The SendGrid Alternative With a Free Tier That Still Exists
SendGrid retired its free plan in 2025, keeps three days of logs unless you pay extra, and parks dedicated IPs behind an $89.95 plan. Mailfully sends 5,000 a month free, keeps 30 days of logs on every plan, and sells a dedicated IP for $29.
5,000 emails a month free, then plans from $19/mo with a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails.
Why Teams Look for an Alternative
SendGrid is the most established email API, and at very large volume it is cheaper than we are. Teams leave over what the low and middle tiers have become. No free plan since 2025. Three days of message history. A shared IP estate so large that other people's behavior becomes your deliverability problem. Support that people describe as unreachable at the moment an account gets held.
There is no free tier anymore
Since March 2025 a new account is a 60-day trial at 100 emails a day, and when it ends Twilio's own changelog says email sending is paused. Existing free accounts were retired from May 2025, and any with more than 100 stored contacts had those contacts deleted with no way to restore them after upgrading. The cheapest way to keep sending is $19.95 a month.
Three days of logs, then guesswork
Searchable Email Activity is 3 days on trial and Essentials, 7 days on Pro. Thirty days is a paid add-on with no published price. Buying it is also the only way to get API access to your own activity data, and that access is capped at 6 requests a minute. Mailfully keeps 30 days on every plan, 60 on Growth and 90 on Scale, readable over the API the whole time.
A review queues the mail, then deletes it
When an account goes under review, SendGrid's own documentation says it accepts and queues mail, holding it for up to 72 hours from the time of send, after which the messages expire undelivered. If the account is deactivated, queued mail is deleted outright. The support article on that same state says the main support team is unable to reactivate a warned, suspended, deactivated or banned account. So the API keeps answering, the password resets quietly stop arriving, and the people you can reach cannot fix it.
Shared IPs, shared blocklists
Essentials sends from shared pools, and dedicated IPs start at Pro. SendGrid's own support documentation puts it plainly: blocklists are a natural part of sending email through shared IP pools. In August 2026 Microsoft 365 blocks rose 10 to 15% across every Twilio SendGrid IP for three days with no published root cause, and a similar Microsoft failure recurred three weeks later.
The useful features start at $89.95
Subusers, single sign-on, dedicated IPs, IP pools, automated warm-up and email validation are all Pro and above. Essentials at $19.95 gets shared IPs, one teammate, two webhook endpoints, three days of history and no validations. Every Mailfully paid plan carries the entire product.
Mailfully Compared With SendGrid
| Mailfully | SendGrid | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 5,000 emails a month, ongoing | None. A 60-day trial at 100 a day, then sending pauses |
| Log retention | 30 days on every plan, 60 on Growth, 90 on Scale | 3 days on Essentials, 7 on Pro, 30 as a paid add-on |
| Log access over the API | Included, same retention as the dashboard | Requires the add-on, then 6 requests a minute |
| Mail sent while an account is held | Held messages stay releasable, and nothing expires silently | Queued up to 72 hours, then expires undelivered; deleted on deactivation |
| Dedicated IP | $29 add-on on any paid plan, included on Scale | Pro and above ($89.95+), extra IPs $30 each a month |
| 50,000 emails a month | $19 | $19.95 on Essentials |
| Overage rate | $0.40 per 1,000, flat | $1.30 per 1,000 at Essentials 50K, falling with volume |
| Scheduling window | Scheduled sends beyond 72 hours | 72 hours maximum, cancelable up to 10 minutes before |
| Marketing email | Same plan, same allowance | Separate subscription, priced by stored contacts |
| Uptime commitment | No published SLA | 99.95% API availability, sub-5-minute outages excluded, 10% credit cap |
| HIPAA | No BAA offered | Not a HIPAA Eligible Service; Twilio will not sign a BAA |
| Recipients per request | Batch endpoint, no 1,000-address ceiling | 1,000 across to, cc and bcc combined |
SendGrid figures checked in September 2026 from its own published pricing and documentation. Published prices change; check both before you commit.
What the Same Volume Costs
| Emails a month | Mailfully | SendGrid |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $0 | $19.95 |
| 50,000 | $19 | $19.95 |
| 100,000 | $39 | $34.95 |
| 150,000 | $49 | $79.95 |
| 300,000 | $109 | $214.95 |
SendGrid figures use its Essentials tier, the cheapest that sends at all, plus published overage where that beats the next rung: $34.95 for 100,000 then $0.0009 an email above it. At 100,000 exactly, SendGrid's $34.95 is cheaper than our $39, and we would rather you read that here. Above 300,000 SendGrid's Pro prices are rendered in-app rather than published as text, so we do not quote them. Mailfully at 300,000 is Growth plus 150,000 of overage. Checked September 2026.
What Mailfully Does Better
- Best in Class Pricing
- One plan covers transactional and marketing email. You pay for what you send, not for contacts you store. Overage is a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails at any volume. Your email history is always included.
- Get Real Human Support
- Every paid plan includes support from a real person. When an email goes missing, our team pulls up the message, reads the log, and tells you what happened. SendGrid's own help article says its support team cannot reactivate a suspended account.
- Extremely Fast Email Delivery
- Your API call returns instantly and the email goes out right behind it. Our servers run in the same AWS region as Amazon SES, so there is no queue to wait in.
- Detailed Logging and History
- Every email keeps a complete history, down to the exact reply from the receiving mail server. When a customer says a receipt never arrived, you see what Gmail said about it. Logs are kept for 30 days on Starter, 60 on Growth, and 90 on Scale, available from the API and the dashboard. Three days is enough to see that something broke, not enough to find out why.
Moving Over
SendGrid's send call nests content in personalizations and arrays of objects; ours takes flat fields. Most teams find the mapping is shorter than the code it replaces. The Bearer token works the same way and the SMTP relay is a host and credential swap. Event webhooks carry the same vocabulary of delivered, bounced and complained, so your existing handler mostly needs its signature check changed.
// Before — SendGrid
// await sgMail.send({
// to: "customer@example.com",
// from: "you@yourdomain.com",
// subject: "Welcome aboard",
// html: "<p>Thanks for signing up!</p>",
// });
import { Mailfully } from "@mailfully/node";
const mailfully = new Mailfully({
apiKey: process.env.MAILFULLY_API_KEY,
});
const { data, error } = await mailfully.emails.send({
from: "you@yourdomain.com",
to: "customer@example.com",
subject: "Welcome aboard",
html: "<p>Thanks for signing up!</p>",
});
if (error) return retryLater(error);Questions
- My SendGrid account was suspended. Can I sign up here?
- Usually yes. A hold on another provider is not by itself a reason we refuse an account; what matters is what you send and to whom. New accounts go through a review, live sending is capped until a domain is verified, and test mode is open from the first minute so you can build while that happens.
- Can I keep my SendGrid templates?
- Yes. Dynamic templates are Handlebars, and Mailfully templates use plain double-brace placeholders, so the markup moves as-is and the substitution syntax is a find-and-replace. Subject lines travel on the send call rather than in the stored template.
- Do you have subusers?
- Mailfully scopes by organization and environment rather than by subuser, and an API key can be pinned to a single verified sending domain. If you need SendGrid's subuser model specifically, with its own statistics and IP assignment per subuser, that is a structural difference rather than a feature gap we can close with a setting.
- What about the Email Activity API limit?
- Mailfully's message and event endpoints are part of the API on every plan, with the same retention the dashboard shows, and no separate purchase to read your own data. Polling is rate-limited like every other endpoint, not restricted to six calls a minute.
Send the First One Free
5,000 emails a month on the free tier, no card. Paid plans start at $19/mo with a flat $0.40 per 1,000 emails beyond the allowance.
Start free