Could you please comment on the relative merits/drawbacks for Sendgrid, Postmark, Amazon SES, and other email providers? Which would you recommend, and why? Is there another email service that you would recommend instead?
Attached: Here is a list of the ones currently being talked about:
At the end of the day, when a competitor like Amazon enters a market, you reach the bottom. There's no way Postmark or SendGrid or Mailjet or Postage or SocketLabs or SendLabs are going to be able to compete on price.
And I don't think the point is to compete on price, but on features and service. Postmark's roadmap is bristling with awesome. At the end of the day customers win when there's innovation and competition in a market.
To answer your question, Postmark and others have support for SMTP to ease integration with companies already using a stock SMTP implementation. There's also insight into email deliverability, being able to handle DKIM/SPF issues for you, inbound processing, etc. It comes down to your use case, and the merits of the service (actual deliverability rates for example).
(I was a developer at Postmark)
Great comparison over at SocialCompare which led me to MailJet due to its superior display of open and click status for sales and marketing emails as compared to sendgrid. We use sendgrid though, with its excellent ruby gem for our website transactional emails where we're not as focused on reviewing for open and click status.
I tried sendgrid and they were unable to provision my free account so I try them. Customer service is terrible. Would advise against it.
Sendgrid is nice and simple, and has lots of plugins for existing frameworks. Postmark is the same, but costs 50% more. But I'd use SES if you can.... it's 1/10 the cost of Sendgrid. Seriously... $1.00 per Sendgrid thousand, versus $0.10 per SES thousand.
SES is cheap and promises to be scalable, but pretty no-frills otherwise. It also has not been proven yet, is still in beta, and is not as easy to use or as functional as what is offered by SocketLabs, SendGrid or Postmark. And the constant innovation at these companies is going to widen this gap even further.
So what does this mean to you? Isn't cheap and scalable enough?
For some it could be - especially the highly technical with super clean email, little need for deep metrics and no need for email deliverability support or advice. The vast majority of email senders want a little more hand-holding, a partner they can work with (vs use), and experts who can answer their questions. The cost difference for that is more than worth it to them. And for the most part, the costs are low enough with any decent email provider.
(I'm the Chief Technologist at SocketLabs)
SendGrid was really easy to implement and tech support via Chat had my question answered in maybe 3 minutes. They know they are now fighting on providing best service/support and I sense that from all the times I have contacted them. I feel like they want to be the RackSpace in this category. Not the cheapest, but the best support.
