App development shop cloudThing solves email with Twilio SendGrid
Time to read: 2 minutes
cloudThing is a full-service development shop that architects, builds, and manages custom software and cloud-born apps. Based in Birmingham, UK, cloudThing has completed over 100 projects for clients, serving one million downstream customers.
Fran Thomas, co-founder and technical director, manages the implementation of cloud technologies including email services at cloudThing.
“Email is a foundational component to the apps that we build. In addition to notifications, we send account verification emails to confirm a user’s registration to our client’s app. These are crucial to onboarding users, and it’s really important that we do that successfully.”
Challenge
Fran and his team have designed and built a number of messaging platforms serving over 2 million users, so they have a deep understanding of email.
In 2013, cloudThing needed to implement email for an event booking platform for a client. Fran and his team knew from experience that managing an email program in-house is very resource intensive and instead decided to search for a cloud-based email partner.
“There’s so much to think about to ensure successful delivery of emails,” says Fran. “Managing email deliverability would have been an ongoing effort on our side and we just wanted to get back to what we do best—building apps.”
Solution
cloudThing is very intentional with selecting the most reliable and cost-effective SaaS partners. “We pay a lot of attention to the cloud services available to us,” Fran says. “These services are ultimately what we sell as our software development capabilities.” When selecting an email vendor, Fran and his team needed a solution that would have:
- Powerful APIs that are easy to integrate with their client’s apps
- The ability to manage multiple accounts and provide customized access to client accounts
- Reporting to track deliverability performance for clients and spot areas of improvement
cloudThing ultimately selected Twilio SendGrid as its email partner for this client. Satisfied with their deliverability and ease of integration, Fran and his team have used Twilio SendGrid for email requirements ever since.
Results
Now Fran and his team never need to worry about email delivery. This frees them up to spend their valuable time building apps that delight their clients. “We’re great believers in allowing cloud providers to do what they do best so that we can worry about other problems that aren’t so easily solved,” says Fran.
With Twilio SendGrid, one of cloudThing’s high email volume clients has achieved deliverability rates over 97%, indicating a healthy, hands-off email program.
Bottom line
Twilio SendGrid is a perfect fit for cloudThing’s email program because of our:
- Ease of integration: Twilio SendGrid’s SMTP relay and flexible APIs helps easily meet your client’s needs, expanding and enhancing your offerings.
- Deliverability: Sending over 60 billion emails from our platform monthly, senders can feel confident that their messages will get delivered.
- Cost efficiency: They can manage multiple clients from one account on a pricing model that scales with their growing email needs
“Twilio SendGrid is a software staple for us and we trust it to deliver our client’s email. We intimately know the ins-and-outs of email, but we would have to invest thousands of hours of upkeep in an ongoing basis to manage email in-house. Using Twilio SendGrid allows us to instead focus our hugely valuable architecture and engineering time on building products. Email is on the list of solved problems for us – it just works.”
