Looking for a SendGrid alternative that also covers inbound mail?
No per-email markup from us and a smaller surface area — Flowmails is what you ship when SendGrid's feature breadth has become overkill for your actual workload, but you need inbound mail and route tables too.
SendGrid is a great product — it's where most teams land the first time they need transactional email that "just works." But as your stack matures, the calculus often shifts: data residency requirements, predictable cost at higher volumes, and the desire to own the whole mail surface — inbox, route table, events and outbound — behind one API instead of three vendors.
Flowmails is what you ship when those are the things you've started to care about. It connects to your domain provider over OAuth and runs one shared mail worker for every tenant, so your inbox, outbox, and route table live in one place, scoped to your domain. There is no per-email fee on top of your provider's own pricing; the platform subscription is what you see on the /price page.
SendGrid's free tier is 100 emails/day forever; paid plans start around $15 / month for 50,000 emails and scale to six-figure annual contracts at high volume. Flowmails' Base plan is $0; Pro is $9.9 / month and Enterprise is $39.9 / month.
SendGrid is a hosted API — sign up, verify a sender domain via DKIM, call the API or SMTP relay. Flowmails connects your domain provider over OAuth and provisions the shared mail worker, the storage and the route table for you.
SendGrid: large teams that need its dedicated deliverability consultants, dedicated IPs, and sub-user management. Flowmails: teams that want a leaner stack with inbound mail and route tables included.
SendGrid ships an SMTP relay in addition to its REST API, so legacy apps can keep talking to it. Flowmails speaks HTTPS REST only — there is no SMTP relay on the Flowmails side. If you depend on SMTP for legacy clients, keep SendGrid (or a relay) for that surface.
Highlights
What Flowmails does differently
Data residency
Flowmails' own storage, scoped by domain id
Inbound parse webhook
Yes
SMTP relay
No (REST only)
Dedicated IP
No (Cloudflare-managed shared IPs)
Sub-user management
Per-account roles, per-domain API keys
Per-email pricing
No
Migration
How to migrate from SendGrid to Flowmails
Audit which SendGrid features you actually use
If you depend on dedicated IPs, sub-user management, or the SMTP relay, map those to a Flowmails equivalent (or decide they aren't required). Flowmails is intentionally a smaller surface.
Connect the domain's provider
Flowmails provisions Email Routing on your provider's zone and picks an outbound provider per domain. Cloudflare is the routing provider we support today, so a domain on another DNS host needs its zone on a supported provider first.
Swap send traffic to the Flowmails SDK
SendGrid SDK calls map to Flowmails SDK calls. Update the auth (Flowmails API key instead of SendGrid API key), update the from-address to your verified zone, and ship. Templates port as plain HTML.
FAQ
Common questions about switching from SendGrid
Other alternatives