
Cloud email service price comparison - wlll
http://willj.net/2011/11/30/email-provider-price-comparison/
======
twakefield
Pricing is hard. We've thought about it a lot at Mailgun.

First of all, alexknowshtml makes some essential points about comparing a
commoditized sending service like SES vs. more full feature services. The
biggest one is delivering vs. sending.

But, maybe the answer should be to move towards ala carte pricing.

If you want just basic sending, then the price is somewhere around the current
floor of $0.10 per 1k messages. But then you can add services like dedicated
IPs, analytics, enhanced delivery, whitelabel domains, etc. for extra. These
services could be fixed or variable costs based on the feature.

Makes the billing system a lot more complicated, but this seems to make the
most sense for the customer. Allows them to tailor their email service to
exactly what they need.

------
jbarham
I chose Postmark over Sendgrid because Postmark supports bounce callbacks for
any volume, but for the same feature from Sendgrid we would have to pay
$80/month, and we didn't need to send even a small fraction of the emails that
that plan includes. You should compare prices based on your expected volume,
not on some hypothetical maximum.

Something else to keep in mind is that some of these services reviewed are
explicitly _not intended to be used for bulk mail marketing campaigns_ but
only for individual user targeted emails such as order confirmations.

~~~
wlll
I totally agree, price is only one factor and that features offered will be a
major factor making in the decision of which provider to choose.

That said, we send 10s of million emails a month (not bulk or marketing
campaigns) so the price is going to be pretty big factor.

~~~
alexknowshtml
Will,

Our price per 1000 drops with large credit purchases, and all
features/benefits stay the same. If you've got a monthly send-count you can
share more detailed than "10s of millions", email me alex@wildbit.com and we
can talk about volume credit pricing options.

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flexterra
We use Postmark for a side project (<http://minusm.com>) and the support has
been awesome. We like the simple price plan and the API is very good.

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dmk23
You should add MailGun to this comparison and the graphs

[1] <http://mailgun.net>

[2] <http://documentation.mailgun.net/faqs.html>

[3] <http://mailgun.net/pricing>

~~~
wlll
Added!

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thinkbohemian
Curious about incoming email. Not even a price comparison, just a list of
companies.

~~~
twakefield
We/Mailgun focus a lot on incoming mail parsing and routing. Honestly, we find
it more interesting than just sending/delivery. Although, there is clearly
more market demand for sending. We also allow you to create IMAP/POP3
mailboxes programmatically. We wrote a blog post about it recently[1] and you
can also check out our docs for more information[2].

The other companies that I am aware of with incoming email capabilities are
Sendgrid with their Parse API[3] and I believe Cloudmailin[4] focuses
exclusively on handling incoming email.

Edit: Postmark[5] has incoming email in beta as well. Added links, too

[1] [http://blog.mailgun.net/post/12482374892/handle-incoming-
ema...](http://blog.mailgun.net/post/12482374892/handle-incoming-emails-like-
a-pro-mailgun-api-2-0)

[2]
[http://documentation.mailgun.net/user_manual.html#receiving-...](http://documentation.mailgun.net/user_manual.html#receiving-
messages)

[3] <http://docs.sendgrid.com/documentation/api/parse-api-2/>

[4] <http://cloudmailin.com/>

[5] <http://postmarkapp.com/>

~~~
alexknowshtml
> We also allow you to create IMAP/POP3 mailboxes programmatically.

This sounds cool - is there a non-obvious (at least to me) case for this
beyond providing your customers with fully-functional inboxes?

~~~
twakefield
Some customers use it for redundancy. So if we POST a message to them and they
mishandle it, they can go back and search the inbox.

------
alexknowshtml
Hey, it's Alex from Postmark here. I posted a response in a recent Quora
thread[1] wondering why Postmark was "so expensive", so I'll move some of
those answers here.

First and formost, there's a bit of an "apples vs. oranges vs bananas"
comparison here. We need to start by drawing a line between email sending
engines and email deliverability engines. Then, we'll draw a line between the
delivery of transactional email (that your webapp sends) and bulk email (your
marketing campaigns).

While Postmark's price per 1000 sends is "higher" than some of our
competition, we provide our customers with access to the full deliverability &
diagnosis stack that we provide for our accounts _regardless_ of how much they
spend monthly. Also, our price per 1000 sends drops to $1.00 for bulk credit
purchases starting at 500k credits, $0.75 for 1MM+, and $0.50 for 2MM+.

When you compare Sendgrid (along with SES, Mailgun, etc), you need to look at
what we each offer at each price point.

In Tim Falls' answer on Quora, he says:

>"If you want the best possible feature set we have to offer, which includes a
dedicated IP, our entire suite of APIs, an exhaustive collection of stats and
more, you can sign up for our Silver plan or higher - Silver gets you 100k
emails/month for $79.95, and everything we have to offer.

> In conclusion: yes, our Lite plan is similar to SES and is very basic in
> terms of features - which could put it in the "commodity" category. However,
> at higher price points, you can get everything you need to operate a fully
> functional email system - without the hassle of doing everything yourself
> and with access to our team of experts, who are available by phone, live
> chat, and email."

Tim's right. SES is very basic and is in the commodity category. It's an email
sending engine, NOT a deliverability engine.

Tim also points out that in order to get what they consider "a fully
functional email system", Sendgrid customers need to spend at least $80/month.

Postmark is $1.50/thousand (or less) with no minimums. You can literally spend
$1.50/month with us and get the same level/quality of service as someone
spending thousands of dollars/month with us.

In addition to our specialized delivery infrastructure, and the tools we
provide that can help you with self-diagnosis of delivery issues, our team has
over 7 years of email delivery experience and has an extremely strong track
record for pinning oddball delivery problems that arise even with best-of-
breed delivery infrastructure. Our customer service isn't just fanatical and
friendly, they're experienced in the problems you're likely to have.

 _How does this "transactional vs. bulk" mail conversation affect you bottom
line?_

Sending an important transactional email from the same infrastructure as your
marketing email queue increases the likelihood that your transactional emails
will be throttled as if they were part of a bulk campaign. A missing or slow-
to-deliver "forgot password" email, for instance, could be the loss of a
customer to a competitor while they can't get into their account, which
obviously affects your bottom line. Further, transactional email _gets read_ ,
which means if you're going to put "marketing" in an email, it has much more
value in a transactional email because it's more likely to be read (with the
caveat, of course, that it's done tastefully).

So in addition to our low tolerance, we also strictly prohibit bulk/marketing
email sending on Postmarks infrastructure to keep our reputation for
transactional emails as high as possible. Our laser focus on a specific email
delivery category keeps our delivery rates as high as possible for customers
who abide by our sending guidelines, and that premium informs our price point
as well.

 _And how do we know all this?_

We ran an email marketing service for 7 years and learned a lot about what
works and what doesn't. We ALSO run one of the most popular SVN/Git/Mercurial
hosting services - Beanstalk. Beanstalk sends significant volume every single
day, and was one of Postmark's first "customers". And when we have ZERO
deliverability problems ourselves, we have huge confidence in our ability to
provide that to others by following our own guidelines. And it's not just our
own apps - we've had people come to Postmark after being dissatisfied with
others' deliverability rates, and have been pleased with Postmark's
performance.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Why-are-Mailgun-and-Postmark-so-much-
mo...](http://www.quora.com/Why-are-Mailgun-and-Postmark-so-much-more-
expensive-than-Sendgrid-and-AWS-SES)

~~~
jbarham
Thanks for the detailed writeup.

> Postmark is $1.50/thousand (or less) with no minimums. You can literally
> spend $1.50/month with us and get the same level/quality of service as
> someone spending thousands of dollars/month with us.

Again, this is exactly why I chose you guys over Sendgrid. Very simple pricing
with no arbitrary feature segmentation by plan.

~~~
alexknowshtml
You're welcome :)

>Very simple pricing

This isn't always talked about as part of "design", but we consider simple
pricing an element of design and a benefit as well and many of our customers
agree.

In our mind, Will shouldn't have had to draw diagrams to figure out what would
cost more.

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billpatrianakos
"Cloud" email? Seriously? If I have to endure someone calling something "the
cloud" one more time I'm going to shoot myself! Since when did the web turn
into the cloud? It's still nothing but a bunch of damn servers! That just bugs
me.

Anyway, thanks for the price info and thanks to the guys from Postmark and
Mailgun for explaining why their pricing looks so skewed in this post.

~~~
EponymousCoward
Would you prefer SaaS, or web service? Will that soothe you?

