
Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month - kehphin
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&amp;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.
======
ttul
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/...](https://trends.builtwith.com/mx/transactional-
email/traffic/Entire-Internet)) 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
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
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.

~~~
disillusioned
What value are they getting out of carrying a bunch of freeloading accounts?

Or put another way: what value are they risking by force-deplatforming the
freeloading accounts, besides a bit of splashback from frustrated (non-paying)
users?

~~~
ptx
The value might be a reputation for trustworthiness and fair dealing.

Those "freeloading" accounts are offered by companies to users, for the
company's benefit, in order to strengthen their market position and lure users
into a trap where they'll have little choice but to pay extortionate prices
once they've developed a dependence on the service.

~~~
plopz
See the reputation of Microsoft and Google in backwards compatibility and
support. I don't think thats the sole reason for Azure's success over Google
Cloud but its certainly a factor.

------
stefan_
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.

~~~
Eikon
> despite sending an email being an utterly trivial, long solved problem.

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.

~~~
kick
Sending an email is absolutely a solved problem.

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.

~~~
ebiester
You can still do that.

However, I, as a receiver of email, get thousands of spam messages a day. So,
I use services that block them before they even reach my view, or get sent
directly to the spam folder.

If you want to send me an email, that's solved. If you want to send it to ten
thousand people on your mailing list, and not have it end up in the spam
folder, you may have more work.

~~~
staticautomatic
This raises what's really the ultimate question, which is whether and how much
individuals should be made to suffer so that advertisers can send spam.
Certainly the recipients are not responsible for the advertisers' decisions to
spam, or more charitably, to blur the lines. Yet it's individuals who pay, in
this case literally, for the advertisers' privilege of spamming them. It's
extremely fucked.

~~~
edmundsauto
I think this is what happens in open systems. The alternative is walled
gardens, like FB messages. Even those suffer from spam, although it's much
less of the wild west.

~~~
mc3
The alternative is simple:

For stranger to stranger communication, both business and non-business set up
a web form. With a challenge if needed.

For friend to friend communication, use email, friends' address in on a white
list.

For business to consumer communication, white list is again used.

For spammer to anyone communication, including business lists that refuse to
take you off, not on white list so doesn't get in. Bounce response with reason
"non on white list"

It's a cultural change though: an email address won't get through unless you
are unblocked, but technically easy.

~~~
sokoloff
What's the easy/low-friction way for Joe Random Consumer to manage their
whitelists?

An email comes in from a sender address which isn't on the whitelist, but is
(in fact) a friend. What's the handling?

An email comes in from a sender address which isn't on the whitelist, but is
not (in fact) a friend. What's the handling?

Do I never hear from the first friend? Or do I get bombarded with "hey, read
this email and see if the sender is a friend" a bunch of times?

~~~
ezrast
I'm just shooting from the hip here, but I think it's:

Joe manages his whitelist through his mail provider's web UI. Many providers
already use the address book as a whitelist; the only difference is they
default to filtration instead of assuming spam.

Joe's friend's mail gets routed to the spam box. Joe's friend gets a bounce
notification that says "To be added to Joe's whitelist, click here (and
optionally solve a captcha/enter Joe's dog's name/submit a blood
sample/deposit $0.25 worth of bitcoin into Joe's wallet)." Joe's friend clicks
here, and Joe's mail provider adds Joe's friend to the whitelist and promotes
the email to the inbox.

Joe's spammer gets the same message and disregards it. Their email stays in
spam forever.

Joe's spam box gets bombarded with "hey, read this email and see if the sender
is a friend" a bunch of times. He can trawl through them for actual friends if
he wishes.

------
prawn
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’?”

~~~
brudgers
The problem is having clients who expect free...or rather delivering free to
clients who expect free. Your job isn't to save the client money on your
services. If having your credit card on file provides value to the client,
then charge the client. If it doesn't, charge them anyway because it has value
to you.

~~~
prawn
We started with Mailgun when the free tier seemed established and permanent.
No card required. Our CMS taps into their API. Then they required a unique
phone number for each account and even that was a time sink getting clients to
comprehend what was going on.

I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some clients are. And how
time poor some small businesses are.

~~~
bigiain
> I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some clients are. And
> how time poor some small businesses are.

Those aren't "clients", they're "moochers".

If they're prepared to walk away because it costs them $35/month to send to
their mailing list, you probably owe it to yourself/your business to spend
your time seeking new better clients rather than talking them thru how to get
stuff/service for less than $35/month... Your business should be "cost
sensitive" as well...

~~~
prawn
They are clients if they found us to provide a service they needed, and we can
provide it in a profitable way.

Our business found Mailgun to be a great solution when we anticipated clients
would stick under 10k/mo and not need a card on file. With Stripe, every time
they pay their cut, they've had a sale. Every time they mail-out through
MailChimp, it's to a list of customers.

We are usually using Mailgun to send transactional emails. I can't promise a
client that they won't get a flurry of junk signups or password reset mailouts
that hit their credit card.

The bottom 50% of the market is heading to self-serve site-builders and it's
savage for a small web business.

~~~
dpcan
I'm completely with you on this.

The responses to your posts are disgusting. I don't think a lot of people
around here understand what it means to provide services to small local
businesses.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a smaller community, people here still earn
$7.25 per hour, and I just don't have access to deep-pocketed big businesses.
I work with small businesses, individual business owner/operators, and mom and
pop type places. $35 here, $50 there - it all adds up fast, and they are very
conscious of these costs, and so am I.

Going to a small business owner and trying to explain any kind of price hike
for a service they thought was free is just another burden to them, and it
makes MY recommendation of the original service seem bad .... and I'm the guy
they came to for GOOD advice.

~~~
patio11
FWIW, as someone who built their career from Ogaki, Gifu, Japan, you're on the
same Internet as most deep-pocketed businesses and can choose to pursue their
custom at any time. Strongly consider doing so. Most technologists overrate
how difficult it is.

I think most HNers currently serving mom-and-pops in a bespoke fashion should
strongly consider exiting that market tomorrow. Those customers will, over
time, gravitate to a Shopify or a site builder or similar because they can
amortize engineering costs over 100,000 similarly situated customers and
consultants can not.

I understand there are aesthetic reasons to prefer that non-tech-forward
people in your local community have someone to ask questions to and help
navigate options, but if you want you can throw free Set Up Your Shopify
office hours every Friday as a pro bono gesture, underwritten by the piles and
piles of money from the many businesses in the world that can afford
professional labor.

------
sanj001
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](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.

~~~
donmcronald
Mailgun is (was) great for setting up a quick regex to process incoming mail.
Maybe I'm misusing it, but I point all my non-email domains there and let this
regex forward everything to my main domain:

^(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!

~~~
veeralpatel979
I've posted this elsewhere in this discussion but have you tried out Sendgrid
Inbound Parse? Does it meet your requirements?

[https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/parsing-
email/setti...](https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/parsing-
email/setting-up-the-inbound-parse-webhook/)

~~~
donmcronald
Technically, yes. Practically, no. Mailgun has a checkbox to forward matched
messages to another address, so the appeal was having something extremely
easy, fast to configure, and reliable.

Building some type of custom endpoint for it is too much work for what it
does. I already pay for email where I can set up unlimited domain aliases, so
I'll just wait for my Mailgun email and switch back to aliases.

The incoming mail filtering was the only reason I decided to try Mailgun
instead of Twilio or SES. I already have SES set up for transactional mail and
my usage is so low they don't even bill me for it.

------
jadbox
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.

~~~
simon_weber
Ugh. I settled on Mailgun for this use case recently and now I'll have to
switch.

I used to use [https://medium.com/@ashan.fernando/forwarding-emails-to-
your...](https://medium.com/@ashan.fernando/forwarding-emails-to-your-inbox-
using-amazon-ses-2d261d60e417) 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](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](https://forwardemail.net) is an open source option
but I wasn't sure about how reliable it would be.

~~~
freedomben
I have used both ImprovMX and ForwardEmail.net so can comment on them.

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](https://forwardemail.net/en/donate)) .
Here's the code: [https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-
forwarding](https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding)

~~~
cx42net
Thank you for your post. I run ImprovMX and it's with pleasure that you liked
using it :)

We are on the verge to release a sending feature and the decision from Mailgun
to drop this came at a great surprise for us.

I always thought of Mailgun like the "unreachable competitor", kind of like
"reach for the moon" type of target. But since they moved their forwarding
feature to a costly paid plan, it's just like the moon vanished from our
trajectory.

Anyway, I'm open to answer any questions if you have any. I also posted about
ImprovMX here on HN today
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223783))
and ready to answer all the questions there too.

------
zackkatz
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
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.

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

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

~~~
NightlyDev
It's seems to be working though, everyone knows about the Nigerian Prince.
He's really good at marketing.

~~~
jjeaff
Interesting thing about that. One might ask why any scammer still uses
Nigerian prince tactics since it is so we'll know and so obviously a scam.

The reason is that they are selecting for the most clueless marks. If you
don't get a bunch of red flags from an email like that, then you are likely
going to be an easy mark.

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

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

------
niftylettuce
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](https://forwardemail.net)

~~~
brnt
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?

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

~~~
cozuya
It is under creative commons.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
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

------
neogodless
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.

------
illnewsthat
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cdpjb5/sparkpost_promised_twice_that_they_were_gonna/)

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

------
clementmas
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
There was an earlier discussion with 'Tell HN' title talking about 625/month.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22192543](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
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
Unsurprising, given that that has to be a huge spam magnet.

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

~~~
sam_goody
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
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.

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duggan
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
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
Hi,

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

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
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.

~~~
cx42net
I can understand, yes. The reason we decided to allow 25Mb for paid plan is to
avoid abuses.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Just to be clear, I'm happy to pay, makes me feel safer. It's just that the
jump is way too big for me.

That being said, I really like your service and I hope will succeed! Cheers

~~~
cx42net
Thank you very much, I also hope it will succeed :D

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

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

~~~
jbob2000
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
I communicate with family and very few close friends only (less than 10
people) and my Mailgun stats show about 1k emails per month.

~~~
jbob2000
That’s 3 emails a day for 10 people... what have you built that requires that
level of communication with family and close friends?

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

------
ukyrgf
I submitted this under the title "Mailgun eliminates 'Concept' plan, no longer
offering 10000 free
emails/mo([https://www.mailgun.com/pricing)"](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
If you're staying on the Flex plan, it's true pay as you go, no need to pay up
front.

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

~~~
cx42net
I run [https://improvmx.com](https://improvmx.com), a service to forward
incoming emails to a personal inbox (like @gmail's). Is this what you are
looking for?

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

------
thefsb
Switched to SES.

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

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

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

------
nikolay
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!

