I feel like there's a business lesson in there somewhere, but can't quite put my finger on it.
Sorry for the winded explanation. I think the gist is there.
One day at the front page of HN of a single page where the only thing you can do is sign up to receive emails is enough to justify 1,000 emails a day IMO. Without knowing anything else, I think the customer support person that took the time to reply me a few times to explain the issue, could have made the decision that likelihood of my service being spam is ~0%.
edit: that's exactly what they did at Mailgun btw. The first reply came with a "I'll need to check with other team". Hours later, without any followup from me, came the second reply with "Thanks for providing the information. We have removed the limitations to your account." (copied pasted). Excellent execution in both getting the account and keeping the risk of delivering spam through their service very low. Compare this to Sendgrid, with three or four cryptic replies, and a lost account.
Check Amplitude's CEO HN thread about what drove the success of the company to the IPO. Among other things, making it easy/free for small companies to use Amplitude, even though their sole business model was to aim at big corporate accounts. For a few small companies that would turn into big corporate accounts or that were acquired by big corporations that would then adopt Amplitude and become big corporate accounts.
I think it would make strategic sense for SendGrid to greenlight my account. It was not a sensible, necessary anti-spam policy IMO, it was just poor execution.
I'm glad you shared that, because I've been all but completely against free trials lately. The advice is model dependent, but you've definitely made me think twice about considering free/low-cost options when I would've otherwise completely discounted the ideas due to the usual headaches(spam, abuse, etc).
Someone wants to give us money, for our product, at a price that will make us a profit. Let them.
I wish more businesses knew this lesson :(
But at the time I look at those and preferred a solution with less upfront configuration required and less things to manage in general. It was a side-project that required a very quick solution. Mailgun was perfect for this.
I had a hit on HN with a side-project last year [0]. It delivers public domain books in chapters to your email. So I was needing to send over 1,000 emails a day from day one basically.
I initially used SendGrid for my project, but SendGrid's free trial had a limit of 100 emails a day. Well, I just needed to upgrade, right? Wrong. Sendgrid had a rule where it was impossible to upgrade from the free trial until the trial period was over. So 90% of my emails were not being delivered because I wasn't in a paid plan and I couldn't upgrade to a paid plan.
The worst part is that it wasn't very straightforward to understand I was in that catch 22. It took me about 4 or 5 days of sending their customer support messages and them taking too long to reply and not being very clear in their replies to understand the whole issue. And even proving that my traffic was legit (the HN post was enough evidence that I was not sending spam I think) was not enough for them to allow me to upgrade.
So I immediately changed to MailGun. They had similar worries about a new account with significant email traffic, but I sent an email to customer support right after signing up, they replied in an hour or so already allowing me to upgrade. Never had an issue with MailGun and I am very happy with their tech and service.
I am now creating a business on top of email delivery and staying with them. Hope this acquisition doesn't change much in that front.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752