sendvia vs SendGrid

What each publishes about price, who owns the sending account, and where SendGrid is the better buy. One of the two prints no price against a send volume at all.

Should I use sendvia or SendGrid?

Use sendvia if you already run on AWS, want the sending reputation and the Amazon bill to stay in an account you control, and send enough that a flat monthly fee beats a rate per email. Choose SendGrid if you want a campaign builder and a contact database in the same account as the sending API, if you run mail for hundreds of customer domains, or if you need subusers, which sendvia has never had. The two are aimed at different buyers, and the table further down makes that clearer than any paragraph can.

Is sendvia cheaper than SendGrid?

SendGrid prints no price against any send volume, on any plan, so nobody can answer that from published figures. What follows is what each side publishes, which for one of them is nothing.

sendvia is $19.00 a month flat plus Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails, billed by Amazon straight to your own account. At 1,000,000 emails that is the flat fee plus $100.00 of SES, and the flat half of it is the half that never moves.

The empty column is the finding rather than a gap in our research. The page it was read from prints an entry price for each plan and never says which send volume either price buys, and the control that would answer that is drawn in the browser rather than written into the page. Pairing a published price with a guessed volume would be the least fair thing this table could do, so nothing is recorded and the cell says why.

Feature by feature

Every cell below carries the page it was read from and the date it was read. Where a plain yes or no would mislead, the cell says what the difference actually is instead of rounding it.

Whose AWS account, whose reputation, whose IPs

sendvia sends through an IAM user in your own AWS account. Amazon meters the mail and bills you for it directly, the SES sending identity is yours, and the addresses it leaves from are Amazon's shared SES pool unless you pay Amazon for a dedicated one. Revoke the key and sending stops the same minute, with the verified domains, the DNS records and the bounce history still sitting where they were.

SendGrid is the other arrangement, at a scale sendvia has never operated at. Your mail leaves on SendGrid servers and the reputation is SendGrid's, and a dedicated address is something you can buy from them if you would rather not share one.

The sending domains row above is where the gap between the two is widest, and it is worth reading before you plan anything at all: one side documents a ceiling in the thousands, counted per user and per subuser, and the other has a plan limit in double figures. If you run mail for hundreds of customer domains, that row is the whole answer and the rest of this page is detail.

The DNS setup row is the one place a rival automates something sendvia does not: where GoDaddy holds the domain, the records can be published for you rather than copied by hand. sendvia generates the records and then watches them, but you add every one of them yourself. sendvia has no dedicated IP of its own either. The only route to one is buying a managed IP from Amazon inside your own account.

The trade runs both ways, and ours costs you something. You set up the AWS account, you create the IAM user, and a new SES account starts inside Amazon's sandbox, capped at 200 emails a day to verified recipients, until Amazon grants production access.

Does sendvia support SMTP like SendGrid?

SendGrid publishes SMTP settings of its own at smtp.sendgrid.net. sendvia runs a relay on smtp.sendvia.io, port 587, with 2525 as a fallback for networks that block it, and your API key is the password.

The send call, side by side

Both are a single POST. SendGrid takes POST https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send and wraps the recipients in a personalizations array rather than a flat to field.

curl -X POST https://api.sendvia.io/v1/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sv_live_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "from":    "[email protected]",
    "to":      "[email protected]",
    "subject": "Your receipt",
    "html":    "<p>Thanks for your order.</p>"
  }'

curl -X POST https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "personalizations": [{"to": [{"email": "[email protected]"}]}],
    "from":    {"email": "[email protected]"},
    "subject": "Your receipt",
    "content": [{"type": "text/html", "value": "<p>Thanks for your order.</p>"}]
  }'

Both answer with JSON and both report a result per recipient. A successful sendvia call comes back as {"success":true,"total":1,"sent":1,"failed":0} plus a results array.

The reply that surprises a reader arriving from a provider which owns the sending account is the 422. sendvia refuses a from-address on a domain it has not verified inside your own SES account, because it has no sending identity of its own to fall back on. Verify the domain and the same call goes through.

# 422 {"error":"The domain \"yourdomain.com\" has not been verified. Add and verify it in the dashboard first."}

The relay takes the same credentials, so the same tool drives it:

curl --url smtp://smtp.sendvia.io:587 \
  --user "sendvia:sv_live_your_api_key" \
  --mail-from [email protected] \
  --mail-rcpt [email protected] \
  --upload-file receipt.eml

Logs and retention

sendvia keeps 7 days of send logs on the free plan and 90 on the paid one, and nulls the stored message body at half the retention period before the row itself is deleted. What it records against a message is a bounce, a complaint, a delivery delay or a rejection, published by SES to an SNS topic in your own account.

Delivery is not on that list, and it is the row to read carefully. sendvia leaves DELIVERY out of its SES subscription because subscribing to it flooded the webhook and stalled the site, so a message with no failure recorded against it two minutes after sending is marked delivered. That is an inference drawn from silence. Resend, Postmark, Mailgun and SendGrid all receive a real delivery event from their own systems, and sendvia does not.

Log history is a plan feature on both sides of this table, and each cell gives the low and the high across everything that provider publishes, paid add-ons included, rather than the end that flatters it. Read the row against the plan you would actually buy, not against the best case either side can reach.

Campaigns and lists

sendvia stores contacts, builds segments from rules over their fields and their engagement, imports a CSV with column mapping for exports out of other tools, and sends a newsletter to a list on the same flat fee as the transactional mail. There is no second plan to buy for any of it, which the newsletters row above spells out for both sides.

SendGrid is the stronger of the two on the contact side, and the wins section below says where and how far. This is the one comparison on the site where the rival is aimed squarely at a job sendvia has never tried to do, so read those scenarios before the feature table rather than after it.

What does SendGrid do better than sendvia?

These come out of the same data file the table above does, and each one links to the page it was checked against.

Who each one is for

Neither line is a slogan. If the one on the left describes you better than the one on the right, the rest of this page is a set of details you do not need.

Can I migrate from SendGrid to sendvia?

Yes, and most of the work is on the Amazon side rather than in sendvia. You need an AWS account, an IAM user allowed to use SES and SNS, and production access, which Amazon reviews and usually grants within 12 to 24 hours. After that you verify a sending domain, publish the records sendvia generates for it, and export your contacts.

Check what is missing before you start, because this is the route most likely to hit a ceiling: there is no dedicated IP option, no inbound email or parsing, no teams or sub-accounts and no official SDKs. The domain allowance is a plan limit rather than a soft cap, and a contact import arrives through an ordinary form upload bounded by PHP limits rather than a documented ceiling.

Migrate from SendGrid to sendvia walks through the rest. Plan the parallel run yourself: same traffic through both for a week, compare what lands, then cut over.