Twilio SendGrid San Francisco CA Charge: Cancel, Refund, Dispute

A line reading “Twilio SendGrid San Francisco CA” on your card or bank statement is a recurring subscription charge from Twilio SendGrid, a cloud-based email sending service headquartered at 101 Spear Street in San Francisco.¹ If you don’t recognize it, the usual explanation is that you, someone in your business, or someone with access to your card once signed up for a paid SendGrid plan, and it has been billing every month since. The descriptor sometimes appears as “TWILIO SENDGRID,” “TWILIO INC,” “TWILIO.COM,” or “PAYPAL *TWILIO.”²

SendGrid is used by developers and businesses to send transactional email (password resets, receipts, order confirmations) and bulk marketing email. The free trial does not require a card and does not auto-convert, so any charge means a paid plan was activated at some point.³

Why the Amount Looks the Way It Does

Twilio SendGrid sells two products, each with its own subscription. You may be paying for one or both.

The Email API, for automated sending, starts at $19.95 per month (Essentials, up to 50,000 emails) and goes to $89.95 per month (Pro, up to 2.5 million). Premier pricing is custom.⁴

Marketing Campaigns, for newsletters and marketing sequences, starts at $15 per month on the Basic plan and $60 per month on the Advanced plan.⁵

If a monthly bill is bigger than the plan rate, the difference is usually overage. Emails or stored contacts beyond your plan’s cap are billed the following month at per-unit rates. The Essentials 50K plan charges $0.00133 per extra email and the Essentials 100K plan charges $0.0009 per extra email.⁶ The Pro 100K plan is $0.001 per extra email.⁷ For Marketing Campaigns, overage runs from $0.004 per extra email or contact on the Basic 5K plan up to $0.005 on the Advanced 200K plan.⁵

Why You Might Not Recognize It

A forgotten paid upgrade. SendGrid accounts are often created by developers, small business owners, or anyone trying out email automation, and the paid plan can outlive the project that started it.
Someone else on your card. A family member, business partner, or employee may have used the card to open the account.
A replacement card that inherited the subscription. Visa Account Updater and Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater share new card numbers with merchants who have recurring billing on the old card, so a subscription you thought ended with an expired or replaced card can continue on the new one.⁸
An account created through a partner platform. If the SendGrid account was set up through Heroku, Google Cloud, or another reseller, billing may run through that partner rather than SendGrid directly.⁴
A compromised account. Twilio acknowledges that bad actors can use stolen API keys to send large volumes of email through a victim’s account, which can then trigger overage charges.⁹

How to Cancel or Downgrade the Subscription

Only an account administrator can cancel or downgrade a paid plan. Support cannot do it for you.¹⁰

To cancel, log in to the SendGrid console and go to Settings, then Account Details, then Your Products. Click “Cancel Subscription” at the bottom, confirm, and complete the short survey. Your plan stays active through the end of the current billing month, and email sending stops on the first day of the next month.¹⁰ Canceling does not delete your account or data. To fully delete the account, contact SendGrid support after canceling.¹¹

To downgrade instead, use “Change Plan” on the same Your Products page and pick a lower tier. Downgrading Marketing Campaigns to the free plan deletes all stored contacts.¹¹

If the account was created through a reseller like Heroku or Google Cloud, SendGrid’s own billing team cannot help. You have to cancel through the partner.¹²

Getting a Refund From Twilio SendGrid

SendGrid will refund only the most recent month’s subscription charge, and only if all three of these are true: the account has not been used at all in the current calendar month, there are no overage charges, and there are no contacts stored in Marketing Campaigns.¹³ Prior months, overage fees, and contact storage charges are not refundable.

If you qualify, reply to your invoice email or open a ticket at support.sendgrid.com. Include your username or user ID from the invoice.¹² One important sequencing point: Twilio will not honor a refund request if you have already filed a chargeback with your bank.¹³ Try the refund first if you want to go that route.

Twilio’s terms of service treat fees as generally non-refundable but let you dispute a charge in writing within 60 days of the billing date. While a good-faith dispute is pending, Twilio will not charge late fees or suspend service.¹⁴

Disputing the Charge With Your Bank

If Twilio won’t refund you, or you believe the charge is truly unauthorized, you can dispute it with your card issuer. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, liability for unauthorized credit card charges is capped at $50, and many issuers apply a zero-liability policy.¹⁵

To keep your FCBA rights, send a written billing error notice within 60 days of the statement date the charge first appeared on.¹⁶ Mail it to the issuer’s billing inquiry address (not the payment address), by certified mail, with your name, account number, the charge amount and date, and an explanation.¹⁷ The issuer must acknowledge the dispute within 30 days and resolve it within 90. You don’t have to pay the disputed amount while it’s being investigated, and it can’t be reported delinquent.¹⁵

Debit cards get thinner protection. If a debit card was charged without authorization but not lost or stolen, notifying your bank within 60 days of the statement date limits your liability to $0. Waiting longer can leave you on the hook for the full amount of transfers after that window.¹⁸

Stopping the Charge From Coming Back on a New Card

If a SendGrid subscription you thought was over reappeared after you got a replacement card, the reason is almost certainly Visa Account Updater or Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater. Most banks enroll cards in these programs by default.¹⁹

Call your card-issuing bank and ask to be removed from the auto-update service, or ask them to place a “stop advice” that blocks updates only for Twilio SendGrid. There is no consumer portal for this; it goes through the bank.⁸ Full opt-out means every recurring subscription you have will also stop receiving your new card number, so you’ll need to update those merchants yourself when a card is reissued.¹⁹

If the Charge Came From an Email, Not Your Statement

Phishing messages sometimes impersonate SendGrid with urgent language about unpaid invoices or account suspensions. Legitimate billing emails come from sendgrid.com or twilio.com. Don’t click links from a suspicious message; log in to the SendGrid console directly to check your billing status, and forward the message to abuse@sendgrid.com.²⁰

If you think an actual SendGrid account of yours has been taken over, Twilio recommends deleting all API keys, changing the password, removing unrecognized teammates, and turning on two-factor authentication. You can also report it to fraud@twilio.com.⁹

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