SendGrid is too complicated for my app emails, what simpler options are there?

Yes — if SendGrid feels like overkill, there are several simpler email options depending on what you need:

Simple email delivery services

These are easier to set up than SendGrid and good for app emails like password resets, notifications, and receipts:

• Postmark — very developer-friendly, excellent deliverability, focused on transactional email only.
• Mailgun — still fairly flexible, but a bit simpler than SendGrid for many use cases.
• Amazon SES — cheap and reliable, but setup can be more technical than the others.
• Resend — modern API, very simple developer experience, especially nice for app/product emails.
• SparkPost — solid transactional email platform with decent tooling.

If you want the absolute simplest setup

• Resend is often the easiest “modern app email” choice.
• Postmark is great if you want reliability and don’t need marketing features.

If you barely send emails

• You can also use your cloud provider’s SMTP/email service:
  • AWS SES
  • Google Workspace SMTP
  • Microsoft 365 SMTP

These can be simpler if you already use those platforms, but they’re not always the easiest for app integration.

For local development / testing

If your issue is mainly testing emails in dev:

• Mailpit
• MailHog
• Ethereal Email (fake SMTP inbox for testing)

Quick recommendation

• Need easy app emails? → Resend or Postmark
• Need cheaper at scale? → Amazon SES
• Need a general-purpose option? → Mailgun

If you want, I can also suggest the best option based on your stack (Node, Python, Rails, etc.) and whether you need transactional vs marketing emails.