Plunk vs Sendgrid (by Twilio)
Sendgrid got started in 2009, and was bought exactly 10 years later by Twilio. Similar to Plunk, it’s a tool to send transactional and marketing emails.
But what makes us different? Well, a few things… We can even be used for free 👀.
Let's get into it.
The differences
Sengrid has a free tier which maxes out at 100 emails per day. This is similar to Plunk, where you get 3000 free emails a month, not capped per day. We like our approach more, but it’s broadly the same.
When we get into the priced tiers, things do start to change though.
Both Plunk and Sendgrid have somewhat of an unusual pricing structure.
With Plunk, you simply pay for what you use. Starting and ending at a very economical $0,001 per sent email. It’s paid per month, but it isn’t a subscription. If you send 1000 emails in June, and only 10 in July, your bills will reflect exactly that. No hidden costs whatsoever, and no money spent for things you didn’t use.
Sendgrid is a subscription that starts at $19,95, and you pay this from between 10,000 to 50,000 sent email per month. Still in this essential tier, you can move up to 100,000 sent emails per month, but they move the payment up to $34.95 per month.
If you require more features, you’re looking at $89.95 per month and beyond.
- Sendgun $ per email: $0.001955 (at 10,000 emails per month)
- Plunk $ per email: $0.001
Making Plunk nearly 100% cheaper in this tier.
When your sending amount goes up, Mailgun starts to become more economical.
One major downside of Sendgrid is the limit on webhooks. In the priced essential tier, you only get 2 configurable event webhooks. In higher tiers, a max of 5. This severely limits the amount of automated actions you can set up.
Webhooks in Plunk are unlimited.
We’ll be intellectually honest, and mention that the feature set on Sendgrid is larger than ours. Particularly the ‘Link Branding’ feature is one that we currently don’t have that looks promising.
Please visit Sengrid’s site and complete your research to see if you require all their features.
How to use Plunk for free
New to Plunk is self-hosting. If you want to completely own your sending and flow yourself, you can! Plunk can be self hosted on AWS SES very easily. Follow this self hosting guide on our docs to set that up.
Doing that, Plunk is effectively free! Of course withholding the costs to AWS that you then pay yourself.
In summary
While Sendgrid is a solid service, which is backed up by thousands of users, Plunk is more lightweight and perfect for smaller projects and developers that care about their bottom line.
Sendgrid is a SaaS run by a modern company with a ton of employees. You’ll get a solid product, but it’s filled with small schemes to make you gently move upstream and increase your monthly payments.
Artificially capped limits, removal of features, and more which have become commonplace.
If you choose Plunk, you’ll find a streamlined yet complete tool run by 2 blokes from Belgium who care about people’s ability to create products. We’ve worked to keep those schemes to an absolute minimum, and actively try to remain the cheapest yet high quality solution. We’re very lucky and humbled to be found by thousands of users who are delighted to use Plunk.
