SendGrid → Postal
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
SendGrid's Essentials starts near $20/month for 50,000 emails and scales up quickly. Postal self-hosted is a VPS with good IP reputation — around $20/month regardless of volume.
Moves cleanly
SMTP sending. If you send over SMTP, this is a credentials change.
You rebuild
Anything using SendGrid's API, templates or marketing features.
What SendGrid costs you today
The permanent free plan is gone (read 2026-09-27): the $0 tier is now a 60-day trial at 100 emails a day. Essentials from $19.95 a month for 50,000–100,000 emails; Pro from $89.95 a month with a dedicated IP; Premier by sales.
What actually holds you in
Low, and worth knowing before anyone quotes you a migration. Sending is SMTP or a simple API, so switching is credentials and an endpoint. Templates export. What genuinely does not transfer is sender reputation: a new IP or domain starts cold, and mail from a cold IP lands in spam until it is warmed over days or weeks. That is the real cost of switching email providers, it is invisible on a feature comparison, and it is why migrations are staged rather than cut over.
What you are moving to
Postal is a full self-hosted mail platform: sending, receiving, bounce handling, click and open tracking, DKIM signing and a web interface — the parts you would otherwise assemble from Postfix, OpenDKIM and a database. MIT, around 17k stars. It is the only option here where addresses never leave your infrastructure, which for GDPR-sensitive senders is not a preference but a requirement. The honest warning: running a mail server well is a real discipline, and reputation is unforgiving of mistakes.
Free and open source. You supply the server and the IP reputation.
Postal strengths
- MIT with no enterprise carve-out
- Recipient addresses never leave your infrastructure
- Full platform — sending, receiving, bounces, tracking, DKIM
- No per-email cost at any volume
What you give up
- You own IP reputation, and warming takes weeks of care
- Running mail well is a genuine specialism
- Blocklists are unforgiving of configuration mistakes
- No shared warmed pool to fall back on
The migration, step by step
- 1Get a VPS with a clean IP and confirm the provider allows port 25 outbound — many do not
- 2Install Postal, then configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC before sending anything
- 3Warm the IP slowly: start at low volume and increase over two to three weeks
- 4Migrate transactional sending first and keep marketing on SendGrid until reputation is established
- 5Monitor bounce and complaint rates daily during warm-up
The gotcha
Deliverability is the whole game and a new IP has no reputation. Sending your normal volume on day one guarantees the inbox providers treat you as spam. The warm-up is not optional and it cannot be rushed.
When to stay on SendGrid
Deliverability is business-critical and nobody on the team wants to own it — this is the migration most likely to go quietly wrong.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-09-27 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.