8 ms·
Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits
- twakefield 13y agoOur most popular feedback to date is to eliminate minimums and get rid of feature gating in plans. So, here you go. As always, open to feedback.
- gog 13y agoBefore if you had a 59 US $ plan (dedicated IP), the cost was 0.59/thousand, so you could send 118k emails. With the new plan, for 59 US$ you get the dedicated IP and 10k emails. Sending 118k emails with a dedicated IP would cost 113 US$
- twakefield 13y agoFor some customers it may make sense to stay on their current pricing, which we allow for.
- agilord 13y agoI think you should update your FAQ entry: "What are the differences between the plans you offer?" Otherwise, looks good :)
- twakefield 13y agoThanks for this. Yes, we need to update our other assets to reflect the new pricing.
- dchuk 13y agoI'm not sure if this is feasible or not, but I'd love to read an overview of how you are handling the different plans scenario (previous plans setup vs new pay as you go setup) on a technical level. It'd be helpful for any SaaS owners who want to one day do something similar and as far as I know, no one has ever documented this process.
- beambot 13y agoLove it! I ran into the (free) limits recently during a one-off email blast as part of a new feature rollout. The limit caused a lot of emails to fail.... but MailGun's customer service rectified it in like 5 minutes (at like 2am on a Saturday). Very impressive! Any idea when the Heroku plans will reflect the pricing changes...? EDIT: From the article, old plans may be granfathered (if desired)...? If so, how do we switch to new pro-rated on Heroku? Just downgrade the addon?
- twakefield 13y agoUnfortunately, Heroku doesn't allow for variable billing so there needs to be a fixed cost and associated limit. Although, we are in the process of reevaluating our Heroku pricing to better reflect our direct pricing and will be adjusting it shortly.
- lucasjans 13y agoThanks for doing this. It makes your pricing now fair and easy for an entrepreneur to plan. I'm currently comparing Mailgun to Mandrill and I'm wondering what makes Bakunin better? Mandrill's prices look great. Can you enlighten me on differences I may be missing? One feature I'm looking for that mandrill doesn't seem to have is multi-tenancy.
- lubomir 13y agoJust a quick note: your pricing calculator does not let me enter any number. I use Czech keyboard layout where numbers are typed with Shift key. This happens in both Firefox and Chrome. Once I switch to English layout, it works fine.
- adlpz 13y agoAside from the cringeworthy meme thing, the pricing seems really, really nice :D.
- the_bear 13y agoThis is awesome. Aside from the fact that my bill will be cut in half, I hate plans. Plans are just one more thing to monitor (make sure you don't go over your totally arbitrary limit!), and they generally lead to weird inequity. For example, I've been adding ~75 people per day to my MailChimp list and the price stayed the same. Then one day it went from $75 to $150. Adding thousands of subscribers was completely free, and then adding one subscriber cost $75/month. That just doesn't make any sense to me. Related anecdote: My company doesn't have plans (most in the industry do) and customers tell me all the time how much they prefer our approach. There may be selection bias going on, but I have tons of feedback supporting my decision to avoid plans.
- nmcfarl 13y agoThis is probably a nature of how the MailChimp plans are constructed. I know that the Zencoder plans get cheaper when you level up to the next one (and it’s worth while switching before you hit the minimum included minutes.) Plans can be done right - that is in a customer friendly fashion while still maintaining reoccurring revenue for the service.
- hijackson 13y agoJocelyn. if you, thought Denise`s article is inconceivable, on monday I got a top of the range Toyota sincee geting a check for $7485 recently and also ten k this past-munth. no-doubt about it, this really is my favourite job I've ever done. I began this eight months/ago and pretty much straight away started to earn minimum $72.. per/hr. I work through this website,=====<<<>>>==== www.jobs34.com====<<<>>>====
- aymeric 13y agoIsn't your company Less Annoying CRM? I see a monthly plan on your pricing page, did I misunderstand what you meant by "My company doesn't have plans"? https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/pricing.php https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/pricing.php
- chrischen 13y ago
- DenisM 13y agoThe old pricing was fine with me. Now I worry you will go out of business or get swamped with support requests from people who haven't paid anything. But whatever works for you, I guess.
- ktsmith 13y agoMailgun was purchased by rackspace. I don't see them going out of business any time soon.
- lubos 13y agoI was also more than happy to pay $19/month. Now my monthly bill goes to $0? I'm a bit worried what will happen to quality of service and support now. And the fact Rackspace has purchased Mailgun doesn't mean a thing. Just look what Rackspace did to JungleDisk... I used to be also happy customer of JungleDisk so no wonder I'm a bit bitter regarding Rackspace.
- ktsmith 13y agoYou can continue to stay on the $19/mo plan. There's an option to stay on your existing plan or move to the new pricing. I'm not familiar with what rackspace did to jungle disk as I've never used it. I was under the impression the service was still running with a rebrand.
- dangero 13y agoGreat job on this. What I really like about this type of pricing is that it puts the complex cost calculation onto your side instead of the customer. I use a ton of products, Heroku services being an example where I have to try to guess at usage. Literally every day I have an internal conversation with myself that says, "Do you need to go into Heroku and turn down the Database tier you're on because the service isn't using the capacity that you're paying for? Wait, but you might get a traffic surge and the site will go down if you decrease the capacity." This seems like for me, the ideal case. Automatically scaling down all the way to $0 so I never have to think about unsubscribing if I stop using it. I was actually discussing with a friend that it seems like there could be a big opportunity in the cloud server space to have a zero scale server where you only pay for time that it is being used. I believe Heroku already does spin down instances that aren't needed behind the scenes, they just don't give you the cost savings. They keep it.
- hayksaakian 13y agoTo be fair, they only spin down people on the free tier, where you can't save over $0.
- dangero 13y agoIs this documented somewhere? Are you sure? How can you tell that you actually have 3 dynos running when you're paying for 3? I suspect that if you pay for at least 2 dynos what happens is that they keep at least one dyno running and scale up to 3 as needed because as a customer I can't really tell the difference between 1 and 3 dynos unless my traffic requires all 3 at which point the service would have already scaled up to three. We already know from the free tier that they can spin up an instance in a couple of seconds. I would bet this is Heroku's little secret about making money. If you look at their cost per month you find that they aren't really making much per instance on AWS servers although, they are perfectly capable of detecting when they should auto scale up. Amazon even has a built in service to do that, but Heroku doesn't expose it because that's where they make their profit margin.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
- bratsche 13y agoThis seems to be closer to how Mandrill works, and it's exactly what got me to sign up for them only a few days ago. I knew about Mailgun and Sendgrid before, and started looking into them first but their pricing tiers turned me off and got me to keep searching until I found Mandrill. My app is very small, just bootstrapping without any funding so I'm trying to be very careful how I spend my money. At first I see that Mailgun's minimum was $19/month while Sendgrid's silver plan is $10/month. Easy, Sendgrid wins. Oops, I want to support inbound email though. Sendgrid will give you that on the trial plan, but not on the $10 silver plan. Suddenly I'm up to $80/month to use Sendgrid. Mailgun wins here. But before I even noticed that I had already signed up for Sendgrid (believing I'd be paying $10/month), but had to wait like 5 hours and then I received some email from them basically demanding that I tell them what my app is, why I need email, what is the purpose of me sending email. Maybe it's for market research, but it didn't come across that way. It came across as "we assume you're a dirty spammer". Of course if I was a spammer I'd just give them so BS answer, I wouldn't admit it. I can't say call a winner, only a lower: Sendgrid. Mandrill and SES both treat you like you expect; you sign up, they cap you at ~250 emails/day for a bit and then you're fine. Sendgrid fail. Anyway, then my friend points me over to Mandrill and I sign up. The pricing model fit us well.. up to 12k emails free, then $0.20/thousand after that. In the state my app is right now I probably won't go over 12k for another few months, and once I do go over that limit I'm not going to find myself jumping suddenly to something like $80/month. If I had been setting this all up just a week later (that is, now) I'd probably be on Mailgun due to this new pricing model.
- prostoalex 13y agoInbox providers keep track of reputation of an IP address, so most outbound e-mail service providers guard their IPs, since even a few bad apples can cause havoc for existing customers. Not saying it's justified, but there's some verification that needs to happen sooner or later.
- bratsche 13y agoRight, but that's the point of SES and Mandrill limiting you to like 250/day at first and gradually increasing your limit. Asking you to write an essay telling them what you're using email for is not verification.
- everettForth 13y agoI started looking at http://yclist.com/ http://yclist.com/ and realized that many companies I often see listed on the front page here are actually YC companies, but not marked as such.
- philip1209 13y agoMailgun is now owned by Rackspace, so I don't think it's still considered an active member of the YC family.
- everettForth 13y agoOk, how do you explain stripe and priceonomics? I'm sure I'm missing others.
- true_religion 13y agoWhy do they need to mark themselves as YC companies if they don't want the boost associated with being YC?
- alberth 13y agoI don't under the pricing table. It shows: Emails Price / 1,000 Total Price 0 - 10,000 Free Next 500,000 $0.50 Next 1,000,000 $0.35 Next 5,000,000 $0.15 Any Additional $0.10 Does that mean emails 10,001-510,000 cost $0.50 per thousand and then emails 510,000-1,510,000 cost $0.35 per thousand?
- jmharvey 13y agoYes, that seems to be what it means. In general, heavy users get better marginal prices, but there's a "free sample" amount for very light users.
- twodayslate 13y agoI always thought there was a price point to weed out spammers. I hope this doesn't effect the service.
- lucisferre 13y agoIs it just me or is it odd that after the free tier sending an e-mail is almost as much as letter postage?
- mgkimsal 13y agohuh? $.50 per 1000 is... nowhere near letter postage.
- gonnakillme 13y agoSending /1000/ emails is almost as much as letter postage.
- cdjk 13y agoThis is awesome! I've been meaning to use mailgun for some small personal projects, but didn't want to pay to use my own domain. That's the biggest advantage of the change for me.
- wijnglas 13y agoThese price changes make Mailgun much more expensive than Mandrill (especially for dedicated IPs). Mandrill also has inbound now, so I don't see the point of choosing Mailgun over Mandrill.
- veesahni 13y agoAlso note that mandrill inbound is complimentary to customers right now ..
- flyingyeti 13y agoWhile reading the new pricing structure, I realized that the Mailboxes feature [1] (allowing programmatic creation of mailboxes via the API) is deprecated. That's too bad; it was the reason I started using Mailgun in the first place. Is anyone aware of an alternate service that offers this feature, short of managing my own mail server? 1: http://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart.html#using-mailboxes http://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart.html#using-mailb...
- thejosh 13y agoBeen using mailgun for a while to send nagios alerts from our server using SMTP to various accounts that need to be notified. Instead of sending it to 3 accounts, you send it to one then mailgun sends it off to the accounts you want added. It is perfect and worth the $19. Now I'm unsure if I should just downgrade... but it's not really worth it for the value I get out of Mailgun.
- mehulkar 13y agoI had just switched to Mandrill after being unhappy with Mailgun for unrelated reasons. I'm tempted to switch back to Mailgun after this.
- 6ren 13y agoWeirdly, the pricing calculator doesn't appear on the linked page - but it does on the pricing page. (using FF 20, ubuntu) I think some people might like plan limits, to cap their costs (so they don't accidentally run up a huge bill). It might be nice to have a separate option to also impose a limit. Though this is an extra complication and I'm not sure how many customers would actually want this, if any.
- dangayle 13y agoThis is RAD. I love mailgun's service, and now I have even more reason to never use the built-in mail server on my *nix boxes for processing or sending mail.
- pbreit 13y agoIf you're gonna promote your big pricing change, why not get closer, or, ideally, undercut your competitors (Sendgrid, Mandrill)?
- ebin 13y agoWhy use a service like this in the first place when you can simply send out mail via a VPS?
- manojlds 13y agoMany email services block spammers / unknown senders, especially if you start sending hundreds of mails.
- yapsody 13y agoGood plans. Nice to see 10,000 free emails offering.
- etaty 13y agoThe input box doesn't work with a French keyboard, nor copy/paste.
- gcforky 13y agoJust changed my Plan... Now i am saving $66 per month.
- dsr_ 13y agoDear Mailgun -- How can I programmatically identify the accounts that are on their first email blast? Please include a header. I suggest it look like this: X-Mailgun-FNG: 1 with the value set to the number of days on which this customer has used your service to send more than 100 messages. Then I can filter out all the spammers who are signing up for your service with stolen credit cards, sending until you stop them, and then doing it all over again with a new account. What, you didn't think of that?
- AznHisoka 13y agoWhen SES is 5 time as less (although less features, I know), there's really no reason why I would go with Mailgun. 10 cents for every 1000 emails is very very hard to beat. And when I'm just relying on you to email, I don't need things such as UI, analytics, etc as much. I typed in 300000 in the pricing calculator, and got $150.00/month as my price. For any startup, that is just too much. With SES, it's $30.00/month. I know that there's a premium to be paid for certain features, and I know the pricing is better than what it was originally, but SES to me is still superior.
- riobard 13y agoYou don't get dedicated IP and custom DKIM with SES. Those affect deliverability significantly.