When setting up self hosted Discourse forums or any other web app I happened to be making I used to use SendGrid. They had a generous free plan. Since I never really sent that many emails I never had to pay. I would just generate an API key for the email sending that I needed and be on my way. I’m not against paying for a service. Totally down for it, but my projects have all been little hobby projects and never really taken off. So, I’d rather not pay for a service I’m not really using all that much. Anyways, SendGrid now requires me to pay $20 per month, so I went looking for a new email service that offered a free tier that doesn’t expire.

I first started out with Postmark, which does seem like a nice service, but they require a manual verification to approve your app before sending will work. Since I setup my project over the weekend they wouldn’t get back to me until Monday, so I bounced. They later did approve me after the weekend was over and I explained to them what my app did (its an RSS reader), but by then it was too late. I totally get that they are just cutting down on spam, but not my speed, I had already moved on.

So I tried out SMTP2GO and it was super easy to sign up. You do need a non-gmail account though. Not a problem though as I use email forwarding to my gmail from hover (my domain registrar) for $5 a year. The only thing that confused me at first with SMTP2GO is that they don’t use API keys for email sending. Instead you setup SMTP Users with a username and password and use those when configuring your app to send email. Not a problem at all, just different than what I was used to with SendGrid and Discourse has support for it.

SMTP2GO will allow you to send 1k emails per month on their free plan. So if you need a good email sending service for your next app definitely check out SMTP2GO.