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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Nobody can really be surprised by that, though? Meaning people who sign up are aware that it could happen eventually?
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.
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.
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.
It is absolutely not. Even if you are not considering the whole spam thing.
Sending an email with the multitude of clients, MIME which is very complex in itself, network issues, message queuing, retries, unsubscription, bounces, providers feedback loops, rate limiting and what not is very hard.
If you add the whole spam folder + blacklists situation into consideration, sending emails becomes a more than painful thing you don't want to deal with.
I can send a message to my address in 2020 using a 2003 Fedora Core 1 box without a domain using only what's part of the POSIX standard, and I'll receive it just fine.
I just did a few days ago, actually. It even got past my provider's spam filter.
I could probably have done it using earlier software than 2003-era mail/mailx, but that was the quickest way I could find to send an attachment given the software on hand.
I spammed with invite mails to users friends back in 2008 and mail started to end up in spam for a while, but after switching to double opt-in for all mail and making unsubscribing easily available it went back to good. Add some periodic list cleaning of long time inactive subscribers and it works perfectly!
It does get harder if you have to account for bad users, but if you're the only user then you can make sure everything is good.
So, is it hard? That depends entirely on how wanted or unwanted the sent mail is.
Sending an email _is_ trivial - you're right - but getting it delivered to the inbox, instead of the spam folder, is far from trivial. At scale, it is incredibly difficult. Even worse, spammers and fraudsters are utterly relentless. They hammer services like mine and Mailgun's constantly with fraud and phishing and porn and other garbage, inbound and outbound.
AFAIK, SPAM is a still a hard problem, and getting emails delivered isn't trivial.
"Under the guise of Spam" is a very reductionist viewpoint. It's like saying "Under the guise of the measles, we now have an oligopoly of pharmaceuticals." The latter might be true, but its important not to understate the threat of the former.
Answer: It's very difficult. Email is adversarial. Getting to the inbox is incredibly difficult to do _at scale_.
A public service where a lot will be spam and unsolicited emails? Must be hell to run.
I can't just block Amazon SES though, because there's also a ton of legit services that use them for mail transport. We've really helped spammers evade blocking and decrease their infrastructure costs, and because there's so much "normal" traffic on SES, spammers will blend right in. And as long as they pay for services rendered, Amazon couldn't be happier.
You don’t get a choice. That was made for you.
Asking someone's permissions first, tracking their desires and immediately updating your response is what they solve.
Seems trivial? Try doing it for (looks at note) 626 people.
It’s easy to make a proof of concept. Production grade is an entirely different story.
Remember to preserve conversations and forwarding. Make sure file attachments are handled and scanned for viruses. Make sure you watch out for recursive automatic forwarding. Make sure that any html is secure. And make sure it will scale well ... and I mean billions of emails a day well.
It's easy to send an email, but it's way harder to ensure that the emails you send are delivered properly.
All of them passed both SPF and DKIM.
How. Just how did these emails get spam filtered by Google? Everything about them screams that they're legit emails from ourselves to ourselves.
I was recently thinking about the email problem myself, and was reading about IP Warmups. Seems like every provider has different recommendations too. So sounds like not an exact science either. But maybe if it was an exact science it'd be hard to tell the good and bad guys apart. I guess one of the tricky problems with decentralized systems.
Then why do companies need transactional email providers?
“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’?”
I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some clients are. And how time poor some small businesses are.
I've worked in this industry for over 20 years and found that the more complicated your explanation, the less likely clients are to want to work with you. Being a stick in the mud on usability is another example - they'll leave for someone who'll make them a splash page without question, etc.
I have a SaaS product with a free tier (like Mailgun) and I have had an app/game which was free with an upgrade.
(My initial point was not about the freemium model but about other changes that have made working with Mailgun difficult.)
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.
^(abuse@|hostmaster@|postmaster@|webmaster@).*
I'd gladly pay $.0008 per message x2 to cover both sides of that event because I have very little usage. By putting email receiving into a tier that costs over $400 per year they've priced me out of the service.
It's disappointing the way these companies are happy to have enthusiasts, hobbyists, and side projects light-housing their products for them at the start, but eventually switch to paid tiers that alienate those same types of early adopters. It feels like it happens with every single service I use.
Boo!
https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/parsing-email/setti...
The email doesn't even mention that 'email receiving' is switched off as a result of moving me to this plan! Pretty poor, IMO.
I've just blocked SES's ip ranges on my servers.
I'm not sure this is valid. Some users will consider anything spam, including password reset emails they asked for.
I used to use https://medium.com/@ashan.fernando/forwarding-emails-to-your... to do this cheaply via SES, but it was a pain to set up for new domains and had some odd behavior at times.
https://improvmx.com was something else I came across, but I don't feel great trusting an unknown service with all my incoming mail.
Zoho works and is free for one user but the webapp is pretty rough to use.
https://forwardemail.net is an open source option but I wasn't sure about how reliable it would be.
ImprovMX has always worked great. I have used it for a handful of email addresses that all forward to my personal account. If your personal account is gmail it's also very easy to set up a "send as." I will definitely use this first next time I need something like this.
ForwardEmail is indeed open source and works pretty good. It's a little more setup than ImprovMX and I did have an issue where sometimes mail would bounce back to the sender and they would tell me about it. I don't know whose fault it was tho, because it was only one sender and her SMTP server was strict. I did also have an issue where all the mail was going into the spam folder of my personal email, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I clicked "spam" for a spam message and then gmail started assuming everything from forwardemail.net must be spam so silently "helped" me by hiding everything D-: Once I figured it out I was able to fix it by marking the emails as "not spam" but it occasionally would spam something I needed. So, if you use either of these services, never mark the message as spam. Also if you use forwardemail throw the dev a few bucks (https://forwardemail.net/en/donate) . Here's the code: https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding
[1] https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/parsing-email/setti...
[2] https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.htm...
I'm building a security case management tool [1] where users can generate inbound addresses in the UI, and then I create a case for any emails sent to a generated inbound address. I'm using the two tools above for this.
It's crazy how the norm has become $5/user/month for something that every web-host on the planet used to charge $.10/user/month for. "But it includes file storage". Yeah, because cable TV tiers is what I always hoped for in tech. /s
I've used Gmail like this for maybe seven years to avoid gsuite and still have custom domains when using Gmail. The delay seems to vary based on how often there is new mail.
You could use a webmail solution or K9 mail to get mail instantly.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask! :)
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.
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.
Even if I sent 5000 messages one month, I'd pay around $4.
This is not even close to a significant cost.
I built it because I was sick of the alternatives and it's 100% open-source.
And what about when forwarding it not to Gmail?
I've been using it on a few domains and it's been working great for me.
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
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
All in all they seem reasonably switched on and protective of their IP addresses.
So if you're already paying for some cloud hosting somewhere you likely have a free email service you can use.
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.
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.
basically anything with imap access.
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.
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
Maybe https://improvmx.com might be the solution you are looking for? (I'm the owner, to be totally transparent).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm a MG user and haven't received that email and their page is showing me 5K/month free tier.
Disclaimer: I might feel this way because they gave me an awesome tshirt one time!
Hopefully we stay grandfathered on our old plan, doesn't seem like we've had this email through yet.
I’d be happy to hear about alternative providers.
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.
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.
Basically, we shot ourselves in the foot! Pun intended!
