We maxed out Sendgrid's free tier

2024-06-10

Henry

Last week, 666a's daily email volume exceeded the limits of Sendgrid's free tier. This caused a brief email alert service outage, as a number of email notifications were blocked from sending. This is now fixed: I've upgraded 666a's Sendgrid account to the $19.95/month billing tier and re-sent the email alerts that were initially affected by the issue.

This is a total lyxproblem, and a milestone I've been anticipating for a while. 666a's admin section has some email usage graphs which include daily sending statistics, so it's been possible to observe the upwards trend in the daily email volume.

Sendgrid performs some kind of background check on your account before they'll let you upgrade your billing tier and start sending larger volumes of email. I'd already completed this process in advance, months ago in fact, because the idea was to avoid an outage entirely and simply upgrade ahead of time shortly before hitting the limit.

I'd calculated that I had another month or two before it would become necessary to pay. What I hadn't counted on was that my cleanup work after the new Arbetsmiljöverket Webdiarium would be enough to tip us over the limit ahead of schedule. I try really hard to keep this thing running as reliably as possible and dropped the ball very slightly in this case.

The extra bill brings 666a's monthly running costs to somewhere in the 300kr range. It's roughly triple what it was before, but still manageable. This Sendgrid billing tier is overpowered for 666a's current scale, so in the near future I'll be looking into cheaper suppliers with smaller limits.

Later, it might be interesting to investigate the possibility of asking one or more of the central unions or umbrella organisations to help cover some of these costs. First though, I think let's get a whole first year of operation in the rear view mirror, and then see how we're looking in terms of statistics and numbers.

That kind of funding will probably become more achievable the more impressive the usage metrics sound. So if you want a more self-sustaining 666a then spreading the word about the service to your own personal network within the labour movement is probably a way you can help make it happen.