SendGrid is a 📝Twilio product that delivers transactional and marketing email at scale through an SMTP relay and a Web API, alongside a Marketing Campaigns tool for designing and sending newsletters to contact lists. Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins founded it in 2009 in Boulder, Colorado, as an early 📝Techstars Boulder company; SendGrid went public on the NYSE in November 2017, and Twilio completed its acquisition, valued at about $3 billion, in February 2019. It competes with Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark, and newer developer-first senders on the API side, and with 📝MailChimp on marketing email. Its users are developers and product teams embedding email into applications, such as password resets, receipts, and notifications, plus marketers running campaigns. Twilio retired the long-running free plan in 2025, replacing it with a 60-day trial ahead of paid Essentials, Pro, and Premier tiers.
I wired SendGrid into 📝My Ethos in December 2019 to send 📝Future Self Party coupons, and it later carried the 📝Zapier-driven emails we sent to 📝Citizens of One. At $89 a month it was one of the tools I canceled in early 2021 while consolidating our stack.
Key Features
- Email API and SMTP Relay — Send transactional email from any app through the Web API or SMTP.
- Marketing Campaigns — Design, segment, schedule, and send newsletters to contact lists.
- Dynamic Templates — Reusable templates that personalize each send with per-message data.
- Event Webhook — Streams delivery, open, click, bounce, and spam events back in real time.
- Email Validation — Checks addresses for typos and risk before sending to protect reputation.
Getting Started
- Start a 60-day trial at sendgrid.com, then pick an Essentials, Pro, or Premier plan.
- Authenticate your sending domain by adding the DNS records SendGrid generates.
- Create an API key with Mail Send permission under Settings, then API Keys.
- Send through the Web API, an official SDK, or SMTP relay using that API key.
- Monitor delivery, engagement, and bounces in the Activity Feed and Stats views.