SendGrid offers two types of pricing plans – commercial (aka Marketing Campaign Plans) and technical (aka Email API Plans). The commercial plan is designed for companies and individuals who need to automate and improve their overall email marketing efforts while the advanced plan allows integrating the email with your app or website.

These plans are available in three different packages – Free, Basic, and Advanced.

Free

The free plan is just that, it’s free. With the free plan, you can send up to 6000 emails to 2000 contacts every month. Also, you get access to design code and editors, segmentation, A/B testing, email insights, 3 email testing credits, 1 signup form, ticketing support, automation, and the ability to involve a single teammate in all processes. This plan is ideal for small business owners and individuals.

Basic

The Basic plan starts at $15/monthly and grows in accordance with the number of contacts and/or emails you send each month. The price ranges from $15/monthly for up to 5000 contacts and grows up to $200/monthly for up to 100,000 contacts. In addition, you get 10 email testing credits, 5 signup forms, and ticketing and chat support, but lose access to automation features.

Advanced

The Advanced plan starts at $60/monthly and grows up to $900 monthly depending on the number of contacts and/or emails you send each month. In addition, you gain access to 60 email testing credits, 15 signup forms, guaranteed fast support via ticket, chat, and phone, automation, adding up to 1000 teammates, and dedicated IPs. This plan is highly recommended to enterprise-level companies.

Overall, the pricing mechanism is rather complicated and while the website’s pricing page is transparent and presents all features and information in detail, it is still difficult to get a clear understanding of how much you’ll be paying each month.

Twilio SendGrid has been operating in the email marketing field since 2009 and has successfully serviced over 82,000 clients to date. SendGrid has pioneered the idea of transactional emails – automated, commercial activity-related emails that are sent to a given recipient. The brand is suitable for small, medium, and large enterprises alike and its portfolio includes many notable companies including eBay, Meetup, Spotify, Airbnb, and Foursquare.

SendGrid offers premium functionality across all pricing plans, including the free ones. It can be efficiently used by both tech-savvy and newbie users, delivering satisfying results and boosting efficiency and productivity. Let’s explore some of the most notable features:

Email Design

The email design feature offers a design and code editor that allows you to create beautiful email templates via drag and drop functionality, or to access and edit HTML without breaking structural code. The editors allow you to create anything ranging from newsletters to receipts and password reset emails.

Automation

Email marketing automation allows you to automate numerous routine tasks. You can create onboarding (series) emails for newly acquired customers, nurture leads and attendees both before and after an event, and follow up with leads that interact with your content. Customizable automation triggers allow you to set various events and emails in motion, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Finally, you can track your automation over time to identify best-performing emails, track and make appropriate changes, and easily update subject lines and contents in real-time.

Centralization

SendGrid allows you to centralize all your email communication, including both promotional and transactional emails, in a single place. This allows easier access and management to all past communications, insights, analytics, reports, and statistics. Furthermore, collaboration becomes much easier when everyone uses the same tools and data. In turn, this allows businesses to calculate KPIs and campaign ROIs more efficiently. Finally, information centralization offers practically endless scalability for growing businesses.

Email Analytics

The analytics tool offers an in-depth statistical analysis regarding engagement (open rates and click rates), deliverability (Inbox vs Spam), and audience insights across all email campaigns. You can also dive into recurring email details, as well as transactional email data reports, and make changes when appropriate. Lastly, the reports and data are easy to understand, track, and use in your everyday work.

SendGrid provides a free, growing library of email templates that you can use for your emails. The templates are customizable – you can easily add your brand logo, colors, and content, and save them for future use. There are multiple industry-specific templates for all kinds of emails including traditional, recurring, newsletters, transactional, financial, etc.

The built-in CTAs make it even easier to achieve high ROI. Furthermore, all the templates are responsive, meaning that they will be perfect on any screen size and device. You can also import your existing email templates and use those easily and hustle-free.

SendGrid is very easy to use. The software doesn’t have a learning curve and any person can use it effectively from day one. Drag and drop functionality allows users to create virtually any kind of email using pre-designed templates. The reports are also very easy to understand, compare, and help decipher which areas need improvements.