Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#111

Post by Scoundreller » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

vermontdevil wrote: post #91

prawn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

Mailgun does not owe you or anyone a free tier. Start charging your clients money to cover costs that comes with their business.

I think the ask is that we wished Mailgun did that from the start instead of creating messes later in the process.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#112

Post by hnick » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:11 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #65

stefan_ wrote: post #27

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…

Yes, sending email is indeed a solved issue, but that isn't what mailgun (re?) solves. 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.

I think their point was that it's been drummed into our heads that ISPs and mail services only accept email from 'trusted' IP blocks, so you can't do it yourself, better use 'the experts'.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#113

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:13 PM UTC

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #110

corobo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hypothetical customer please don’t send me 4 emails a day. Or week for that matter.

Mailgun is transactional mail though. Not marketing mail. Mail that you want to receive like password resets, email confirmations, notifications, etc

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#114

Post by ljm » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #27

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…

These providers are just as responsible for spam by running opt-out mailing lists and, even worse... spamming you with surveys and confirmations to see why you unsubscribed. With tracking pixels and rewritten URLs that go through their system before you get to the real destination.

You don’t get a choice. That was made for you.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#115

Post by scottmotte » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

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.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#116

Post by illnewsthat » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

rcfox wrote: post #104

illnewsthat wrote: post #100

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 a…

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.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#117

Post by jchw » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

staticautomatic wrote: post #51

ebiester wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Actually I think individuals suffer so that less SPAM gets through. The SPAM is flowing regardless.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#118

Post by ttul » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

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/...) 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.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#119

Post by cozuya » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:38 PM UTC

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.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month

#120

Post by donmcronald » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #95

donmcronald wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

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...

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.