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The SendGrid Alternative That Runs Your Sending For You

Your receipts and password resets leave an authenticated subdomain that we publish, warm and watch. From $60 a month, with 25,000 delivered emails included.
Who this comparison fits
Is moving your sending off SendGrid worth the disruption?
Most people arrive here after one specific bad week. A password reset landed in spam, or a customer swore they never got the receipt, and the answer inside the dashboard was three days of history and a bounce code nobody could read. SendGrid can send the mail. The open question is who owns the part that keeps it landing.
Icon representing deliverability that nobody on the team owns

Nobody on staff owns deliverability

The account exists and the API key works. The records were published once, by someone who has since left. When delivery starts slipping there is nobody whose job it is to notice.
Icon representing support offered as a paid add-on on every tier

Support turned out to be a paid add-on

SendGrid lists personalized support as available for purchase on every paid plan, Pro included. So the month you actually need a human is the month you find that out.
Icon representing a search through delivery records for one message

You cannot say whether one customer got their email

Searchable activity runs three days on Essentials and seven on Pro, with longer history sold separately. Support asks about an order from last month and the log rolled off weeks ago.
Platform versus service
What you buy from SendGrid, and what you buy from us
SendGrid sells infrastructure, and it is serious infrastructure. Twilio puts the platform at more than 200 billion emails a month. It does precisely what you configure it to do. What we sell is the configuring, the watching, and the fixing, on top of a sending path of the same class.

Cascadia

We publish the records, warm the subdomain, route your application mail and read the delivery numbers every month. You get an invoice and an inbox that works.

Without Cascadia

You get an API key and a documentation site. The DNS, the warmup, the suppression list and the monthly look at bounce rate all land on whoever has time that week.

Comparison

Cascadia vs SendGrid
Here is where a sending platform and a managed service part company. Every row below is about who does the work, not about whose servers are quicker. All of it is covered by our managed transactional email service.

Deliverability is our job, not yours

SPF, DKIM and DMARC published and kept aligned

Sending subdomain warmed before live traffic depends on it

Application mail routed and every template tested

Bounce and complaint rates watched on your behalf

A straight answer about one recipient, on request

Delivery history kept past seven days at no extra charge

Existing reputation damage audited and repaired

Support included at the entry price

One monthly price covering the platform and the work

Generic logo representing a comparable provider.
SendGrid

Where SendGrid fits

SendGrid is a serious platform with a decade and a half of delivery data behind it. If you have engineers who want direct control of sending, it is the obvious choice and this page will not talk you out of it.
Cascadia Web Services logo

Cascadia Web Services

Where Cascadia goes further

We are built for teams who need the mail to land and have nobody spare to make that happen.

Where SendGrid is strong

Icon representing global sending at very large scale
Scale almost nobody will outgrow
Twilio reports the platform delivers more than 200 billion emails a month. Whatever your volume turns out to be, it is not the interesting number in the room.
Icon representing an API connecting an application to a sending platform
A real API, properly documented
SDKs in every common language, plain SMTP if you prefer it, event webhooks and inbound parse. If your team wants to build directly against a sending platform, it is all there and it works.
Icon representing per-message cost falling as volume rises
Cheaper per message at volume
Overage on the larger Pro plans runs as low as $0.0005 an email. Past a few hundred thousand messages a month the per-message maths favours them, and it is not close.
Icon representing a dashboard of email delivery statistics
Analytics you can dig into
Deliverability insights, bounce classification and ISP feedback loop data all ship in the product. The data is there for anyone willing to sit down with it.
None of that stops being true because you are reading a comparison page. If you have an engineer who enjoys this work and volume in the millions, go and use SendGrid. This page is written for the other situation.

Where our service is stronger

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Someone is watching the numbers
Delivery rate and bounce rate get read every month by a person, against thresholds that mean something. Above 99 percent delivered is the normal range for transactional mail. Under 98 gets looked into before you have noticed anything.
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Setup is ours, not a link to the docs
We publish the records, warm the subdomain, route your application mail and test each template that goes out. You give us DNS access and roughly an hour.
Icon representing a single delivered message being traced
We answer for individual messages
Give us an address and a rough time, and we will tell you whether the message was accepted, bounced or rejected, and what the receiving server said about it. Without kept logs the honest answer to that question is a shrug.
Icon representing a damaged sending reputation being repaired
Broken reputation gets repaired
If the domain has been mailing bad addresses for years we audit what is published, correct it, request delisting where you have been flagged, and clear out the addresses causing bounces. Expect weeks rather than days.
If your mail matters more than your interest in email infrastructure, buying the outcome costs less than staffing it. The same reasoning runs through the rest of our managed email services.

Onboarding process

Moving your sending off SendGrid in four steps

The work here is mostly ours and mostly DNS. The one part nobody can rush is warming, because mailbox providers form their opinion of a new sending domain slowly and on their own schedule.

1

We audit what is published today

We read your current SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, look at what the domain has actually been sending, and check whether anything has been flagged anywhere. Sometimes this turns up the real problem on day one.

2

We publish records and build the subdomain

A dedicated sending subdomain goes up with authentication aligned across all three records. Your primary domain keeps its own reputation, held separately from anything your application does.

3

We route your mail and test every template

Your site starts sending through the authenticated path instead of the web server. Each template gets sent and read by a person, WooCommerce order mail included, rather than assumed to render.

4

Volume rises and we watch it

Sending climbs over two to three weeks while providers learn the domain. Then it gets boring, which is the whole point, and you get a monthly delivery number instead of a support ticket.

Testimonials

Don't Take Our Word For It

What changes when you move your sending off SendGrid
The stories are variations on one theme. The platform was never the problem. Nobody owned the strip of ground between the platform and the inbox, which is exactly what our transactional email service is for.
A laptop showing a dashboard that nobody has acted on

How this plays out

A password reset that quietly stopped arriving

A store sends a few thousand receipts a month without incident. Then resets start landing in spam, and support hears about it from a customer rather than from a dashboard. The activity log holds three days. The trouble started a fortnight ago, so nobody can say when it began or what changed.
A man at a laptop working out how long something has been going wrong

The other version of this

A sending domain carrying years of bad addresses

An older site collected addresses with no validation and mailed all of them anyway. Delivery has been drifting down for a year without anyone plotting it. The fix is not a plan upgrade. It is an audit and a delisting request, then several weeks of rebuilding a reputation that took years to spend.
99%

Delivered rate we work to

For transactional mail, above 99 percent delivered is the normal range. Anything under 98 gets investigated rather than averaged into the quarter.
25

Thousand delivered emails included each month

Twenty five thousand delivered messages sit inside the $60 monthly price. Past that it is one dollar per additional thousand, on the same invoice, with no upgrade conversation attached.
2 to 3

Weeks of warmup, typically

Volume rises gradually over two to three weeks so providers learn the domain before live traffic depends on it. The records themselves go up within a day or two of getting DNS access.

SendGrid alternative and managed transactional email FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a SendGrid alternative?
Any other way of getting your application mail delivered. That covers rival platforms such as Postmark, Mailgun or Amazon SES, and it also covers managed services like this one, where the sending is run for you instead of handed over as an API key and a documentation link.
How is Cascadia different from SendGrid?
SendGrid gives you a sending platform and expects you to operate it. We operate it. The sending domain, the authentication records, the warmup schedule and the monthly delivery numbers are ours to get right, and ours to explain when they slip.
How does the pricing compare?
SendGrid Essentials starts at $19.95 a month and Pro at $89.95, with per-message overage that changes with the plan you are on. Cascadia is $60 a month with 25,000 delivered emails included and one dollar per additional thousand. Under 25,000 messages we cost more than Essentials and less than Pro. The difference in both directions is the work.
At what volume does SendGrid become cheaper?
Fairly quickly, if you only count the sending. Overage on the larger Pro plans drops to $0.0005 an email against our $0.001, so past a few hundred thousand messages a month the platform cost clearly favours them. What does not change at any volume is that somebody still has to run it.
Does SendGrid include support?
Not as standard. Their own pricing page lists personalized support and expert services as available for purchase on Essentials, Pro and Premier alike. Here it is included at $60, because the support is the product.
How far back can I look at what was sent?
SendGrid keeps searchable email activity for three days on Essentials and seven days on Pro, and sells additional history separately. We keep your delivery history and answer questions against it as part of the service, which matters more than it sounds until the first time somebody asks about last month.
Do I need a dedicated IP?
In our view most senders under a few hundred thousand messages a month do not, because a dedicated IP with too little volume behind it builds reputation slowly and can perform worse than a well-run shared pool. SendGrid includes one from Pro at $89.95. We make the call on your actual volume rather than on the plan you happened to buy.
Can you move me off SendGrid without downtime?
Yes. The new sending path gets built and tested alongside the old one, and your application only switches over once messages are landing. Nothing is turned off before the replacement is demonstrably working.
Will my emails still go out during warmup?
Yes. Warming controls how fast volume climbs on the new domain, not whether your mail sends. Plan on two to three weeks before everything is running at full volume, and expect us to tell you where you are in that ramp rather than leaving you to guess.
What if my domain reputation is already damaged?
That is a repair job rather than a setup job, and it takes longer. We audit what is actually published, correct the records, request delisting anywhere the domain has been flagged, and clear out the addresses causing bounces. If the domain has been mailing bad addresses for years, expect a few weeks before the numbers settle.
Does this replace SendGrid or sit on top of it?
It replaces the part you were operating. We own the sending path end to end, so there is no platform account left for anyone on your team to administer, and no second invoice to reconcile against the first.
Can I keep my existing templates?
Yes. We test each one during setup rather than assume it renders, and anything built inside a previous provider's editor gets rebuilt on the new path. The ones that break are almost always the oldest ones nobody has opened in two years.
What happens to my suppression list?
It comes with you. An accumulated list of addresses that bounced or complained is worth real money in reputation terms, and starting clean without it means mailing known bad addresses on your first day at full volume.
Is this only for WordPress and WooCommerce sites?
No, though those are the common case. Anything that can send through an authenticated path can be routed, and the setup work on our side is much the same whether the mail comes from WordPress, a custom application, or both at once.
How quickly does setup start?
Records go up within a day or two of getting DNS access, and templates are usually done the same week. The warmup sets the real timeline, so the honest answer to when everything is finished is two to three weeks.
What if I want to leave?
Thirty days notice ends it and everything is portable. The DNS records were always on your domain because they were always yours, and your templates, suppression list and sending history come back in a standard format. We will also tell you what to point your site at next so the mail does not simply stop.
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