We sent identical email through all four major platforms and scored setup time, API ergonomics, deliverability, and price. The results were not what the marketing pages promise.
A brand-new domain has zero reputation, and receivers treat that as suspicious by default. The four-week warmup schedule we use, the subdomain trick, and what to do when it goes wrong anyway.
Resend is the shiny new email API that developers keep recommending. SendGrid is the veteran that runs huge chunks of the internet’s mail. I sent production traffic through both — here is the honest verdict.
Brevo bills by messages sent, Mailchimp bills by contacts stored. For a lot of real-world lists, that one difference decides the whole comparison.
They both send email, but they are built for completely different jobs. After running both for a year, here is the honest breakdown of where each one wins.
Stalwart is a single Rust binary that does SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, and web administration. Here is what it actually takes to run it yourself, from a blank VPS to delivered mail.
Postfix is thirty years old and still moves a huge share of the internet’s mail. Here is the configuration that works today, the modern requirements people skip, and when to choose an API provider instead.
SendGrid’s dashboard has a hundred buttons, but the API you need daily is small. Restricted API keys, the Mail Send endpoint, dynamic templates, and event webhooks — the parts that matter.
A complete walkthrough of Resend’s email API: domain verification, your first send with curl, the Node SDK, error handling, and the webhooks you should set up on day one.
The three records that decide whether your email is trusted, the mistakes that quietly ruin deliverability, and the rollout order that avoids self-inflicted outages.