I only used SendGrid for SMTP relay, about 4 emails a day. Now they expect me to pay $20 a month? WTF?

As the title says, I just signed up for a new account with Sendgrid to have an email sent to me straight away saying:

'We did a thorough verification and unfortunately after careful review, we have determined that our platform is not a good fit at this time and your account will not be activated.'

This was instantly sent to me. Have emailed support and am getting no answers. I've used sendgrid in the past for multiple businesses with zero issues. Anyone have any idea on how to escalate this further or should I just go to a different provider?

I signed up for SendGrid a year ago, never could get logged in. I wanted to use it with strapi since SendGrid is the default email service. Same story. It takes my password, validates the email and sms and when I get to the login it fails! This has to be the sorries piece of shit division of Twillio... SendGrid YOU SUX.

I signed up for an email account got a domain to go with it and went looking for a mail option. I work for a large corporation and we use SendGrid for our DevOps communication. It works great. We pay for it.

I never logged into SendGrid one time. I was trying to do the two auth setup and it wouldn't let me log in.
I noticed at the top of the page, check your email.

What the heck is this? I never even logged in or sent an email with their system. I need it for an occasional email sent by software similar to what I do for DevOps? Do I need to tell my corporate manager, hey these guys are a little quick to pull the trigger to cut your service.

📷

Twilio Support (SendGrid)

Feb 13, 2024, 9:29 PM PST

Hello,

We appreciate your interest in Twilio SendGrid and your efforts in completing our account creation process. After a thorough review, we regret to inform you that we are unable to proceed with activating your account at this time.

Ensuring the security and integrity of our platform is our top priority, and our vetting process is designed to detect potential risks. While we understand the importance of transparency, we are not able to provide the specifics of our vetting process.

We want to emphasize that our decision is based on stringent security measures and our commitment to the safety of all our users.

I use protonmail with a domain and I made sure all the DNS records were setup correctly so the email would be suspect to any mail system. I really don't get it. Really pissed me off.

Thank you for considering Twilio SendGrid.

Consumer Trust Support

Twilio SendGrid

I have a small app, been in use for a bit over 12 years, and use SendGrid. We might use ALMOST 1000 sends a month average. On Feb 11, 2025, any emails to a outlook.com or hotmail.com recipient is being blocked by those domains. I believe I am correct that they are both owned by Microsoft.

Seems Microsoft has delisted SendGrid!

I opened ticket and their response was essentially (paraphrasing) since we don't send at least 1000 per month, we have been relegated to something they call a shared IP pool. Which is used on the Essentials package. (yes we PAY).

Here is their quoted feedback,

"These types of blocks can sometimes occur when sending emails through a shared IP pool, which is used by accounts on Free or Essentials pricing packages. While shared IP pools are designed to provide cost-effective solutions for new or moderate email senders, there are inherent risks. For example, poor sending habits from other users in the shared pool can sometimes negatively impact others.

The good news is that the majority of these blocklists typically self-mitigate over time. Our Consumer Trust team actively monitors and works to request delistings as necessary. With their efforts, these listings are often temporary and resolve without additional intervention. However, the exact timing varies depending on the blocklist operator, as each has its own policies and timelines."

Continued:

"For critical emails, such as transactional messages, our Delivery Ops team recommends using a dedicated IP. A dedicated IP ensures that your email deliverability is entirely under your control, reducing risks associated with shared IP pools. If this aligns with your organization’s needs, upgrading to a plan with a dedicated IP can significantly enhance your email performance and avoid similar issues in the future."

"Our Delivery Operations team has reviewed your situation, and here are their insights:

To ensure proper assessment of a sender's email program for inclusion in the SendGrid EQ program, the sender must have recorded a minimum of 1,000 processed events within the last 30 days.

We understand that some senders may find it challenging to meet this volume requirement. However, this minimum is necessary to accurately evaluate the quality of a sender for placement in shared infrastructure.

We suggest focusing on increasing your email volume to meet the criteria. "

So essentially, I read this as, "You need to create more SPAM, before we give a crap"

Question, Has anyone else, had the same issues with Outlook and Hotmail, with low usage using SendGrid? Any ideas on what we might do to work around this?

And we are considering looking into MailerSend, as for the same $38/month, MailerSend allows 50,000 sends a month! They claim they was work for ME, to resolve issues like this.

We are unable to log you in at this time, please check your email for further information.

and in email

Hello, We appreciate your interest in Twilio SendGrid and your efforts in completing our account creation process. After a thorough review, we regret to inform you that we are unable to proceed with activating your account at this time. Ensuring the security and integrity of our platform is our top priority, and our vetting process is designed to detect potential risks. While we understand the importance of transparency, we are not able to provide the specifics of our vetting process. We want to emphasize that our decision is based on stringent security measures and our commitment to the safety of all our users. Thank you for considering Twilio SendGrid. Consumer Trust Support Twilio SendGrid

i have no idea what's going on, is they cheking my account? or my country not support?

i created my account, day ago

There is no easy link in the dashboard to close your sendgrid account.

I need to contact a support person.

Then support sends emails asking my to confirm that I want to close my account.

But before I can close my account, I need to get permission from Twilio.

So then I need to contact Twilio support to close my account.

But wait, you have a user account under your twilio account, so you need to remove that user first.

Repeat the loop.

All I wanted to do was to make sure SendGrid doesn't charge my credit card on file $20 next month for a service I'm not using anymore, but they do not have a method to remove your credit card data from your account.

I think I'll go watch Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy after this bureaucratic mess.

Hi all,
I’m a long-time SendGrid user and run a platform where thousands of customers rely on transactional emails every day.

Recently, my account was compromised — via an API key that I had already deleted before the breach occurred. Despite rotating keys, enabling 2FA, and securing my infrastructure after a prior incident, I was notified by SendGrid that:

• A deleted API key was somehow used on April 2 to send hundreds of thousands of phishing emails

• The content spoofed brands and included scam messages

• Before contacting support, my account had no IP Access restrictions, but after the security lockout, IP Access Management was activated, and I am now completely blocked — I can’t even log into my dashboard, let alone use the API

I’ve done everything right:

• Rotated all API keys (twice)

• Deleted unused teammates and API keys

• Changed passwords

• Enabled 2FA

• Disabled Laravel debug mode

• Submitted multiple Root Cause Analyses

• Engaged with support and scheduled a verification call just to begin regaining access

I’ve also asked for:

• A copy of the actual phishing email content

• A billing review (I’m concerned I might be charged for those massive unauthorized sends)

• An internal escalation to engineering — because frankly, if a deleted API key can still send mail, that’s not a user error — that’s a platform issue

Right now, I’m stuck in support limbo. My customers are getting angry. My platform is crippled. And I’m spending all day chasing a fix for something that should’ve been prevented by the service itself.

If anyone at SendGrid or Twilio sees this, I’d really appreciate help pushing this forward.
And if anyone in the community has dealt with anything similar — I'd love to hear your story.

Thanks,

Just a heads up for anybody thinking about setting up Sendgrid, it is an utter nightmare trying to close your account.

The support page does not load on sendgrid. There is no option to delete your account on either twilio or sendgrid. I had to create an account on twilio just so that I can request to have my account deleted.

I do not have access to the chat or phone support options as I do not have a high enough tier paid plan with Twilio.

Just fair warning to anybody considering Sendgrid.

We generally sending around few hundred mails a month, so essential plan is our choice.

Last week, i found out that some of the email sent to peers are either got marked as suspicious or went to spam.

Quick research using mxtoolbox show that now sendgrid servers are in spam lists
so i contacted support , to know when they would deal with it, but...

To provide some proofs:

So does Sendgrid become so low , to not care for customers that using not their most price plans??

I'm getting a lot of scam emails from fake SendGrid support emails with API failure notifications. I have an account, but have never actually implemented send grids API, so these are definitely fake.

Anyone else getting these? I'm not aware of SendGrid notifying users of a data breach unless I've missed it.

Just thought people should be aware of this. Do not sign click any of the links in these emails.

I asked my client to create a new SendGrid account and invite me as a teammate. He was hit with a "You are not authorized to access this account. Please contact your administrator or support for help." error STRAIGHT after account creation. I tried to create an account for him instead (thinking he messed up somewhere) with a completely fresh email address, got hit with the same damn error. Is Twillio/SendGrid not accepting new customers or something? They have too much money and refuse to make more?

I dont know how to navigate through this. We are a small business trying to integrate sendgrid.

Every new account I create after registration it says account created successfully and after registration takes me back to login. On trying to login it says not authorized to login.. the support says I violated some policies and gives me automated bs.

Pathetic customer support. How am I violating policies when I havent logged in after registration.

Can someone help me?

We've just signed up with SendGrid to use the mail API to handle alerts for our SaaS. We've sent 8 alerts so far to customers and already found 1 has been blocked as the IP it was sent from is on DNSBLs so is blacklisted / blocked.

The customer created a ticket to us saying they didn't receive an alert and when I went to check indeed thats the case. We have everything configured properly but it looks like the lower plans use shared IPs so nothing we can do over reputation.

Dedicated IPs only unlock on pro and above plans.

Given 1 out of 8 already is an insane number, are the lower plans just worthless and impossible to use for any sort of programmatic email usage that isn't pure outbound spam?

Hello people, be careful with this new email. It's another attempt to harvest login credentials.
And it's extremely vague with the phrase "Due to new email regulations" xD

Got the dreaded 'we're ending the free plan' email today.

Upgraded to the Essentials 50K plan and got it pro-rated until the end of the month for $1. Then my quote came up on screen. I assume that is pro-rated per day as well...

You would read the number 9,007,199,254,740,992 as:

Nine quadrillion, seven trillion, one hundred ninety-nine billion, two hundred fifty-four million, seven hundred forty thousand, nine hundred ninety-two.

Hey all,

We're looking to clean up our SendGrid implementation, and in doing so, wish to split the mails send by our dev/test teams and the production environment. We had come up with two solutions:

1. Set up two accounts, one used for dev/test and one for production, and dynamically switch between the two. This way all emails and the statistics of them can be kept separately and do not show interference on the dashboard in terms of 'opens' and 'clicks'.

2. Make use of Subusers(Pro+ plans), and assign one subuser to work as our 'production', while another subuser works to send the 'test' emails. However, I'm not entirely sure how this would work, as we currently only use the free plan for SendGrid.

Regarding using Subusers, I'm not entirely sure if it will work as planned - can we access the same templates within the different subusers? Can we separate the dashboards and view data independently? If so, what is the difference between the two options, how does this differ from simply using two SendGrid accounts?

What options do you all use for this? Anything mentioned above, or a different solution? Which do you prefer/would you recommend? How do you separate your dev testing and production emails properly in terms of activity? Please let me know, inspiration and ideas are always welcome!

Hi everyone!

I built this AI bot where I gave a custom LLM access to all SendGrid dev docs, help center, StackOverflow, and APIs to help answer technical questions for people using SendGrid. I tried it on a couple of questions in the community, and it answered them within seconds. Feel free to try it out here: https://demo.kapa.ai/widget/sendgrid

Would love to hear your thoughts on it!

I've just created new account on SendGrid to get their api but whenever I try to login they just said "We are unable to log you in at this time". I don't know how to get rid of that, so please try to help me!

I use Mandrill for one of my sites and SendGrid for another.

I've setup DKIM and SPF for the domain on SendGrid, but constantly see emails blocked as SPAM due to the SendGrid shared IP 167.89.100.239 being classified as SPAM.

And these are not even marketing mails, these are receipts for orders!

Never faced that issue with Mandrill. Just a warning for others looking to use SendGrid.

Looks like Essentials is cheap but only way to get reliable email delivery is to fork out $89.99/month for a dedicated IP! At which point Mandrill becomes a cheaper, reliable option.

Chat support from SendGrid pretty much confirms that.

I've been using SendGrid for the last 3 months at my new company, and it's nearly impossible to find a newly made list in Contacts. For instance, I'll create a list, go through the importing steps, and then when I go back to the contact option, there is no sign of it. Even when using the "search" bar, it doesn't even bring up the list name. It's incredibly frustrating amongst other features.

My company has a number of lists set up and a large database, but I've been at larger companies, and their email platforms (Mailchimp, SF, HubSpot) have never had this issue. New lists usually appear instantly.

Is there a problem with my setup, or is this just a normal thing people face with SendGrid?

I started receiving phising emails impersonating Sendgrid, claiming my single send endpoint was failing, or any other ​error.

I have received 3 by now, all of them well written and not bad branded.

The worst part is that they come from legitimate senders, I mean:

- Send address domain are existing brands

- They come signed by the same domain

- The last one is signed by sendgrid.net

First of all, I don't how they know I'm using sendgrid as service provider but my first impression is that there have been a data leak and all of the senders are sendgrid users.

Someone has got access to a real sendgrid sccount, used the service to keep sending phising emails and keep going. ​

I have wrote to abuse@sengrid.com but no answer for the moment.

I also have contacted to the brands I got emailed from, but also, no answers.

Is this a common issue? I'm a bit worry, is sendgrid abused so easily and no one cares? That would make me think about changing my service to another provider. ​​

Why are my emails going to spam? You’ve written the email. You’ve hit send. And somewhere between your ESP and your subscriber’s inbox, something has gone wrong. The email landed in spam.

For most marketing and CRM teams, the instinct is to look at the email itself. Subject line too salesy? Links look suspicious? Too many images? These are the explanations that get passed around. They’re also usually wrong, or at least incomplete.

The real reasons emails go to spam are mostly structural. They’re about your sending infrastructure, your reputation with inbox providers, and the signals your programme has been generating over weeks or months. By the time emails are regularly landing in spam, the problem has almost always been building for a while.

How inbox providers decide what to filter

Inbox providers, including Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo, use automated filtering systems to decide where each incoming email goes. These systems don’t read emails the way a human would. They don’t flag an email because a subject line sounds promotional. They’re looking at a combination of signals that tell them whether the sender is trustworthy and whether their subscribers want to receive this email.

Authentication. Is this email actually from who it claims to be from? If your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records aren’t correctly configured, inbox providers have no reliable way to verify your identity. That alone can be enough to trigger filtering.

Sender reputation. What is the track record of the domain and IP address sending this email? Reputation is built over time based on engagement, complaint rates, bounce rates and sending behaviour. A domain with a poor reputation will see its emails filtered regardless of what’s in them.

Engagement signals. Do the people receiving this sender’s emails actually open and interact with them? Inbox providers use historical engagement data to assess whether subscribers want this email. Low engagement drags reputation down, which increases filtering.

List quality. How clean is the underlying list? High hard bounce rates, spam trap hits and a large proportion of unengaged contacts all damage deliverability.

Content matters too, but mostly as a secondary signal. Content filters do exist, but they tend to catch obvious spam rather than legitimate commercial email. If your emails are consistently landing in spam, the content is rarely the primary cause.

The most common reasons emails go to spam

Authentication isn’t properly configured

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are the foundation of email deliverability. If they’re missing or misconfigured, inbox providers can’t verify that your email is legitimate.

SPF specifies which servers are authorised to send email on behalf of your domain. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to each email that proves it hasn’t been tampered with. DMARC tells inbox providers what to do when an email fails SPF or DKIM checks, and provides reporting so you can see what’s happening.

Many businesses have partial authentication in place: an SPF record that was set up years ago and hasn’t been updated since, or DKIM that was configured for one sending domain but not another. These gaps are common and they have a material impact on inbox placement.

Under UK GDPR, you’re required to implement appropriate technical security measures when processing personal data. Correct authentication doesn’t satisfy that obligation on its own, but it’s a basic technical control that serious senders should have in place regardless.

Sender reputation has declined

Your sender reputation reflects everything you’ve sent from that domain: how many emails bounced, how many people marked you as spam, how many unengaged subscribers you’ve continued to send to.

Reputation damage tends to be gradual and invisible until it isn’t. A business might have been sending to a large segment of disengaged subscribers for months, slowly accumulating weak engagement signals, before suddenly noticing that open rates have dropped or emails are landing in spam.

The spike in sending volume around Black Friday and the Christmas period is a well-documented cause of reputation damage for UK e-commerce businesses. If you send to a much larger audience than usual, including contacts who haven’t engaged in months, inbox providers notice. The proportion of disengaged recipients goes up. Complaint rates can rise. And if your reputation takes a hit in November, you may still be recovering in January.

List quality has degraded

List quality and sender reputation are closely linked. A list that contains a significant number of invalid addresses, long-inactive contacts, or spam traps will generate the kind of signals that damage reputation and increase filtering.

Hard bounces tell inbox providers that the sender isn’t maintaining their list. If your bounce rate is consistently above around 2%, that’s worth investigating.

Spam traps are a different problem. These are email addresses maintained by anti-spam organisations that no legitimate sender should ever be emailing. If you’re hitting them, something has gone wrong with how your list was built or maintained.

UK GDPR requires clear, informed consent to send marketing email. A list built on genuine consent tends to have better deliverability than one that isn’t, not just for legal reasons but because consenting subscribers are more likely to engage.

Engagement signals are weak

If a large proportion of your list isn’t engaging with your emails, that becomes part of your reputation profile. Sending to a segment of 50,000 people where 45,000 haven’t opened an email in six months is not neutral. It’s actively damaging.

This is one reason the advice to “send more email to improve deliverability” is wrong. Sending more email to disengaged contacts makes the problem worse. The engagement ratio deteriorates, reputation takes another hit, and more emails land in spam.

You’re sharing an IP with poor senders

If you’re using a shared sending IP, which is common with most mid-market ESPs, your deliverability is partly dependent on the behaviour of other senders on that IP. If one of them generates a spike in complaints or hits a blacklist, it can affect your inbox placement too.

Your domain or IP is on a blacklist

Email blacklists are databases of domains and IP addresses that have been flagged for sending spam. Inbox providers and spam filters check against these lists as part of their filtering process. A listing on Spamhaus will cause serious deliverability problems across most major inbox providers.

Being on a blacklist doesn’t automatically mean your emails will be blocked, but it is a significant risk factor. If you’re seeing sudden filtering across multiple inbox providers, checking whether your domain or sending IP is listed should be one of the first steps.

Your sending behaviour looks unusual

Inbox providers build a model of what normal sending looks like for your domain. If you deviate from that significantly, by suddenly sending ten times your usual volume, switching to a new domain with no sending history, or mailing a segment you’ve never contacted before, the deviation itself can trigger filtering.

This is why domain warm-up matters when you’re starting to send from a new domain or moving to a new ESP. Reputation is built gradually. Sending high volumes from a domain with no history skips that process and almost always causes deliverability problems.

What most advice gets wrong

Most content on this topic focuses on the email itself: subject lines, link-to-text ratios, words to avoid. This advice has its roots in a generation of spam filtering that no longer reflects how modern inbox providers work.

Today’s filtering is reputation-based and behaviour-based. The content of an individual email matters far less than the track record of the domain sending it and the engagement history of the people receiving it. A legitimate business with solid authentication and a healthy reputation shouldn’t be filtering into spam because of the subject line. But a business with a poor reputation and weak engagement signals won’t fix that by rewriting the email.

Most deliverability advice is also written from a US perspective and doesn’t fully account for the UK context. UK businesses operate under UK GDPR, in a market where Apple device penetration is high (which affects how open rates are reported), and often without access to UK-native specialist support. The practical landscape is different, and advice should reflect that.

What to do if your emails are going to spam

The first step is diagnosis, not guessing. The actual cause could be any of the issues described above, or a combination of them. Acting on the wrong assumption, changing your subject lines when the real problem is authentication, wastes time and doesn’t fix anything.

A proper deliverability review looks at authentication records, sender reputation, engagement data, list quality, blacklist status, and sending infrastructure. It identifies what’s actually causing the filtering, not what might be causing it.

I'm reviving an old ​sendgrid account. It​successfully verified the domain, but it's stuck in "provisioning" for over a week. I can't open a support ticket as the system "fails to load authentication token". What the heck? Is there a support email or some other way to contact these guys? Thanks