Initially pricing, and the 'only pay a little up front' aspect - no monthly contracts. I just charge up the account now and then. It used to be $1/1000 - dropped in Jan to half that (yay).
The setup wasn't too hard, and ntoper and a couple others were in IRC to ask questions of (and they provided some more support via email as well). I was a transition customer - started about a year ago when they were putting the polishing touches on their public offering. What I had was rather beta - no self-serve payments, reporting didn't work too well - but it's improved a lot in the last year (and even a year ago it worked for what I needed).
edit: the support was primarily me setting up domain keys and such on my end with DNS entries - the instructions weren't as clear to a non-sysadmin mortal such as myself a year ago.
So, pricing, pay as you go, IRC support and friendly people. Does that help?
Interesting. I've liked Sendgrid since when we've had issues of peoples email going to spam folder they are pretty helpful in tracking down why. (mostly saying gmail is a black whole (: )
I hadn't learned of sendgrid prior to going with critsend. That said, critsend has been fine with supporting my few issues, and until they let me down I'll keep trusting them :)
The setup wasn't too hard, and ntoper and a couple others were in IRC to ask questions of (and they provided some more support via email as well). I was a transition customer - started about a year ago when they were putting the polishing touches on their public offering. What I had was rather beta - no self-serve payments, reporting didn't work too well - but it's improved a lot in the last year (and even a year ago it worked for what I needed).
edit: the support was primarily me setting up domain keys and such on my end with DNS entries - the instructions weren't as clear to a non-sysadmin mortal such as myself a year ago.
So, pricing, pay as you go, IRC support and friendly people. Does that help?