Sayonara SendGrid; Hello Brevo 

When I wrote my own newsletter email service, I used SendGrid to handle the nitty gritty details of actually sending the emails. If I tried to roll my own email server, I would have to deal with so much nuance around security, spam, and other logistics that it wasn't worthwhile. However, you can logically argue this whole email service may not be worth my time on a per-hour basis, but I justify it because I'm ✨ learning new things ✨

SendGrid recently sent an email that ironically landed in my Spam folder. I almost never check my spam, but it's a good thing I did because it let me know that SendGrid would stop working in 60 days. Bold of them to start a letter like this with "Ahoy!"

You get what you pay for! Perhaps they made this decision to curb spam, but what matters to me is that I need to migrate.

How I did it

Since nobody recommended alternatives on HackerNews, I used Claude with all the bells and whistles: Opus 4, thinking mode, and web search turned on. It revealed Brevo, which has 3x SendGrid's email limit and a nearly turn-key migration. I told it to create a todo.md with step-by-step instructions to update the source code and move me over. 

I was able to install Claude on my Raspberry Pi, pulled down the repo, then Claude and I started hacking away at it. I had two rsspberry2email instances running side by side. I tested signing up/sending emails for my newsletter with the new service, and once everything looked good, I spun down the SendGrid instance and transferred the subscribers list to the Brevo instance.

Claude Code is such a game-changer

Last time I worked on this, I spent a significant amount of time on meta-work: copy/pasting code, Taildropping files to/from the Pi, repomix-ing for LLM context... Driving Claude from the command line saves so much time on top of the time it saves coding the actual thing. My total active time on this migration was maybe an hour.

I also have to say "bravo" to Brevo for such an easy transition. I just made an account, generated an API key, clicked an "Add All the Things for Me in Cloudflare" button and it was sending emails with my Cloudflare account's blessing in minutes.

Hopefully Brevo doesn't copy SendGrid and drop their free plan, but if they do, I can quickly migrate to another service again. Or maybe that's the point where I just open up my wallet for a proper newsletter service instead of being such a cheapskate.

Now for the real test: publish this post and hope nothing breaks 🤞 

Update: went off without a hitch