I think there's only one appropriate response when Amazon comes stumbling into your market: http://blog.easydns.org/2011/01/18/easyroute53-nameserver-in...

The thing is, Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will. And that's a good thing: They focus on the absolute core of a product need - and let providers like heroku or dropbox grow like a vine on top of them, providing things people want.

> Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will

Seems to me that Amazon has been quite busy innovating and expanding their feature set.

You're right, I misspoke when I said "innovate" - what I meant was, Amazon's goal is to create reliable base-level services for the developers of the world. Whereas a Sendgrid might provide unsubscribe management and fancy graphing, I don't see Amazon adding on additional services like this.

They already added fancy graphing to EC2, EBS and RDS just recently. What used to be CloudWatch services became free and integrated into the dashboard of those other services. Elastic Beanstalk is also a layer above their base-level services. Seems like Amazon is willing to move up the chain and will continue to in the future.

then they'd be moving into MailChimp's turf! I'd say they're in a pretty tight spot...

I think they aligned their prices with Google App Engine (they charge the same $0.1 per 1000).

Why are you going to switch from the other providers to Amazon? Because of price?

I think this must have always been a concern for companies like Sendgrid. As someone who operates a service to allow incoming email (CloudMailin) there's nothing more worrying than the big boys coming along an sweeping you up. However, so long as you continue to add value people will choose your product over the competition. Moves like this can ultimately lead to a far better product in the long run.

Having tried the service it's currently clunky and command line based too! I wouldn't actually call these comparable products. SES seems more like it replaces transactional emails that users might have previously event sent without a lot of a anti-spam measures. The value that companies like Sendgrid/Mailchimp/Postmark add outweighs the price for me and, at least, in the short term I won't be moving anywhere.

Sendgrid is half as expensive once you get beyond sending a handful of emails. $.005 vs $.01

I am a sendgrid customer, and unless Amazon is cheaper and can solve the deliverability issues, there is no way I'm switching.

Amazon is $0.10 per 1 thousand emails.

Sendgrid is $0.00045 at the highest tier which is $0.45 for 1 thousand.

That means Amazon is much cheaper even at Sendgrid's highest tier, further, it's much cheaper at the lowest tiers as well.

Wow, I'm an idiot and you might have just saved me a bunch of money, so thank you!

Why? We use Sendgrid where I work and they're great. Probably quite a bit more expensive though. We pay over $100 a month just to send email.

Umm .. that's why!