PSA: SendGrid ending their free-tier plan

Announcements
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What Happened

Hi all :wave:
We wanted to give everyone a heads up that SendGrid recently announced (read it here) that their free plan will be discontinued in the near future.

What It Means For You

  • Bubble’s built-it email functionally will continue to work as usual
  • For users that want to use their own key, SendGrid will still have a 60 day free trial (without credit card) of their service but should plan on alternatives if they are looking for a fully free service

Next Steps

There are plenty of other free email service providers that still have free tiers like Postmark, Resend, SMTP2Go, AWS SES. We recommend that users do their own research to find a provider that fits their needs.

To reiterate

Bubble’s out the box functionality won’t change. This affects users that depend on a free-tier plan with SendGrid. Those users should review and plan according to these news.

Thanks

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Thanks for the heads up.

Postmark has been really good and I don’t have any issues with any bounces or down time. Pretty cheap for all of my apps for one price. I think I only pay like $15/month for ALL of my apps currently.

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I think Bubble has an opportunity to build a premium email tool into their platform. Looking at the SendGrid pricing, they want $19.99/month for basic email functionality. That’s almost 70% of the price of Bubble’s Starter plan. In my use case I need to send a few emails from my web app, but we are talking less than 500 per month. I’d much rather pay Bubble an additional $5 or $10 a month for limited email functionality than having to step up to SendGrid’s plan which is overkill for my needs.

The main value of Bubble is that it brings many tools under one umbrella so I don’t have to worry about separate back-end and front-end software systems working together. Email is a very common need for web/mobile apps so having to seek out a separate vendor is friction Bubble could eliminate with a native integration.

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I agree. This was a huge for me when I first started learning Bubble. How easy it was to send an email was amazing.

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Was a big Postmark fan for the longest time, and longstanding client but recently cancelled my account because they ratcheted up their pricing substantially, post-acquisition by ActiveCampaign. Now they have effectively 6Xed pricing if you need or want support for inbound emails/inbound routing. Switched to Mailgun Send as they don’t have unscrupulous investors trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of their userbase (at least, not currently :man_shrugging: ), and support inbound routing even on their free plan.

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Is this specific to Bubble apps?

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No it’s for anyone (Bubble or not) that uses Sendgrid

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yeah what Johnny said. It’s just the way to get “free” sendgrid now, through their trial period

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Can we use “Send email” functionality with other providers? Bubble seem to be having native support for Sendgrid only. So if we want to use some other email service provider, we need to integrate their APIs, create our own new API workflow for “Send mail”, and replace all the existing “Send Email” actions to new ones?

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correct, but you should really build modularly and just have 1 send email backend WF that you call - that would simplify it a LOT. but if you don’t have that setup, then you have to use the app searcher and search for send email actions.

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Thanks. I do have modularity at most places with one WF wrapping the action. But there are still a few dangling ones. Also wanted to clarify if this is what is Bubble’s stance is. It would have been nicer if Bubble had integration with more email providers. But I suppose that’s not trivial.

Also, I think there are some actions that I haven’t used much but call email inherently without us calling our wrapped WF, like sending reset password email. Need to see how those get affected.

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This only affects you if youre using Sendgrid’s free tier so if you’re not using their free tier you should be fine too

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I think I’ll just leave sendgrid. I’ve had a terrible experience with them.

I’m using with one app, which admittedly was fine to set up and integrate, but did experience some delivery issues. My bigger problem is that when I tried to register a second app for a different client, it was rejected for ‘security reasons’ but no one from sendrgid would expand on the reasons and what needed to be done to satisfy their issues. Especially weird since the account was already registered and successfully processing SMS through Twilio, which Sendgrid now falls under (acquired). I ended up using Postmark for this app, and it’s been a dream.

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Thanks @fede.bubble for the heads up.

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Super curious about this. Do you mind sharing how you’re using Postmark for more than one app/client? And is such setup possible in SendGrid also?

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Not sure about Sendgrid but Postmark has ’Servers’ which are basically folders. So each of my apps use a different server. Does that make sense?:blush:

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Another upvote for Postmark. Great service! Been with them for over 5 years

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SendGrid supports multiple domains on 1 account.

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Can you expand on how Bubbles built in email functionality will continue to work - do you mean it will continue to work with a paid sendgrid plan?

Can you expand on how to integrate other providers with built in functions, for example Brevo and forgotten password emails

1 Like