Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

422 points by kehphin 6 years ago | 255 comments

Email:

Hi there,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ttul 6 years ago |

My company (MailChannels) sends email on behalf of more domains than any other transactional email provider (see https://trends.builtwith.com/mx/transactional-email/traffic/...) 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.

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.

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.

donmcronald 6 years ago | |

The thing that annoys me is the standard operating procedure in tech is to offer stuff for free until a bunch of people depend on it and then to start charging as much as you possibly can once there's a large enough customer base that a reasonable percentage won't have any choice but to bear the updated costs.

Mailgun did a pretty nice job by offering a pay-as-you-go tier, but they still took features from the free plan and moved them into a paid tier where you have to spend a minimum of $420 per year.

I use Mailgun for less than 100 emails per month, but happen to use the receive filtering that's not going to be available with pay-as-you-go. I don't expect them to give me anything for free, but I'm not going to pay $420 / year for something that costs $.72 using your estimates.

webbie917 6 years ago | | |

It really has become a norm and is very frustrating for customers, while there is simply a better way to do this - kill free plan for NEW customers, but grandfather existing customers. Or at least introduce some break-even (low profit margin) plan/tier to move existing customers to, no need to force them off the platform completely.

Yes, spammers are a big issue for all ESPs (my own biz in this space is no exception), but no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

akira2501 6 years ago | | |

> The thing that annoys me is the standard operating procedure in tech is to offer stuff for free until a bunch of people depend on it and then to start charging as much as you possibly can [...]

Maybe someone more knowledgeable can help me.. but from a laymans point of view, how is this different from the practice of "dumping?" Shouldn't the FTC be more active in protecting markets from this type of strategy?

smoyer 6 years ago | | |

I'd love to have a business (of any sort) with customer lock-in ... sadly none of my start-ups have ever achieved that position.

dumbfoundded 6 years ago | | |

I don't know if emailing them would help, but I'd try it. They probably have a system to grandfather people in, who reach out. I would hope.

smaryjerry 6 years ago | | |

Note his estimates were for revenue less cost of goods sold. So that doesn't cover any labor, interest, taxes, etc.

exolymph 6 years ago | | |

The very obvious takeaway is to not expect free services to be available indefinitely.

codingmess 6 years ago | | |

"offer stuff for free until a bunch of people depend on it"

Nobody can really be surprised by that, though? Meaning people who sign up are aware that it could happen eventually?

nodesocket 6 years ago | |

Makes sense. I think the 10,000 number was way too high, but completely removing the free plan is a bit jarring and frankly annoying. I'd be much happier keeping the free plan but only 100 emails a month instead.

I'm still trying to figure out my new costs, I send approx 30 e-mails a month. I think it's like a handful of cents a month which is annoying.

eb0la 6 years ago | |

I always thought 'free tier' was meant to make development and testing feasible without incurring big charges.

Having a big free tier is just a growth hacking technique, and it worked: people know the product and developeed integrations.

But, all marketing tactics have a beginning and an end. If the market is mature, and it's ROI is not good enough or has decreased dramatically, it will end soon.

maxmalysh 6 years ago | |

Amazon SES — $0.10 per 1000 emails.

cpncrunch 6 years ago | | |

Because it's shite. I've blocked SES's IP range on all my servers, as they just ignore spam reports.

nekoashide 6 years ago | | |

We looked at SES and it was a no go on reputation alone. We went from a few thousand emails on Mailgun to almost 7 million emails across 140 domains and we have never encountered any reputation issues over the years we have used them. It just works and I suspect this change is to help protect their email reputation.

ttul 6 years ago | | |

I suspect many tiny senders will just use SES...

stefan_ 6 years ago |

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.

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.

prawn 6 years ago |

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.

“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’?”

sanj001 6 years ago |

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 far cheaper (60K free emails if you're sending from an AWS instance), and deliverability is on par.

But SES is super basic. It's just an API, no fancy analytics.

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.

If anyone is feeling adventurous, it's https://messageray.com

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.

jadbox 6 years ago |

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.

zackkatz 6 years ago |

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!

veeralpatel979 6 years ago |

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.

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.

I wish they found a middle ground here.

corobo 6 years ago | |

As a hypothetical customer please don’t send me 4 emails a day. Or week for that matter.

veeralpatel979 6 years ago | | |

Mailgun is transactional mail though. Not marketing mail. Mail that you want to receive like password resets, email confirmations, notifications, etc

Jedd 6 years ago | |

> 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.

That's if you're sending email every day of the week.

If it's just Mon-Fr then it's 30 emails per day.

If you have 5 customers ... then you can hopefully afford USD$0.80 for 1000 emails / month.

massaman_yams 6 years ago | |

I send between 500 and 1000 per month through mailgun. On high-usage months, I will pay around $1.

Even if I sent 5000 messages one month, I'd pay around $4.

This is not even close to a significant cost.

ada1981 6 years ago | |

Who cares though? If you have customers the cost to send an email is still almost zero.

veeralpatel979 6 years ago | | |

Sure the marginal cost of sending another email might be zero. But typically you price based on what people are willing to pay -- not based on costs.

rapfaria 6 years ago | |

What service sends 4 e-mails to your inbox everyday?

veeralpatel979 6 years ago | | |

Heroku, Sentry, Jira, GitHub, any service that's notifying me of events via email regardless of company size.

crankylinuxuser 6 years ago | | |

I have some free v1agra for you to buy from n1g3rian princ3.

chrisgoman 6 years ago |

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

ticmasta 6 years ago | |

This is what twilio does right? you buy credits ahead of time and then consume them via service usage?

giarc 6 years ago | | |

Correct. Purchasing phone numbers is recurring ($1/month for residential and toll free numbers).

porker 6 years ago | |

Postmark used to take this approach and it was awesome. Now they've switched to a subscription model for new accounts :(

niftylettuce 6 years ago |

ForwardEmail is a good alternative if you're just doing forwarding for now (also has Send Mail As from Gmail).

I built it because I was sick of the alternatives and it's 100% open-source.

https://forwardemail.net

brnt 6 years ago | |

What does support for 'send as from Gmail' mean though? Doesn't Gmail allow that with any address you forward to it? Does it mean an SMTP server?

And what about when forwarding it not to Gmail?

slig 6 years ago | |

Thank you! I've been using on a couple of domains and it works perfectly!

fooey 6 years ago | |

Thank you!

I've been using it on a few domains and it's been working great for me.

neogodless 6 years ago |

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.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6 years ago |

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.

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.

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.

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

illnewsthat 6 years ago |

This is super frustrating.

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].

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").

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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cdpjb5/sparkpost_pr...

rcfox 6 years ago | |

I feel like you just read the headline and not the email in the body. The email quoted is all about their pay-per-use model.

illnewsthat 6 years ago | | |

Sorry I should have clarified, I was previously on their pay-per-use model with 10k included.

Yes, it is nice they are still providing a pay as you go model, but it is frustrating to have another plan change and increase my cost.

clarabaloo 6 years ago |

10k was probably too generous but that's a radical change. $35 per month to receive emails is steep.

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?

m4tthumphrey 6 years ago |

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.

codegeek 6 years ago |

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.

jhloa2 6 years ago | |

I worked at one of these companies a few years ago in the department that dealt with spammers. The volume of attempted spam from these free (and low tier) plans was absolutely staggering.

Carpetsmoker 6 years ago | | |

Anything that allows sending emails with custom content will attract spammers. We aggressively limited the free accounts, and that still attracted spammers who would just create loads of news accounts to send out emails; we eventually put a stop to it by limiting it to 25 recipients in total, after which they finally gave up (before, it was 25 emails with a max of 10 recipients each, which meant 250 spam emails).

scottmotte 6 years ago |

Why hasn't someone built an email system that only accepts signed payloads?

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.

A separate tab would show me all incoming request to accepts public keys (request to send email)

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.

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.

aembleton 6 years ago | |

> Why hasn't someone built an email system that only accepts signed payloads?

Because it requires both parties to play along. Lets say I had such a service and I signed up for an account on Github. Github would have to implement this and give me a key. OK, maybe they do; but Stack Overflow don't. Then I end up reverting to Gmail or Fastmail.

lytedev 6 years ago |

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.

chipperyman573 6 years ago | |

Yes, I got an email about it this morning. You'll move to the PAYG plan automatically in a month.

clementmas 6 years ago |

I'm currently sending 3k emails per month so if I believe it would cost $2.4. I'm completely fine with that.

However, I receive < 500 emails per month and that would cost $420 per year. That's just not possible for a small startup.

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.

mtmail 6 years ago |

There was an earlier discussion with 'Tell HN' title talking about 625/month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22192543 When I access the page I read "Get 5,000 free emails per month". Maybe they're A/B testing?

ukyrgf 6 years ago | |

5,000 a month free for 3 months. Previously, you got 10,000 emails and 100 validations per month included. You had to have a non-prepaid credit card to sign up as well.

gshdg 6 years ago |

Unsurprising, given that that has to be a huge spam magnet.

scaryclam 6 years ago | |

Historically they've been very careful. No DNS, you don't get to send to non-verified test emails. High bounce rate? No more mailing for you until you contact them and explain.

All in all they seem reasonably switched on and protective of their IP addresses.

corobo 6 years ago |

Completely fine with going to a PAYG model for sent emails, it's a shame that inbound mail will no longer be supported at all on that plan though

black1101 6 years ago |

Is there any alternative to Mailgun for sending / receive mails for free? Let's say 500mails per month? Thank you.

yyyk 6 years ago | |

Most large Cloud Providers have an arrangement with at least one email service which allows some free service (at least no extra charge than whatever one is paying for the subscription), with a far higher limit than the typical free tiers - e.g. AWS/SES, Azure/SendGrid, IBM/SendGrid, GCP/Mailgun.

So if you're already paying for some cloud hosting somewhere you likely have a free email service you can use.

sethammons 6 years ago | |

Disclaimer: I work with Twilio SendGrid.

We have the inbound parse webhook which turns incoming SMTP into an HTTP post to your URL. Our free plan is is 100/day after the trial period which has a much higher limit.

corentin88 6 years ago | |

Gmail + a mail merge addon (like Mailmeteor.com or Gmass)

sam_goody 6 years ago | |

Mailjet, even though it is owned by Mailgun, has a higher free tier.

Sendgrid is owned by Twillio, and has a similar free tier.

Ses is pretty cheap, for 500 mails, it is essentially free.

Or get a dedicated IP, use mailinabox or other similar one click setups.

black1101 6 years ago | | |

I Own our private VPS where I was sending and receiving without trouble in the past but currently I am not able to setup mail server correctly what is reason why I started to use mailgun.

DoctorOW 6 years ago | |

Just curious if it is 500/month, why switch?

black1101 6 years ago | | |

From the description, it seems, that you have just 500 mails to send. You can not receive emails anymore. Or am I wrong? Thank you.

pmlnr 6 years ago | |

gmail? outlook?

basically anything with imap access.

edmundsauto 6 years ago | | |

This is downvoted, but correct. You can programmatically tap into a Gmail account and send 20-30 emails per day, which adds up to the 500/mo.

duggan 6 years ago |

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.

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.

Fastmail is probably more suited, and at $5/m is the right price point.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6 years ago |

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).

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.

All I really need is a redirect to gmail and a way to send through that domain

cx42net 6 years ago | |

Hi,

Maybe https://improvmx.com might be the solution you are looking for? (I'm the owner, to be totally transparent).

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6 years ago | | |

Thanks, I tested your service and it works great, unfortunately there is nothing in between the free plan and the paid plan, I need the 25MB email size, but none of the other features.

Since this is to use personal emails for my family, I can't justify $10/month for the email forwarding part just for the attachment size.

nodesocket 6 years ago |

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.

zeefarmer 6 years ago | |

The OP calculated $0.50 / $0.0008 per message to get 625 messages, based 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"

That's not quite how it works out though. Mailgun rolls over the balance till the balance hits $0.50 and when the balance hits $0.50, they cut an invoice for that amount.

cstrat 6 years ago | | |

Oh wow, so it really is 0 free emails...

memset 6 years ago |

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.

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?

SwellJoe 6 years ago |

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.

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.

yangity 6 years ago |

I think 10000 was probably too generous, but 625 also seems a bit too little as well for hobbyists.

avolcano 6 years ago | |

As someone who has a noncommercial side project and has been using SendGrid's free 100/day plan, I'm actually thinking of switching to this. I've always been a bit concerned with what would happen if my app got a sudden burst of signups (since email verification is required to sign up), and have been looking for an uncapped plan, but don't want to spend $10 a month or more just for that possibility.

The key here is that with the $0.80/1000 emails PAYG rate, you can still do like 2000-3000 a month for less than $5, which no one except SES will provide. Everyone else has a gulf between "free tier 100/day" (or even 100/month with Postmark) and their first actual paid tier ($10/month for Postmark, $15/month for SendGrid). No one else except SES has this PAYG for low rates as far as I'm aware. I think if your hobby project needs more than 625 emails a month, it's reasonable to spend a dollar or two on a month to handle that.

flatiron 6 years ago | |

I run a gitlab for around 30 users and that’s around what I use on AWS to send my emails. It’s a bunch. Rarely do I send emails on weekends so it’s like 20 days a month I send emails just for merge requests and stuff.

jbob2000 6 years ago | |

Hobbyist to me means that you are doing it for fun and aren't engaging more than 5-10 people. So given that, I'm having a hard time understanding how 10 people could handle 625 emails a month.

katsura 6 years ago | | |

I communicate with family and very few close friends only (less than 10 people) and my Mailgun stats show about 1k emails per month.

jjeaff 6 years ago | |

My account is still grandfathered in with 30k free per month.

ukyrgf 6 years ago | | |

This takes place in March.

shampine 6 years ago | |

I was trying to reason how they hit that number this morning. I'm guessing probably average or mean is much lower.

ukyrgf 6 years ago |

Here's a discussion from 6 years ago when they first announced their new plans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226964

ukyrgf 6 years ago |

I submitted this under the title "Mailgun eliminates 'Concept' plan, no longer offering 10000 free emails/mo(https://www.mailgun.com/pricing)" 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.

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?

zeefarmer 6 years ago | |

If you're staying on the Flex plan, it's true pay as you go, no need to pay up front.

tln 6 years ago |

I'm a happy customer, and will be moving to foundation plan soon.

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.

gamedna 6 years ago |

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.

black1101 6 years ago |

Is there any other service instead of Mailgun who can also receive/resend incoming mails? I didn't find anything nice. thank you.

cx42net 6 years ago | |

I run https://improvmx.com, a service to forward incoming emails to a personal inbox (like @gmail's). Is this what you are looking for?

mmcclure 6 years ago | |

I think most of the big names in this space do both, but I can personally confirm that Postmark.app does outgoing and incoming.

taytus 6 years ago |

Any chance they are A/B testing this?

I'm a MG user and haven't received that email and their page is showing me 5K/month free tier.

ilikepi 6 years ago | |

Are you looking at the part that says, "Get 5,000 free emails per month for 3 months?" I would interpret that as an introductory quota for new accounts; after three months the monthly quota will be reduced.

jv22222 6 years ago |

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.

Disclaimer: I might feel this way because they gave me an awesome tshirt one time!

tehbeard 6 years ago |

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.

Hopefully we stay grandfathered on our old plan, doesn't seem like we've had this email through yet.

badbond 6 years ago |

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.

hundsim 6 years ago |

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.

I’d be happy to hear about alternative providers.

andrei_says_ 6 years ago |

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?

mrpotato 6 years ago |

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?

cx42net 6 years ago | |

I've been a user at Mailgun for a few years now. Easily sending more than 625 emails per month.

When they launched the new pricing, they said that only the new users will be affected. Maybe they'll change that in the future, but for now, I don't worry.

vorpalhex 6 years ago |

I really hope this means every dang blog/recipe page/random article will stop asking for my email so they can spam me.

thefsb 6 years ago |

Switched to SES.

taesu 6 years ago |

batch and switch from 10,000 to 625 is worthy of never using them ever again.

Carpetsmoker 6 years ago | |

So what you're saying is that if you're offering a free plan as a business, you can never change it?

foota 6 years ago | |

Not much of a bait and switch when the change is coming after several years.

KaoruAoiShiho 6 years ago | |

Doesn't sound like you were a customer in the first place.

johnchristopher 6 years ago |

How long before the the mailjet free tier gets bogged down too ?

cozuya 6 years ago |

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.

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.

unreal37 6 years ago | |

Or you can find a way to make money to pay for the services your hobby/business uses.

cozuya 6 years ago | | |

It is under creative commons.

bakoo 6 years ago | |

By switching to Amazon, I believe you can reduce the monthly $3.75 down to $0.45, which hopefully isn't enough to break your bank.

nikolay 6 years ago |

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!

Basically, we shot ourselves in the foot! Pun intended!