Guide

Migrate Off SendGrid: A Decision Guide

Most 'migrate off SendGrid' guides assume you're swapping one transactional sender for another — and usually you are. But SendGrid did two jobs: it sent mail from your domain, and through Inbound Parse it received mail too. Those two halves move to different places. This guide routes the outbound half to a sender and the inbound half to a contextual API, with a migration checklist for each.

Written by Nick Barraclough Product Manager

Verified — CLI 3.1.16 · Gmail, Outlook · last tested June 8, 2026

Command references used in this guide: nylas email list, nylas webhook create, and nylas init.

Why are teams leaving SendGrid?

Teams leave SendGrid for three recurring reasons. The free tier became a 60-day trial capped at 100 emails per day, so hobby and early-stage projects lost a permanent free plan. Cost at volume favors alternatives — Amazon SES sends at $0.10 per 1,000 emails. And newer APIs like Resend offer a cleaner build experience that pulls developer-led teams away.

SendGrid remains a capable sender, owned by Twilio since its 2019 acquisition, and a migration isn't mandatory. But if any of those three reasons applies, the move is straightforward once you separate what SendGrid actually did for you. Start by listing every place your code calls SendGrid: each one is either an outbound send or an inbound receive, and the two go to different homes.

What replaces SendGrid for sending?

For outbound mail from your own domain, three transactional senders cover almost every case. Resend leads on developer experience and React Email templates with a free tier of 3,000 messages a month. Amazon SES is the cost leader at $0.10 per 1,000 and integrates natively with AWS. Postmark specializes in fast, reliable transactional delivery with strong analytics.

ReplacementBest forFree tier
ResendDeveloper DX, React Email3,000/month
Amazon SESLowest cost at scaleSandbox (200/24h)
PostmarkFast transactional deliveryTrial credits

Whichever you pick, the migration steps are the same: verify your sending domain (re-publish SPF and DKIM records for the new provider), port your templates, export your suppression list so unsubscribed addresses stay suppressed, and swap the API client. Run both providers in parallel for a few days, comparing delivery, before cutting over fully.

Were you using SendGrid Inbound Parse?

SendGrid's Inbound Parse webhook turns email sent to your domain into HTTP POSTs — teams use it to receive replies, support mail, or form-to-email. That's the half a transactional sender swap won't cover, because receiving mail is a different capability than sending it. If your migration includes Inbound Parse, decide where inbound goes before you assume Resend or SES handles it.

Two patterns fit. If you only need to receive at a domain you own, SES inbound receiving rules (to S3 or Lambda) replace Inbound Parse directly. If what you actually wanted was access to a user's real mailbox — replies landing in someone's Gmail, not just your domain — that's a contextual API. Nylas reads and sends across Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, Yahoo, iCloud, and IMAP and delivers changes as signed webhooks.

# Contextual receiving: read a connected user's real inbox
nylas init
nylas email list --json --limit 20

# Or get new mail as signed webhooks (replaces a parse webhook)
nylas webhook create \
  --url https://your-app.example.com/webhooks/inbound \
  --triggers message.created

What does the migration checklist look like?

A clean SendGrid migration is a sequence, not a single swap. The eight steps below separate the outbound and inbound halves so neither gets dropped. Run them in order, keep SendGrid live until the last step, and you avoid the classic failure: cutting over sends on Friday and discovering on Monday that inbound replies vanished.

  1. Inventory every SendGrid call and label each as outbound send or inbound receive.
  2. Choose the outbound replacement (Resend, SES, or Postmark) by cost and DX.
  3. Verify the sending domain on the new provider — re-publish SPF and DKIM.
  4. Port templates and export the suppression list so unsubscribes carry over.
  5. Swap the outbound API client; run both senders in parallel for a few days.
  6. For Inbound Parse, decide: SES receiving rules (your domain) or a contextual API (user mailboxes).
  7. Wire inbound to the new path and confirm replies arrive end to end.
  8. Cut over fully, then disable the SendGrid account once metrics match.

The deliverability records are the step people skip. Whatever sends your mail next must pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — and since February 2024, Gmail rejects bulk senders that don't. See SPF, DKIM, and DMARC explained for the records, and SendGrid vs Nylas for the outbound-versus-contextual split in detail.

Next steps