SendGrid's free plan ended — what to use instead

SendGrid is The Twilio-owned incumbent, processing billions of emails a month across transactional and marketing with deep enterprise tooling. Unitpost covers transactional and marketing email in one product with unlimited contacts on paid plans and a free tier of 5,000 emails a month. Across 14 compared capabilities, Unitpost leads on 9 and SendGrid leads on 4.

Which should you choose?

Choose SendGrid if

You send hundreds of thousands of emails a month, where their volume pricing is genuinely cheaper
You need sub-accounts to isolate sending for your own customers
You need an enterprise contract, procurement paperwork, or a named support contact
You depend on one of their many first-party integrations

Choose Unitpost if

You want a permanent free tier — theirs is gone, ours is 5,000 emails/month
You want a modern API and DX rather than a surface shaped by a decade of backwards compatibility
You want marketing included rather than priced by contact count on top
You are a small team who would spend more time fighting the console than sending email

What SendGrid does well

Stated plainly, because a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

Proven at a scale we have not operated at, with enterprise support to match
The broadest integration catalogue in the category
Sub-account management for multi-tenant platforms, which we do not offer
Advanced IP management and dedicated IP pools for high-volume senders

Pricing and free tier

Unitpost: 5,000 emails/month, 200/day, no credit card; On paid plans your monthly price is a sending allowance you spend at your tier's rate, and it refreshes every month. Marketing and unlimited contacts are included rather than billed as add-ons.
SendGrid: None — a 60-day trial at 100 emails/day, then a paid plan (their free tier was retired in 2025); Monthly plans by volume, competitive at high throughput, with marketing contacts and add-ons like email validation billed separately.

SendGrid pricing and free-tier details last verified 2026-07. Providers change these often — check their pricing page before making a decision.

Feature comparison

Feature and pricing comparison between Unitpost and SendGrid
Capability	Unitpost	SendGrid
Free tier	5,000 emails/month, 200/day, no credit card	None — 60-day trial at 100/day, then paid. The free plan was retired in 2025
Price at high volume	Volume-based, but we do not try to undercut incumbents at the top of the range	Volume discounts make them cheaper at high throughput
Sub-accounts / multi-tenant sending	Not offered — one workspace per team	Sub-user management on Pro and above
Scale track record	New platform, no comparable public scale record	Billions of messages per month
API design	One modern versioned surface — Bearer keys, cursor pagination, consistent error envelope	Mature but complex, with v2/v3 legacy surface area to navigate
from display name	Embedded in the from string: Acme <hi@acme.com>	A separate from.name field
Idempotency keys	Idempotency-Key on sends, 24-hour dedupe window	Not offered
Complaint suppression handling	Complaint suppressions cannot be self-serve removed (Postmark model) — a 409 protects your reputation from yourself	Removable with a warning
Integrations	A small, growing set	Extensive first-party catalogue
SMS	On every paid plan: the same contacts, API key, webhooks, and monthly sending allowance as email, at a published per-country rate	Not part of SendGrid. SMS is a separate Twilio product with its own API, console, and billing
Idempotency keys on send	Idempotency-Key on sends, 24-hour dedupe window	—
Webhook secret rotation without dropped deliveries	svix-compatible HMAC-SHA256 with a 24-hour dual-signing rotation grace	Rotation replaces the secret immediately
Hybrid template editing	Visual drag-and-drop and React/TSX code mode over one shared document — the same @unitpost/email library renders both	Varies
One-key import from SendGrid	Migration Assistant moves contacts, segments, topics, templates, domains, suppressions, and webhooks in about 4 minutes with a read-only key	n/a

How do I migrate from SendGrid?

Paste a read-only SendGrid API key into the Migration Assistant and it previews everything that would carry over — contacts, segments, topics, templates, domains, suppressions, and webhooks. Nothing is written until you accept, and SendGrid keeps sending the whole time, so there is no downtime. It takes about four minutes.

Two things do not carry over: sending domains must re-verify with freshly generated DKIM keys, and webhook signing secrets are regenerated. Dynamic segments import as a static snapshot of their members.

See how migration works

Frequently asked questions

Does SendGrid still have a free tier?

No. SendGrid retired its free plan in 2025. New accounts get a 60-day trial limited to 100 emails a day, after which sending requires a paid plan. That single change is why much of the indie and startup community moved to providers with permanent free tiers. Unitpost's free tier is 5,000 emails a month with no credit card.

Is Unitpost cheaper than SendGrid?

At low and mid volume, usually — our free tier is 5,000/month and permanent; theirs is gone. At high volume, SendGrid's discounts can win on per-email rate, and we don't claim otherwise. What we win on is the rest of the bill: transactional and marketing in one product, unlimited contacts (not a contact add-on), one invoice, and SMTP plus REST plus MCP through the same send gate.

Can I migrate from SendGrid without downtime?

Yes. The Migration Assistant takes a read-only SendGrid API key, previews everything that would carry over — contacts, segments, templates, domains, suppressions, webhooks — and writes nothing until you accept. SendGrid keeps sending the entire time, so you cut over when your Unitpost domain is verified. Expect to re-verify domains with new DKIM keys and to regenerate webhook signing secrets.

What does SendGrid do that Unitpost does not?

Sub-account management for multi-tenant platforms, dedicated IP pools with advanced IP management, email validation as an add-on, an enterprise support and procurement track, and a much larger integration catalogue. If any of those is a requirement, SendGrid is the better answer today.

Switching from SendGrid?

Try it on the free tier first

5,000 emails a month free. Verify a domain, send a test, preview the migration.

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