Keep SendGrid. Stop betting everything on one account.
SendGrid is a capable provider. The risk isn't SendGrid, it's that one account, reviewed at SendGrid's discretion, carries every email your product sends.
Most "SendGrid alternative" searches start with a specific bad day: an account put under review, a key revoked, mail queued with no answer, or a customer asking about an email that has already aged out of the activity feed. A different provider in the same position gives you the same risk with a new invoice.
What changes the risk is a second provider behind SendGrid and a record of your own. That's what Mailway adds, while SendGrid keeps sending. And sometimes you need neither.
A mature, full-featured provider.
Transactional and marketing in one account
One vendor for product mail and campaigns, with templates, stats, and a mature API.
Standard SMTP relay
smtp.sendgrid.net on ports 25, 587, 2525 and 465, authenticated with an API key, so almost any mailer can use it.
Redundant infrastructure
Twilio describes multiple data centers and formal failover policies, with a public status page.
Longer history if you pay
Activity history can be extended to 30 days with a paid add-on.
Where one SendGrid account becomes the risk.
Review is discretionary, and queued mail can be deleted
SendGrid reviews accounts with apparent abnormal activity and publishes no numeric thresholds. A suspended account holds mail for up to 72 hours; a deactivated one deletes undelivered mail queued on the system.
source: SendGrid: account under reviewWhen SendGrid refuses a message (a revoked key, a deactivated account), the retry goes to the next provider in your chain five seconds later. Failover needs two providers, so it's available on Pro and up. When SendGrid accepts and holds mail during a review, no gateway can see that: the record says accepted, and moving new mail to your second provider is one reorder in the console. Either way the message itself is in your archive, so you know exactly what was held. Failover buys time; it doesn't fix a list problem, which is why reported bounces and complaints feed a suppression list checked before any provider.
Three days of history
Email Activity history is 3 days on Essentials and 7 days on Pro and Premier; 30 days is a paid add-on, and the feed holds events, not your message bodies.
source: SendGrid Email API pricingEvery message is archived byte-for-byte, with a timeline of every attempt, searchable by sender, recipient, subject, and state for as long as your plan keeps it, which is what a support or legal question months later actually needs.
An SLA not everyone gets
The Mail Send SLA applies to buyers of certain paid service packages; for everyone else an outage is simply an outage.
source: Twilio API SLAWhatever the SLA, a second provider means a SendGrid outage delays mail by seconds instead of hours, and the timeline shows exactly which provider carried which message.
- Your SendGrid account, pricing, dedicated IPs and sender reputation.
- Domain authentication stays at SendGrid. Mailway relays your message; SendGrid signs and sends it.
- Opens and clicks stay in SendGrid. Mailway reads SendGrid's delivery events (delivered, bounced, deferred, spam reports), never engagement: tracking opens means rewriting your message, and Mailway relays it unchanged.
If SendGrid has never held or lost your mail, a few days of activity answer every question you get, and one provider covers your volume, SendGrid on its own is the right answer. Adding a layer in front of it would be over-engineering.
Keep SendGrid; change one config block.
Add your SendGrid account to Mailway with its API key. Mailway relays your app's SMTP mail over SendGrid's SMTP (as apikey), which keeps it byte-for-byte: SendGrid's HTTP API can't carry the raw message, so Mailway uses it only for API and console mail. Add a second provider behind it, then point your mailer at smtp.mailway.net with a Mailway SMTP credential (quickstart).
Point SendGrid's Event Webhook at the URL Mailway generates for the provider, and deliveries, bounces, deferrals, and spam reports land on each message's timeline. Enable Signed Event Webhook and store its verification key in Mailway: every event's signature is checked, and unsigned events are refused (SendGrid setup). Until then, SendGrid sends read accepted, never delivered.
If you later decide to leave SendGrid, it becomes a console change: reorder the chain, and your application never notices.
SendGrid facts checked 2026 Q3 against the vendor's own pages
- SendGrid: account under review
- SendGrid Email API pricing
- SendGrid Email Activity feed
- SendGrid SMTP integration
- Twilio API SLA
- Twilio global infrastructure
Other providers: Amazon SES · Mailgun · Postmark · all providers
Your mailer config has
one block to change
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