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

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

#131

Post by bdcravens »

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…

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

Then why do companies need transactional email providers?

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

#132

Post by bdcravens »

prawn wrote: post #62

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 probab…

Do you as a consultant have a free tier?

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

#133

Post by vermontdevil »

Scoundreller wrote: post #111
vermontdevil wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never assume free tiers will last forever. Recognize they are often a way to entice people into the system. And that often they change as the business grows. Thus don’t build your business that depends on free tiers.

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

#134

Post by donmcronald »

ttul wrote: post #118

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…

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.

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

#136

Post by slig »

niftylettuce wrote: post #124

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

Thank you! I've been using on a couple of domains and it works perfectly!

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

#137

Post by NightlyDev »

Eikon wrote: post #31
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…

> 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 situ…

I've sent a lot of mail in the last 14 years, and it's not hard.

I spammed with invite mails to users friends back in 2008 and mail started to end up in spam for a while, but after switching to double opt-in for all mail and making unsubscribing easily available it went back to good. Add some periodic list cleaning of long time inactive subscribers and it works perfectly!

It does get harder if you have to account for bad users, but if you're the only user then you can make sure everything is good.

So, is it hard? That depends entirely on how wanted or unwanted the sent mail is.

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

#138

Post by Scoundreller »

vermontdevil wrote: post #133
Scoundreller wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Never assume free tiers will last forever. Recognize they are often a way to entice people into the system. And that often they change as the business grows. Thus don’t build your business that depends on free tiers.

Unless the vendor has more to lose than gain if they started charging.

Discount stocks brokers make more money on float than trades.

Search engines make enough off ads instead of charging per search.

Photoshop didn’t have a free tier, but rampant piracy from home users created proficient corporate users.

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

#139

Post by greglindahl »

bigiain wrote: post #82
kick wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely not. Even if you are not considering the whole spam thing. They specified that it wasn't even if you could ignore the spam issue. I said that it was if you ignored the spam issue. The first post in this thread was "We've made sending electronic mail way too complicated under the guise of fighting spam." I'm aware that it won't get past every spam filter, but it gets past both Gmail's and my own provi…

> My claim was that sending electronic mail is a solved problem, because it is. Agreed. I mean, I can _probably_ remember enough to be able to send mail using just telnet without even needing to look anything up. (And that mail, without any mime parts or urls - it very very likely to not fall into any of the spam filtering on my inbound email accounts...)

In the modern era, lots of mailservers run software that looks for weirdnesses in incoming email. I don't know, but I'd suspect that the typing delays of using telnet to send mail are likely to trigger their defenses.

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

#140

Post by NightlyDev »

ttul wrote: post #122
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…

If it's an oligopoly and presumably throwing off cash, what's stopping anyone from creating their own transactional email service? Answer: It's very difficult. Email is adversarial. Getting to the inbox is incredibly difficult to do _at scale_.

A private service where you are very sure that subscribers wants and opens the mail? Easy.

A public service where a lot will be spam and unsolicited emails? Must be hell to run.

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