 emails per month, sometimes with peaks of 80-90k per month.
Obviously, I contracted another service, and once I got over the laziness of having to configure 22 endpoints again, I won't go back to Sendgrid even if they pay me.
The new service has a much more useful interface if any endpoint is used to send SPAM, and if so I will remove it and solve the problem.
I won't say the name of the service, it is also one of the best known, but I don't want to advertise it for free.
I also had my scares due to traffic peaks that I found difficult to analyze where they came from, but because of laziness I didn't change the service since I used it in dozens of places.
The last straw was when overnight (early Monday morning) they cut my service due to "malicious traffic from my endpoints", and asking me to fill out a super-exhaustive report, more than a dozen questions, to restore the service and all this, with response times to the incident of several days, meanwhile, everything stopped. That means, literaly, all my webs and services without being able to send emails.
Talking to their support, they told me that it is normal, that they had seen that one of my websites had probably been breached, and that at such a signal they would cut to the chase.
We are talking about less than a dozen emails in a week, in a contracted service of 50,000 emails per month, sometimes with peaks of 80-90k per month.
Obviously, I contracted another service, and once I got over the laziness of having to configure 22 endpoints again, I won't go back to Sendgrid even if they pay me.
The new service has a much more useful interface if any endpoint is used to send SPAM, and if so I will remove it and solve the problem.
I won't say the name of the service, it is also one of the best known, but I don't want to advertise it for free.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Sendind email from API, web applications and other distributed endpoints.
Sendgrid started as a livesaver, these days it sucks 80% of our time and causes a LOT of grey hair
What do you like best about the product?
It's a powerful platform that powers email infrastructure for our app notifications and other key functionality. In theory it could help us move more quickly by editing email templates instead of manually coding notifications.
What do you dislike about the product?
Maybe worst support I've ever experienced in a SaaS company. They changed the way they share data with us - by the way Sendgrid, it's OUR DATA! How can you tell clients using your system that we can't see opens/clicks for certain emails when that's exactly what we pay you for! We've literally reached out telling them we'd pay for support and nobody responds. Sendgrid must have hired their support team and structured their org around the DMV. We are miserable and the only reason we haven't left is bc we have to work through other key projects first.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
In app notifications & customer facing functionality
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Stay away! Don't build an app around them unless you want massive headaches down the line.
Good monitoring but expensive and no IP reputation protection.
What do you like best about the product?
Good reporting export and activity data.
What do you dislike about the product?
Reputation protection is non existent .
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Wanted reliable transactional emails to reach our customers inboxes while making sure our email sending was monitored effectively to protect our IP and Domain reputation.
Sendgrid is providing a similar set of features from other transactional email providers at a premium cost compared to other providers. We get good access to download historical data to use in our own app, and they have a clean, limited functional dashboard.
Where they failed is when we did get exploited when someone hijacked our email script. The exploiter was able to send off more than 400K in emails through our mailscript before any protections kicked in by Sendmail. Our account typically delivers 1000 transactional emails a day, so for any type of reputation protection kick in until 4000 X our daily average went out within 3 hours means they really don't provide any reputation protection. Once they did finally stop queuing the emails, they were unable to remove the emails that had made it through (but not sent yet) to their deferral queue. So we were stuck for the next 72 hours while their servers tried to send spam emails under our account (350k of them) domain. Even though we knew they were bad emails and were already identified. So our IP reputation went from a perfect 100% to 20% over 4 days. Now most of our emails go to junk and we have to start with a brand new IP and rebuild our reputation over the next 6 months.
Sendgrid told us it was our responsibility to monitor traffic and that they had notification tools (which we had implemented but didn't notify us of the unusual traffic until it was too late - very limited notification like "you've reached 50% of your monthly quota". Pretty useless when this notification gets sent at 2am on a Sunday).
In short, they do not have the capabilities nor consider it their responsibility to protect your IP or Domain reputation.
1. They do not stop a send attack until your reputation has been damaged beyond rehabilitation (pausing sending emails at 10X our daily average to wait for our approval would have stopped this issue immediately).
2. They have no way to stop emails in their deferral queue even though they have been identified as fraudulent (we watched at these known emails took our rep down from 55% to 20% even though we knew they needed to be deleted).
3. They do not see this as their responsibility.
Almost all other transactional mail service providers have the ability to add in hard caps to daily email limits and much quicker technical triggers to catch unusual sending activity (most would have caught it before 10000 emails were sent from our IP, instead of waiting until 400000 were queued and sent).
Sendgrid is providing a similar set of features from other transactional email providers at a premium cost compared to other providers. We get good access to download historical data to use in our own app, and they have a clean, limited functional dashboard.
Where they failed is when we did get exploited when someone hijacked our email script. The exploiter was able to send off more than 400K in emails through our mailscript before any protections kicked in by Sendmail. Our account typically delivers 1000 transactional emails a day, so for any type of reputation protection kick in until 4000 X our daily average went out within 3 hours means they really don't provide any reputation protection. Once they did finally stop queuing the emails, they were unable to remove the emails that had made it through (but not sent yet) to their deferral queue. So we were stuck for the next 72 hours while their servers tried to send spam emails under our account (350k of them) domain. Even though we knew they were bad emails and were already identified. So our IP reputation went from a perfect 100% to 20% over 4 days. Now most of our emails go to junk and we have to start with a brand new IP and rebuild our reputation over the next 6 months.
Sendgrid told us it was our responsibility to monitor traffic and that they had notification tools (which we had implemented but didn't notify us of the unusual traffic until it was too late - very limited notification like "you've reached 50% of your monthly quota". Pretty useless when this notification gets sent at 2am on a Sunday).
In short, they do not have the capabilities nor consider it their responsibility to protect your IP or Domain reputation.
1. They do not stop a send attack until your reputation has been damaged beyond rehabilitation (pausing sending emails at 10X our daily average to wait for our approval would have stopped this issue immediately).
2. They have no way to stop emails in their deferral queue even though they have been identified as fraudulent (we watched at these known emails took our rep down from 55% to 20% even though we knew they needed to be deleted).
3. They do not see this as their responsibility.
Almost all other transactional mail service providers have the ability to add in hard caps to daily email limits and much quicker technical triggers to catch unusual sending activity (most would have caught it before 10000 emails were sent from our IP, instead of waiting until 400000 were queued and sent).
Recommendations to others considering the product:
The API is easy to implement and the data export and reporting are clear and useful. The help documentation is weak. The monitoring to protect your IP and Domain Reputation is non-existent so you better make sure you eliminate any exploits possible to your endpoints that access your sendgrid account. Sendgrid does not have the self service monitoring tools to effectively identify and/or stop an attack before the damage to your reputation has been done.
Not on par with the competition
What do you like best about the product?
Nothing that I liked particularly, we started using the Sendgrid Marketing tools because we are Sendgrid API users, so it made sense to have everything in the same platform.
What do you dislike about the product?
The pricing model is not good if you have large subscriber lists that you contact frequently, as they charge $10/10k contacts. Any decently sized ecommerce platform will struggle to justify the cost of idle subscribers in Sendgrid.
Also the tool is not very sophisticated in terms of A/B testing, timezone split of sends etc - overall a pretty immature product for the price.
Also the tool is not very sophisticated in terms of A/B testing, timezone split of sends etc - overall a pretty immature product for the price.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use this tool for all marketing emails.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Adopt it if your contact list is small and you don't have complex requirements like AB testing, multiple languages, multiple timezones, and complex segmentation of contacts.
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