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Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

blog.mailgun.com

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Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#51

Post by gingerlime »

bratsche wrote: post #7

This 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 tha…

Given the higher price, what are the advantages of mailgun over Mandrill worth paying extra for?

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#52

Post by ebin »

manojlds wrote: post #46
ebin wrote: post #42

Why use a service like this in the first place when you can simply send out mail via a VPS?

Many email services block spammers / unknown senders, especially if you start sending hundreds of mails.

So its essentially paying for the safe haven of knowing that your mail won't get blocked due to stupid policies?

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#53

Post by aymeric »

the_bear wrote: post #4

This 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 fre…

Isn'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

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#54

Post by chrischen »

aymeric wrote: post #53
the_bear wrote: post #4

This 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 fre…

Isn'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

I think he means plans with different tiers instead of one continuous tier.

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#55

Post by dsr_ »

Dear 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?

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#56

Post by veesahni »

wijnglas wrote: post #28

These 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.

Also note that mandrill inbound is complimentary to customers right now ..

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#57

Post by veesahni »

bratsche wrote: post #7

This 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 tha…

If you do a lot of inbound, another thing to consider is difference in pricing practices:

SendGrid and Mandrill inbound is currently complimentary to customers.

To receive an inbound email via Mailgun, you pay once for it to be received by mailgun servers, and once for it to be delivered to your webhook.

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#58

Post by the_bear »

aymeric wrote: post #53
the_bear wrote: post #4

This 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 fre…

Isn'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

Chrischen is right. Maybe I'm not using the term correctly, but I think of "plans" as meaning multiple different tiers that a user can choose from. Mailgun previously had plans (i.e. you had to pick which tier you wanted) and now they don't (i.e. there is just one tier that applies to everyone).

Some characteristics of plans that I don't like:

* Passing some arbitrary limit (# of contacts, # of users, # of files, etc) triggers a steep increase in price, rather than having the price gradually increase as usage increase. For Mailgun, usage is the number of emails sent. For us, it's the number of users on the account.

* Because of the steep price increases at arbitrary points, some users get a lot more value out of the software than others. With Highrise (another CRM) an account with 5,000 contacts pays $24, while an account with 5,001 users pays $49/month. Both accounts are getting roughly the same value, but one is paying twice as much as the other.

* Most SaaS companies with plans force users to choose which plan (or tier) they want when they sign up. How would a user know what features are worth paying for when they haven't even tried the software yet?

* Plans are often used to upsell existing customers after they're locked into your service. Salesforce has a plan that is cheaper than my company's price ($5/user/month vs. $10/user/month) but it is limited to the point of being almost useless. I've talked to many people who got suckered into a 1+ year commitment with them only to realize they'd have to pay $65-$250/user/month to get the functionality they needed.

* Customers have to monitor their usage to make sure they don't trigger the next tier. It's just one extra thing to worry about every day, and businesses have enough on their minds without worrying about unexpected price increases.

Having said all of that, I'm currently struggling with how I might go about offering more products than just a CRM without making it look like a tiered system. I don't consider it to be the same thing because they really will be additional products (project management, invoicing, etc.) which are generally completely separate subscriptions if you use a different company's products, but I want them to be integrated/bundled directly with the CRM to make the user experience as simple as possible. Still not quite sure how to pull this off. Pricing sure is tricky.

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#59

Post by old-gregg »

veesahni wrote: post #57
bratsche wrote: post #7

This 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 tha…

If you do a lot of inbound, another thing to consider is difference in pricing practices: SendGrid and Mandrill inbound is currently complimentary to customers. To receive an inbound email via Mailgun, you pay once for it to be received by mailgun servers, and once for it to be delivered to your webhook.

>you pay once for it to be received by mailgun servers, and once for it to be delivered to your webhook.

Mailgunner here. This does not sound right. Can you please reach out to me via address in profile? Mailgun does not charge for webhooks, you're probably confsuing this with email relaying (which we also do).

Also it is impossible to have complimentary inbound email of production quality due to the need for quality spam filtering. Handling spam in production setting (throughput, quality of service, uptime, performance) for free would mean wiping out CloudMark and other spam filtering vendors.

In other words, as always, you get what you pay for. Mailgun has always been known for being a true bi-directional programmable ESP and a sizable percentage of our traffic is inbound.

Re: Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits

#60

Post by ezl »

bratsche wrote: post #7

This 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 tha…

I can't figure out the sendgrid pricing at all. 10/mo for 40k emails and 80/mo for 100k emails doesn't fit a normal model of reducing price for incremental usage and there's no clear explanation for it.

I use sendgrid, and I thought I was using mailgun, but now after seeing the pricing simplicity and ease I'm feeling like I should make the switch.

What reason would I rationally have at the Additionally, for the lite plan with sendgrid, they don't include email open and click tracking (even though they DO for the FREE tiers).

Would love an explanation for why this is sensible.

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