Migrate from SendGrid to a sender-reputation-first European alternative

Domain reputation transfers; IP reputation doesn't. Sender reputation at receiving mailbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft) is largely tied to the combination of sending IP and From: domain. Your domain reputation stays attached to the domain — when emails start flowing through new IPs but the same From: domain, receivers see "this domain has historical engagement, but the IP is new." That's exactly the warmup signal they expect, and it's why the 14-day ramp on new IPs lets us establish IP reputation without the domain reputation having to start over.

What we do not transfer: any historical IP-warmup data SendGrid built on the shared pools they used for your account. That data isn't portable, and frankly, much of it was specific to SendGrid's IP space anyway. The shared-pool baseline you had on SendGrid Essentials was actually a ceiling on your deliverability rather than a foundation — moving to dedicated IPs is what unlocks the next level of placement.

Templates port over with minor syntax changes. SendGrid uses Handlebars with some custom helpers ({{{dynamic_data}}} for HTML, custom conditionals for personalization). Our template engine is closer to standard Handlebars; the migration script our team runs typically handles 90% of the conversion automatically, and the remaining 10% (custom helpers, deeply nested conditionals) gets manual review during week 1.

Contact lists: SendGrid's contact API exports lists in CSV or JSON. For teams on Marketing Campaigns, the export-and-import workflow is straightforward — segments, custom fields, and suppression lists all transfer. For teams using SendGrid's contact storage as their primary CRM (which we don't recommend, but it happens), the export needs more careful handling because SendGrid's custom fields can drift from your application's understanding of the contact model. We work through that during the marketing migration phase.

Move just the email portion. Twilio's product suite (Programmable Voice, SMS via Twilio rather than SendGrid, Verify, Flex) is genuinely strong and you don't have to leave Twilio to leave SendGrid. The dual-subscription model that's a cost concern for email-only customers is less of an issue when you're getting value from other parts of the platform. We see many migrations where customers stay on Twilio for voice + SMS + Verify and move just SendGrid email to us. The unified-billing argument for keeping SendGrid weakens when your email volume is the dominant cost line.

Yes, and some teams do exactly that as a deliberate strategy. The pattern is "primary + standby" where one provider handles 95-100% of traffic and the other is configured for rapid failover. We've seen teams keep SendGrid as a standby for 6-12 months after cutover and only cancel once they're confident in our infrastructure's steady-state performance. The cost is a small SendGrid Essentials plan (~$15/month) for the standby capability, which most teams view as cheap insurance.

For multi-region applications, we've also seen permanent dual-routing — SendGrid for one geographic segment, us for another. The architectural complexity is higher, but if your application already has a feature-flag system, it's straightforward to maintain.

Honest comparison: Amazon SES is the lowest-cost option at high volume, full stop. If you're a heavily-AWS-integrated team running 10M+ emails/month and your engineering team has the operational appetite to handle SES's much-lower-touch service model, SES is probably the right answer on raw cost. SES added the Tenants feature in August 2025 (default 10K/day, request up to 300K, dedicated IPs at $24.95/IP/month) which addressed some historical complaints about scaling.

Where we differ from SES: we operate as a managed deliverability practice, not a metered API. The SES model assumes you'll own deliverability operations internally (warming, monitoring, complaint-rate management, list hygiene). Our model assumes you'd rather hand that to a named engineer in our Stockholm team. For teams without dedicated deliverability staff, our pricing typically beats SES + the cost of an internal deliverability lead. For teams that already have that lead, SES is a real alternative. We're transparent about that and don't pretend otherwise.

Export before cancellation. SendGrid retains a limited amount of historical data on the lower tiers (Essentials shows 3-day activity history; Pro shows 7 days; Premier varies). Before you cancel, we recommend exporting your last 30-90 days of email activity via the SendGrid Activity API or the dashboard CSV export. We don't import SendGrid's analytics into our dashboards (their event schema differs slightly from ours, and historical IP data doesn't transfer meaningfully), but we keep the export as part of your migration archive for reference.

For ongoing analytics post-migration, our dashboards cover the same dimensions SendGrid reported on (delivered, bounced, opened, clicked, unsubscribed, marked-as-spam) plus per-IP reputation data, Postmaster Tools integration, and seed-list inbox placement testing that's not standard at SendGrid's tier level.

Month-to-month on all standard plans, with a 30-day notice for cancellation. We offer annual contracts with a discount (typically 10-15%) for teams that want pricing certainty, but the annual is optional. The SendGrid pattern of trial-then-paid-then-overage doesn't apply on our side; the price you see on the plan page is the price you pay for the volume that plan covers, and any overage discussions happen before they appear on a bill.

For migration projects specifically, the first 60 days are structured so that you can route back to SendGrid at any time if the new infrastructure doesn't meet your standards. We don't lock you in during the period when you're still validating; the lock-in considerations (if any) come later, once steady-state is achieved.