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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

#91

Post by vermontdevil »

prawn wrote: post #80
bigiain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some clients are. And how time poor some small businesses are. Those aren't "clients", they're "moochers". If they're prepared to walk away because it costs them $35/month to send to their mailing list, you probably owe it to yourself/your business to spend your time seeking new better clients rather than talking them thru how to get stuff/service for less than $…

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.

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

#92

Post by veeralpatel979 »

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…

Have you tried Sendgrid Inbound Parse [1] + ActionMailbox (in Rails) [2]?

[1] https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/parsing-email/setti...

[2] https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.htm...

I'm building a security case management tool [1] where users can generate inbound addresses in the UI, and then I create a case for any emails sent to a generated inbound address. I'm using the two tools above for this.

[1] https://truepositive.app

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

#93

Post by bscphil »

prawn wrote: post #80
bigiain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some clients are. And how time poor some small businesses are. Those aren't "clients", they're "moochers". If they're prepared to walk away because it costs them $35/month to send to their mailing list, you probably owe it to yourself/your business to spend your time seeking new better clients rather than talking them thru how to get stuff/service for less than $…

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 think it's possible you're both right. There will be cases where you need to drop a client because they're not willing to pay you enough for keeping them to be profitable (parent's point). On the other hand, there's a whole "low-end" market available to some people who have the resources to band together a large number of very-low-profit customers into a product that ultimately still makes you money (your point). If you can find such a market, then providing a service to these people is economically justifiable.

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

#94

Post by duggan »

I received a variation on this mail too. I signed up on their free plan years ago to play with the API, eventually setting it up just to do mail forwarding to GMail from my domains.

This move makes sense and I hope it works out for them, though I'm a bit disappointed, as $35 a month for low volume mail forwarding is just more than I'm willing to pay. I'd have paid $5 a month to save me the hassle of migrating, but $35 means I'll be finding an alternative. I doubt personal mail forwarding is their target market anyway.

Fastmail is probably more suited, and at $5/m is the right price point.

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

#95

Post by veeralpatel979 »

donmcronald wrote: post #46
sanj001 wrote: post #10

We used to be customers of Mailgun, but last month moved over to SES. Not that there's anything wrong with Mailgun, SES's pricing is far cheaper (60K free emails if you're sending from an AWS instance), and deliverability is on par. But SES is super basic. It's just an API, no fancy analytics. So of course, I built a small web app that "wraps around" SES, and gives you some insight into what you're sending, some pret…

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...

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

#96

Post by corobo »

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #53

10k emails per month is generous. Maybe too generous. Selfishly I wish they didn't increase the price, but as a aspiring SaaS founder, it's totally fair that they did. They do provide value. But 625 emails per month amounts to around 20 emails per day. If you have 5 customers, then you can send them 4 emails per day. So not much. I wish they found a middle ground here.

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

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

#97

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Perhaps the better answer is to never pitch or put your clients on any "free" plan. Explain that these sorts of marketing and outreach campaigns cost money, just like getting a Yellow Pages ad costs money, and perhaps work with them on figuring out how many customers or leads these efforts generate so they can more accurately evaluate the cost.

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

#98

Post by gamedna »

Businesses need to prioritize customers to maintain their continued success. Free customers with a solid product quickly build trust in the developer ecosystem but its hardly a model that scale. Where i am scratching my head: did mailgun just miss an opportunity to be the good guy? $1 a month to keep your existing limits would cut the demographics into those that need it, and those that use it b/c its free.

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

#100

Post by illnewsthat »

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 app is entirely seasonal so I only send emails about 4 months out of the year, and I don't want to pay monthly when it's not in use.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cdpjb5/sparkpost_pr...

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