Email:<p>Hi there,<p>Mailgun is adjusting our plans and pricing to more accurately reflect the value users get from the service and to make room for some great new deliverability features we just released.<p>Throughout 2019, we were hard at work adding and improving our email capabilities and optimizing our support to help your business grow. While many of these updates were made behind the scenes, the truth is that Mailgun can do a lot more than it could two years ago when we last updated our plans.<p>What does this mean for you?
On March 1, 2020, we will automatically transition your account to the new Flex plan, a pay-as-you-go plan comparable to the Concept plan you’re currently on. You’ll receive your first invoice under the new plan on April 1 if your amount due is greater than $0.50. According to your usage last month, your invoice under the new price per message of $0.0008 would have been $0 for December. It’s a modest change, but we wanted to be transparent about it.<p>What’s changing with the Flex plan?
Flex offers you the same pay-per-use model you were used to on the Concept plan. The main differences are that we are no longer offering 10,000 free emails or 100 free validations per month, and our support options now include limited ticket support as well as enhanced self-service Q&As so you can find answers faster. Additionally, while your existing routes will still be functional, new routes will not be supported on this plan.<p>What other options do I have?
We have several other plans available with additional features and service levels, including a new subscription plan called Foundation that starts at $35 per month. This plan provides access to new deliverability tools like Inbox Placement so you can effortlessly increase your deliverability and email ROI.<p>Looking for validations, inbound routing, or more support? Foundation is a great starter plan. If this is something you’re interested in, check out your plan options.
My company (MailChannels) sends email on behalf of more domains than any other transactional email provider (see <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/mx/transactional-email/traffic/Entire-Internet" rel="nofollow">https://trends.builtwith.com/mx/transactional-email/traffic/...</a>) because our customer base is hosting companies rather than individual senders. The whole transactional space has matured in the past year with SendGrid's acquisition by Twilio and Mailgun passing through a couple of different private equity portfolios. Mailgun is simply trying to make a profit; removal of the generous free tiers had to happen eventually.<p>In their S-1, SendGrid disclosed that it earned about 73% gross margins, spending roughly $18M in cost-of-goods-sold to earn $52M in revenue (six months ending June 30, 2017). Around that time, we estimate that they were sending roughly 30 billion messages a month, suggesting that they were spending $18M to send 30 billion messages - that's about $0.60 for every thousand messages.<p>If SendGrid's costs are universal in the industry, then that 10,000-message free tier, therefore, is costing Mailgun perhaps as much as $0.60 x 10 = $6.00 a month. If you have thousands of free accounts, the cost adds up rapidly on the P&L statement. I could be off by an order of magnitude about the sending cost, but you get the point.
So under the guise of spam protection, we have created an oligopoly of email gateways, despite sending an email being an utterly trivial, long solved problem, and now those companies are putting the squeeze on.<p>The best part about this particular item on the list of "things that have only gotten worse over time": they charge companies more to deliver what is essentially spam, and they conspired to make that spam show up in inboxes and "enhance" it with all sorts of tracking.
I use Mailgun with various client sites. Where I find these sorts of services awkward as they become paid (Google Maps APIs are similar) is that for each client I have to put my credit card on file, monitor charges and bear costs in case of a blow-up OR I have to go through the hassle of coaching technically hapless clients through logging in and adding a credit card.<p>“I thought you said it would be free?”
“It probably will be, but we still have to add your card.”
“What do you mean ‘probably’?”
We used to be customers of Mailgun, but last month moved over to SES. Not that there's anything wrong with Mailgun, SES's pricing is <i>far</i> cheaper (60K free emails if you're sending from an AWS instance), and deliverability is on par.<p>But SES is super basic. It's just an API, no fancy analytics.<p>So of course, I built a small web app that "wraps around" SES, and gives you some insight into what you're sending, some pretty graphs, and other stuff.<p>If anyone is feeling adventurous, it's <a href="https://messageray.com" rel="nofollow">https://messageray.com</a><p>You give it an AWS access key with permissions for SES, and you can send 60k free emails a month. It's just a side project atm, and completely free.
Losing the inbound routes functionality completes wrecks my use-case for mailgun. I've been using it as a way to have business emails come through a custom domain and then routed to personal email addresses. It actually works well enough as with personal email you can respond "as" the custom domain. I have a tiny startup with a few users that I use the routing to move incoming email to also their own personal addresses. Sure it's simple, but it's far cheaper than getting GSuite. If anyone has any advice for my situation, I could love to hear it.
We have used Mailgun to power our SaaS emails for years with great deliverability and without paying a cent. It makes sense for them to charge for their service. It was too good to last forever!
10k emails per month is generous. Maybe too generous. Selfishly I wish they didn't increase the price, but as a aspiring SaaS founder, it's totally fair that they did. They do provide value.<p>But 625 emails per month amounts to around 20 emails per day. If you have 5 customers, then you can send them 4 emails per day. So not much.<p>I wish they found a middle ground here.
Maybe a better idea for them would be to say charge you $10 upfront for 12.5k email credits which should last you a while. Seems like a better deal for "hobbyists" vs a bill at the end of a couple of months. For MG, they can collect payment upfront. I guess maybe for some people, going from free to $10 might be too much of a leap? We were on the "free" Mandrill plan which became PAID (which we were fine paying) but you have to pay for Mailchimp before you get the privilege to pay for Mandrill (we don't use Mailchimp at all), all our stuff is transactional. Hard to get out of it as we are using both inbound and outbound
ForwardEmail is a good alternative if you're just doing forwarding for now (also has Send Mail As from Gmail).<p>I built it because I was sick of the alternatives and it's 100% open-source.<p><a href="https://forwardemail.net" rel="nofollow">https://forwardemail.net</a>
I've been happy with Mailgun for free, super low volume sites (i.e. single digit emails per month.) However, I've been shopping around for alternatives because I have a domain that won't pass their dashboard validation of DNS records. I checked DNS from a wide variety of other tools, and everything works. I waited weeks but the dashboard still reports problems, but it doesn't tell me _what_ the problem is, and their support, naturally, isn't the best at the free tier. So I couldn't get any help from them on what the problem was. I'm open to the idea that I misconfigured DNS, despite it matching other domains, and the DNS tools validating my work, but without someone on their end giving me debugging information, I haven't been able to solve my issue, and have to use an alternative.
I opened a ticket with Mailgun kindly asking if there was any solution for people like me (small email senders, much less than 1000 email/month) who use their service for personal emailing, if they would provide a new plan that would be like Flex but include routing.<p>The response, aside the almost-automated one from the first ticket, has been that there might be an add on purchasable for the routing, in case anyone is interested.<p>I've always been happy to pay for my email where possible, the problem is that the pricing has never been balanced. $5/month PER ACCOUNT is excessive. For a family of 4, that's 20$/month for sending emails.<p>Mailgun is going to have the flex plan ($1/month basically) or the foundation plan, $35/month, nothing between those two. I hope they implement something for smaller companies and for single person
This is super frustrating.<p>I was using Mandrill which changed their pricing, so Sparkpost had a great offer for new users. Then they had such a terrible bait and switch [0].<p>I then did hours of research and switched to mailgun only to now need to find a new provider again. (I don't blame Mailgun here, it's not like they made an explicit promise "this won't ever go away").<p>I'm not opposed to paying for usage, but my app is entirely seasonal so I only send emails about 4 months out of the year, and I don't want to pay monthly when it's not in use.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cdpjb5/sparkpost_promised_twice_that_they_were_gonna/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cdpjb5/sparkpost_pr...</a>
10k was probably too generous but that's a radical change. $35 per month to receive emails is steep.<p>One thing that has always been expensive and still is is email validation. $35 per month and you still have to pay $1.20 per 100 validation. Does anyone know why this feature is so pricey?
Whoa. Thank you so much for telling me this. I am literally in the middle of a one-day project to send nearly 10k emails and have been using the free tier for years with no issues. I was just thinking today about how good the free tier is. I am not surprised they are making this change. I will gladly upgrade, Mailgun provide a great service and I have never had an issue.
Not surprised. Pretty much all transactional email services have done this and I have have used mandrill, sendgrid, sparkpost so far. Perhaps it is not cost effective to provide such high tiers or not worth it due to spammers.
Why hasn't someone built an email system that only accepts signed payloads?<p>Email would only be allowed into my inbox if it was signed. Then, layer 2, it would only allow signed emails from senders whom I've accepted their public key.<p>A separate tab would show me all incoming request to accepts public keys (request to send email)<p>Now to opt-in to a marketing email I first accept their public key. To opt-out I delete their public key. Their email now goes to /dev/null.<p>Senders wouldn't have to re-implement unsub/subscribe, spammers would be /dev/nulled, and we could later add encryption on top of signing as a requirement.
Is this going to affect my current account? I've been using mailgun for years under this 10k limit to send mail from all my domains for free except once when a bunch of alerts sent thousands of emails.
I'm currently sending 3k emails per month so if I believe it would cost $2.4. I'm completely fine with that.<p>However, I receive < 500 emails per month and that would cost $420 per year. That's just not possible for a small startup.<p>And only 1 month notice. It feels like what happened with the Google Maps API pricing. I wish there was a middle ground for small businesses.
There was an earlier discussion with 'Tell HN' title talking about 625/month. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22192543" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22192543</a>
When I access the page I read "Get 5,000 free emails per month". Maybe they're A/B testing?
I received a variation on this mail too. I signed up on their free plan years ago to play with the API, eventually setting it up just to do mail forwarding to GMail from my domains.<p>This move makes sense and I hope it works out for them, though I'm a bit disappointed, as $35 a month for low volume mail forwarding is just more than I'm willing to pay. I'd have paid $5 a month to save me the hassle of migrating, but $35 means I'll be finding an alternative. I doubt personal mail forwarding is their target market anyway.<p>Fastmail is probably more suited, and at $5/m is the right price point.
Mh interesting. I was using that free tier to handle my family email addresses (personal and "group-like" email addresses,eg. Family@blah would direct to the entire family).<p>What alternatives do I have to send and receive emails using my custom domain? I don't love the idea of paying for gsuite (too many features for what I need). But it's hard to think of email providers that allow me creating aliases / groups for my personal email.<p>All I really need is a redirect to gmail and a way to send through that domain
I am trying to figure out where 625 comes from? Nowhere in the email or on the pricing page that I can find does Mailgun say how many free outbound emails you get now.
Hi! So, for the past year I’ve been working on a self-hosted service to allow people to switch between different email providers at runtime. Basically, how can we make it easy for people to configure how, or when, to use a given SMTP provider, or do failover, when changes like this happen.<p>We don’t have a landing page or anything- just working code! Would anyone here like to see it working or be willing to share feedback?
I don't think I mind this change. I mostly use my own mail servers, but when I setup a Discourse forum a couple months ago, it was so easy to turn it on with Mailgun that I gave it a try (the forum was migrated from an existing forum that sends about 9,000 email notifications per month, so I was going to be pushing the limit a little bit on the free tier right away). I definitely wasn't, and am not, willing to pay $35 a month for sending email for a forum I'm paying $20/month to host, and for a service I could setup in an afternoon on a $5/month VM, but if they want to charge me $8/month to send 10,0000 messages, I'm absolutely fine with that...the API, bounce processing, reporting, etc. are definitely worth a few bucks.<p>Mailgun was the obvious choice when I set it up, since it would be completely free for the volume I send, and I'll probably stick with it for that forum that's already using it, but now maybe I'll look around at the other options again for my next project.
Here's a discussion from 6 years ago when they first announced their new plans: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226964" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226964</a>
I submitted this under the title "Mailgun eliminates 'Concept' plan, no longer offering 10000 free emails/mo(<a href="https://www.mailgun.com/pricing)"" rel="nofollow">https://www.mailgun.com/pricing)"</a> but it was a dupe. I think mine might be a bit more descriptive title, though. They are not offering 625 for free. There is a 3 month trial that gives you 5,000 emails.<p>Does anybody know the $0.0008/email is the real pricing, or if you have to pay $0.80/1000 up front like the footer of the price table says?
I'm a happy customer, and will be moving to foundation plan soon.<p>If I didn't rely on their inbound email parsing, I could get by on the flex plan for less than $10/mo.... it's still super cheap.
Businesses need to prioritize customers to maintain their continued success. Free customers with a solid product quickly build trust in the developer ecosystem but its hardly a model that scale. Where i am scratching my head: did mailgun just miss an opportunity to be the good guy? $1 a month to keep your existing limits would cut the demographics into those that need it, and those that use it b/c its free.
Any chance they are A/B testing this?<p>I'm a MG user and haven't received that email and their page is showing me 5K/month free tier.
I was very glad to see this change it’s always bothered me that mailgun, an awesome company, was leaving this much money on the table. Even if they had lowered I’d to 2000 all that time it would be very generous.<p>Disclaimer: I might feel this way because they gave me an awesome tshirt one time!
Surprised no one has mentioned the gutting of log retention with the lower tier plans. The logs have been a key value proposition for us in helping to diagnose delivery issues.<p>Hopefully we stay grandfathered on our old plan, doesn't seem like we've had this email through yet.
Guess I will just move to Elastic Email, where you can have about 3000 free emails per month and they only charge $0.09 per 1,000 emails. With all the features, I doubt there is a better offer anywhere.
Their email today left me with a bad feeling. I assume that wasn’t the intention, but $35/month and only one month notice shouldn’t be buried in marketing speak.<p>I’d be happy to hear about alternative providers.
How are users calculated? If I have a system sending 1000 transactional emails per month to about 100 active users which are a subset of 10000 users, what would I pay?
I would be curious to know how many of their free tier users will be converted to paying customers. Is the bulk of their free tier users over the 625 mark or below?
Welp FML. I run a free/lets encrypt/no ads web adaptation of a board game with email verification for only signups and password resets, no "blasts", no nothing else, and I send out ~150 mailgun emails a day.<p>I mean I guess I can disable it and... if you lose your password, you're fucked? Handling my own SMTP sounds like a nightmare.
Bastards! We've been using it for our nonprofit and now our email delivery goes down the drain! I knew I should trust on something with "gun" in its branding!<p>Basically, we shot ourselves in the foot! Pun intended!