A short story on my really swift and decisive comparison of transactional email as a service services.

After I noticed that Mandrill has dropped free tier from their pricing options I took of to find alternative to be used while prototyping and with a small scale hobby stuff.

I quickly browsed through Elastic Email, Mailgun, Postmark and Sendgrid. From them I chose Mailgun and Sendgrid to a closer inspection.

Both of them were quite even in feature-wise. Sendgrid offered 12k free monthly emails and Mailgun 10k. Both had HTTP api, SMTP, custom domains, TLS, DKIM, SPF and impressive lists of services using their product containing everybody’s favorite startups.

I continued by registering test accounts – starting with Sendgrid. After registration I had to wait for confirmation mail, opened verification link and got forwarded to a really terrifying marketing info questionnaire containing dozen required input fields.

I got scared and retreated…

Next up Mailgun. Filled in registration form and immediately got forwarded to a confirmation page containing Curl example on using the service sandbox and sample source code snippets for a number of alternate languages. Instant success!