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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#181

Post by patio11 »

dpcan wrote: post #153
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…

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 m…

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.

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

#182

Post by chiefalchemist »

donmcronald wrote: post #173
seibelj wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It's their business. You didn't sign a contract saying "free for life". It's sad, but there is no free lunch, and you shouldn't build your own business off the assumption that some resource will be free forever.

Free tiers are just another type of market research where the company is collecting data to determine the stickiest features. $8 (or less) per month to keep using the feature with competition (sending). $35 a month to keep using the feature without competition (receive filtering and forwarding). Is that a coincidence?

Features and bugs. The free tier is closer to unpaid beta testers, except the free tier comes with minimal support.

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

#183

Post by encoderer »

simon_weber wrote: post #130
jadbox wrote: post #87

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 address…

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... 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 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 f…

Using pobox.com for this for many years now

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

#184

Post by pests »

donmcronald wrote: post #108
jadbox wrote: post #87

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 address…

ZOHO is the only one I can find that still offers a free tier with a custom domain. Their lite $1/month/user account might be an ok fit for you. It's crazy how the norm has become $5/user/month for something that every web-host on the planet used to charge $.10/user/month for. "But it includes file storage". Yeah, because cable TV tiers is what I always hoped for in tech. /s

Ceck out Mitadu. $5/for unlimited domains and users. Prices rise with outgoing mail needs.

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

#185

Post by ttul »

akira2501 wrote: post #180
donmcronald wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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 [...] Maybe someone more knowledgeable can help me.. but from a laymans point of view, how is this different from the practice of "dumping?" Shouldn't the FTC be more active in protecting markets from this type of strategy?

It’s not anticompetitive to offer a freemium product, unless your market position is so powerful (Microsoft vs Netscape late 1990s) that competitors cannot also afford the same giveaway.

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

#186

Post by sokoloff »

mc3 wrote: post #179
edmundsauto wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 i…

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?

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

#187

Post by wolco »

bigiain wrote: post #172
greglindahl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SO I just tested. After working out that on macOS I now need to use nc -c instead of telnet... I _can_ send mail manually, but it _does_ end up in gmails's spam folder saying "Why is this message in spam? It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." Iain-2:~ iain$ nc -c gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25 220 mx.google.com ESMTP k5si5682618pls.209 - gsmtp EHLO elided.org 250-mx.google.com at your se…

I wonder why google treats this simple email as spam. It contains nothing that should trigger the spam filter aside from where it came from.

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

#188

Post by alharith »

ttul wrote: post #185
akira2501 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 [...] Maybe someone more knowledgeable can help me.. but from a laymans point of view, how is this different from the practice of "dumping?" Shouldn't the FTC be more active in protecting markets from this type of strategy?

It’s not anticompetitive to offer a freemium product, unless your market position is so powerful (Microsoft vs Netscape late 1990s) that competitors cannot also afford the same giveaway.

With the consolidation of resources into Big Tech, this is quickly becoming the reality across all domains. I imagine that they will always keep cloud computing costs juuuust low enough to have plausible deniability in a court case, but still.

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

#189

Post by 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 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.

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

#190

Post by mc3 »

sokoloff wrote: post #186
mc3 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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…

Fair game. You got me, I have no nice answer other than phone your friend. I'll stop digging. I'm not going to do what this guy did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862739
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