A SendGrid alternative for teams that just need to send

Side by side

SendGrid's pricing spans many tiers, add-ons and overage rules, so where we're not certain of a current number we say so rather than guess.

SendGrid figures are as published on their pricing page at the time of writing and vary by tier, contract and add-ons. Verify current pricing on sendgrid.com before deciding.

The cost that isn't on the pricing page

The bigger difference between the two products isn't the monthly bill — it's surface area. SendGrid is a platform: IP pools, subusers, link branding, event webhooks with dozens of event types, and pricing tiers whose feature matrices take real time to compare. That breadth is genuinely useful at enterprise scale, but for a product team that needs receipts and magic links delivered, every extra concept is another thing to configure, secure and debug at 2am. MailFleet's bet is that most transactional senders are better served by one endpoint, four flat plans, and deliverability protections that are simply on by default.

When SendGrid is the better choice

• You need marketing and transactional in one place. SendGrid's marketing campaigns suite — audiences, segmentation, automations — is a real product, not an afterthought. MailFleet doesn't do marketing email at all (see our Acceptable Use Policy).
• You rely on dynamic templates.SendGrid's Handlebars-based dynamic templates, with versioning and a visual editor, are mature and widely used. MailFleet expects you to render your HTML before you call the API.
• You want a fifteen-year track record.SendGrid has sent trillions of emails and is backed by Twilio. If procurement wants a household name, that's a fair reason to choose it.

When MailFleet is the better choice

• A radically simpler API.One endpoint, one auth header, a flat JSON body. No personalizations arrays, no content-type objects, no SDK required — it's just HTTP. The entire API fits on one docs page.
• Transparent flat pricing. Four plans, published on the homepage: free 3,000/mo, $10 for 50,000, $29 for 200,000, $99 for 1,000,000. No overage surprises, no add-on matrix to decode.
• SSO without the enterprise tier.SAML/SSO, audit logs and a 99.9% SLA are included at $99/mo, self-serve. You shouldn't need an upgrade conversation to satisfy your customer's security questionnaire.
• No deliverability upsells. Per-customer SES tenant isolation, automatic suppression of hard bounces and complaints, and auto-pause thresholds are baked into every plan — including Free — not sold back to you as add-ons.

Migrating from v3/mail/send

SendGrid's POST /v3/mail/send maps directly to our POST /api/v1/send — the same information, with the nesting flattened: recipients move out of personalizations into a plain to field, and the content array becomes html and text. Field-by-field details are in the API docs.

curl https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer SG.xxxxxxxx" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "personalizations": [
      { "to": [{ "email": "customer@example.com" }] }
    ],
    "from": { "email": "hello@acme.com", "name": "Acme" },
    "subject": "Your receipt",
    "content": [
      { "type": "text/html",
        "value": "<p>Thanks for your order!</p>" }
    ]
  }'

curl https://mailfleet.dev/api/v1/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mf_live_xxxxxxxx" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "from": "Acme <hello@acme.com>",
    "to": "customer@example.com",
    "subject": "Your receipt",
    "html": "<p>Thanks for your order!</p>"
  }'