I work at SendGrid as the Community Guy, so I thought I’d add my two cents Re: the comparison between SaneBox and SendGrid. Below is (a) the short story and (b) further details about SendGrid, to fully explain the differences…

The short story:
There are virtually NO similarities between the service SaneBox is offering and that which SendGrid provides to its customers. SaneBox is serving a consumer market (those who receive email), whereas SendGrid is selling to businesses (those who send email).

The long story:
SendGrid focuses on the delivery of email to the inbox – we serve as an email infrastructure and delivery service for our customers.

Businesses generally send two types of emails to their customers: 1) transactional (“welcome” emails, password reminders, purchase receipts, and other automated notifications) and 2) newsletters (marketing-focused promotions, company news, etc) to a list of customers or subscribers. The former category is sent on a one-to-one basis, while the latter is sent on a one-to-many basis.

SendGrid helps its customers send either of the above categories of email, but we specialize in (and built our company around) transactional email delivery.

Beyond simply placing these emails in the intended recipient inboxes, we also provide a number of other values:
– statistics: who opened an email, clicked on a link within a message, or marked your email as spam (plus much more)?
– scalability: as a cloud-based service, our customers can send 200 emails/day or 2 million/day.
– simple, flexible integration: we allow customers to use us as a SMTP relay, or they can choose to connect to our service through a number of APIs, which allow for custom solutions to fit any business type/model.

So, as you can see, the two services discussed here could really be complimentary from an end-user perspective. When it comes down to it, consumers want to get the emails they expect to see in their inbox (that’s where SendGrid comes in). However, because of the volume of email the average person has to manage these days, he/she also needs tools to make sense of all that content (this is where SaneBox comes in).

If you’d like to learn more about SendGrid, feel free to check us out at http://sendgrid.com.

Also, anyone is more than welcome to email me and my team at community [at] sendgrid [dot] com.

Thanks!

Tim Falls
SendGrid