Recently opened a SendGrid account on their $14.95 tier for a new project and found the shared IP blocked by MS domains (outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com). MS servers confirmed the reason in the SMTP negotiaton as owed to the IP/provider.
We reported it to SendGrid and their only option was to upgrade to their $89.95 plan to get a dedicated IP. That plan comes with 100K monthly sends and we are nowhere near that.
So, the choice was to have a significant portion of important transactional emails, like registration, not go through or overpay for a plan that is wildly overmatched for us.
Email is hard, but this borders on unethical. Customers pay for and integrate a service that simply doesn't work as advertised. They make no offer to mitigate (e.g. change to a new shared IP). It's just "oh yeah, if you want the service to actually work reliably, you need to pay us 6X more".
We reported it to SendGrid and their only option was to upgrade to their $89.95 plan to get a dedicated IP. That plan comes with 100K monthly sends and we are nowhere near that.
So, the choice was to have a significant portion of important transactional emails, like registration, not go through or overpay for a plan that is wildly overmatched for us.
Email is hard, but this borders on unethical. Customers pay for and integrate a service that simply doesn't work as advertised. They make no offer to mitigate (e.g. change to a new shared IP). It's just "oh yeah, if you want the service to actually work reliably, you need to pay us 6X more".