I’m not going to comment specifically on the substance of the SendGrid and PlayHaven mess because it’s complicated and completely out of hand already. It’s a pretty sad situation for everyone.
But as it turns out, I am a SendGrid customer. I use the free plan to send email in a few of my web apps. I started using SendGrid because they offered it as a simple Heroku add-on, not because of any particular research or opinion about what they were doing well.
So it’s a good time to move away, to a company that I can pick based on merits and attitude and not just because it was the default choice. I’ve long been a Beanstalk customer; I use it for all my private Subversion and Git repositories. The makers of Beanstalk, Wildbit, have a second product similar to SendGrid that looks like what I need: Postmark.
Wildbit also had a good blog post yesterday from some of the aftermath of the controversy as it relates to SendGrid (and Postmark) competitors:
“We’ve been doing this a long time, 13 years as a company, 8 years since launching our first product. There’s this rule, this gentleman’s agreement I thought existed. When someone you compete against is suffering, especially as a result of any kind of infrastructure issues, shut up and keep your head down. You do not use this situation to gain a few customers eager to jump ship.”
I like what I see in Postmark. I’ve set up an account and should have my apps switched over to Postmark this weekend.
