Sendgrid’s free tier disappears; New email options to consider

If you’re looking for a free way to add email sending capability to your Docassemble interviews, Sendgrid is no longer a good choice. Consider switching to one of the newer options listed below.

For those with a relatively low email volume, Sendgrid has long offered a moderate free tier of 100 emails/day. For those with simple transactional needs, this has been plenty.

Mid July 2025, Sendgrid sent its free tier customers a message that they were being immediately converted to a new “trial” tier and that the trial would expire in 12 days. Not a lot of notice, and something that sours me on using Sendgrid in the future. A handful of folks on the Docassemble Slack and one customer we helped in the past with server setup both reached out after their email stopped working. They hadn’t seen Sendgrid’s single email message sent in the summer doldrums.

What is transactional email, anyway?

Transactional email simply means email related directly to an action that the recipient took, such as:

• Creating a new account
• Confirming their email address
• Sending a completed document to themself

The most common alternative delivery services focus on marketing messages. Think: Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and the like.

Sendgrid is, really, a hybrid between a transactional email delivery service and a marketing-focused service. Long ago in the early days of the web, you could create your own email server and have a chance of your email making it in to your customer’s inbox. Spammers have ruined that for all of us. Most email clients are now setup to ignore email from untrusted sources, or even those that simply don’t yet have a track record of safety. Small volume senders can’t easily break through to get the reputation they need to be accepted by large email providers like Gmail and Office 365. As a result: today, a small number of commercial services deliver most of the world’s email, and if you don’t use one, the recipient of your email might never see it.

What can you use instead?

For those of you who used Sendgrid in the past: the free tier is over. Your options are:

• Bring your own existing mail service (e.g., Gmail or Office 365)
• Switch to a new free service
• Pay Sendgrid, or another provider, for basic email delivery

Best free options (for those with limited volume)

An incredibly cheap (but high effort) option

AWS Simple Email Service (SES) has a misleading name, because the setup is anything but simple. Be prepared to submit endless verification of your intentions for the service and to wait through a lengthy verification process. Once you pass that gauntlet, however, you will get rewarded with low cost, per-use pricing that is cheaper than any of the other options listed above. How cheap? 1000 email messages will cost you just 10 cents.

As of 2025, SES also has a 3000 messages a month free tier that matches Mailersend’s offering.

Recommended paid alternatives

If you are willing to pay for it: Mailgun seems to offer the best mix of services for small volume transactional needs. At $15/month, you get simple setup and reliable delivery with a service that is focused on transactional messages, not marketing. The next, $35/month tier, offers essentially unlimited custom domains, perfect if you’re in charge of a few brands or are helping out your own customers with email delivery.

Best practices for using mail with Docassemble

I recommend using a dedicated sub domain that is separate for the messages that you send from your own email client. For example: instead of messages coming from LemmaLegal.com, our Docassemble emails come from mail.lemmalegal.com.

Using a subdomain greatly simplifies the security setup, and it also helps ensure that if something goes wrong with your email delivery it doesn’t affect your most important delivery channel: direct 1-1 emails you send to your clients.

Keep security and deliverability in mind

All the services listed above offer you optional features you can enable to improve your deliverability. I recommend using them all. In most cases, it’s a simple matter of adding a few extra DNS records to your domain.

The most common email deliverability features you can enable are:

• SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, lets you specify a list of rules about who has permission to send email associated with your domain name.
• DKIM, or Domain Keys Identified Mail, adds a cryptographic digital signature to the email headers when mail is sent that is essentially impossible to forge.
• DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance, adds a recommended enforcement mechanism to the information contained in your SPF records. For example: you can tell email clients to discard messages that aren’t signed or that do not come from a known email sender.

You can read more at CloudFlare.com.

Need some help?

We’re always ready at Lemma to help you with email setup for your Docassemble server or other legal IT needs! Book an appointment by clicking the button below and we’ll give you a hand.