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 free, and then adding one subscriber cost $75/month. That just doesn't make any sense to me.
Related anecdote: My company doesn't have plans (most in the industry do) and customers tell me all the time how much they prefer our approach. There may be selection bias going on, but I have tons of feedback supporting my decision to avoid plans.
This is probably a nature of how the MailChimp plans are constructed. I know that the Zencoder plans get cheaper when you level up to the next one (and it’s worth while switching before you hit the minimum included minutes.)
Plans can be done right - that is in a customer friendly fashion while still maintaining reoccurring revenue for the service.
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 that Mailgun's minimum was $19/month while Sendgrid's silver plan is $10/month. Easy, Sendgrid wins.
Oops, I want to support inbound email though. Sendgrid will give you that on the trial plan, but not on the $10 silver plan. Suddenly I'm up to $80/month to use Sendgrid. Mailgun wins here.
But before I even noticed that I had already signed up for Sendgrid (believing I'd be paying $10/month), but had to wait like 5 hours and then I received some email from them basically demanding that I tell them what my app is, why I need email, what is the purpose of me sending email. Maybe it's for market research, but it didn't come across that way. It came across as "we assume you're a dirty spammer". Of course if I was a spammer I'd just give them so BS answer, I wouldn't admit it. I can't say call a winner, only a lower: Sendgrid. Mandrill and SES both treat you like you expect; you sign up, they cap you at ~250 emails/day for a bit and then you're fine. Sendgrid fail.
Anyway, then my friend points me over to Mandrill and I sign up. The pricing model fit us well.. up to 12k emails free, then $0.20/thousand after that. In the state my app is right now I probably won't go over 12k for another few months, and once I do go over that limit I'm not going to find myself jumping suddenly to something like $80/month.
If I had been setting this all up just a week later (that is, now) I'd probably be on Mailgun due to this new pricing model.
The same thing happened to me with SendGrid. I gave them the essay they asked for, just to see whether they'd ask for anything even more ridiculous. Thankfully they didn't, and they unlocked my account so quickly I suspect they didn't even read my intentionally extremely verbose reply. My best guess is that the essay request serves as a CAPTCHA.
Inbox providers keep track of reputation of an IP address, so most outbound e-mail service providers guard their IPs, since even a few bad apples can cause havoc for existing customers. Not saying it's justified, but there's some verification that needs to happen sooner or later.
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 <100k emails level for staying with sendgrid?
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.
Great job on this. What I really like about this type of pricing is that it puts the complex cost calculation onto your side instead of the customer. I use a ton of products, Heroku services being an example where I have to try to guess at usage. Literally every day I have an internal conversation with myself that says, "Do you need to go into Heroku and turn down the Database tier you're on because the service isn't using the capacity that you're paying for? Wait, but you might get a traffic surge and the site will go down if you decrease the capacity."
This seems like for me, the ideal case. Automatically scaling down all the way to $0 so I never have to think about unsubscribing if I stop using it.
I was actually discussing with a friend that it seems like there could be a big opportunity in the cloud server space to have a zero scale server where you only pay for time that it is being used. I believe Heroku already does spin down instances that aren't needed behind the scenes, they just don't give you the cost savings. They keep it.
I'm not sure if this is feasible or not, but I'd love to read an overview of how you are handling the different plans scenario (previous plans setup vs new pay as you go setup) on a technical level. It'd be helpful for any SaaS owners who want to one day do something similar and as far as I know, no one has ever documented this process.
Love it! I ran into the (free) limits recently during a one-off email blast as part of a new feature rollout. The limit caused a lot of emails to fail.... but MailGun's customer service rectified it in like 5 minutes (at like 2am on a Saturday). Very impressive!
Any idea when the Heroku plans will reflect the pricing changes...?
EDIT: From the article, old plans may be granfathered (if desired)...? If so, how do we switch to new pro-rated on Heroku? Just downgrade the addon?
Thanks for doing this. It makes your pricing now fair and easy for an entrepreneur to plan. I'm currently comparing Mailgun to Mandrill and I'm wondering what makes Bakunin better? Mandrill's prices look great. Can you enlighten me on differences I may be missing?
One feature I'm looking for that mandrill doesn't seem to have is multi-tenancy.
Just a quick note: your pricing calculator does not let me enter any number. I use Czech keyboard layout where numbers are typed with Shift key. This happens in both Firefox and Chrome. Once I switch to English layout, it works fine.
While reading the new pricing structure, I realized that the Mailboxes feature [1] (allowing programmatic creation of mailboxes via the API) is deprecated. That's too bad; it was the reason I started using Mailgun in the first place. Is anyone aware of an alternate service that offers this feature, short of managing my own mail server?
The old pricing was fine with me. Now I worry you will go out of business or get swamped with support requests from people who haven't paid anything. But whatever works for you, I guess.
Been using mailgun for a while to send nagios alerts from our server using SMTP to various accounts that need to be notified. Instead of sending it to 3 accounts, you send it to one then mailgun sends it off to the accounts you want added.
It is perfect and worth the $19. Now I'm unsure if I should just downgrade... but it's not really worth it for the value I get out of Mailgun.
I started looking at http://yclist.com/ and realized that many companies I often see listed on the front page here are actually YC companies, but not marked as such.
When SES is 5 time as less (although less features, I know), there's really no reason why I would go with Mailgun. 10 cents for every 1000 emails is very very hard to beat. And when I'm just relying on you to email, I don't need things such as UI, analytics, etc as much.
I typed in 300000 in the pricing calculator, and got $150.00/month as my price. For any startup, that is just too much. With SES, it's $30.00/month. I know that there's a premium to be paid for certain features, and I know the pricing is better than what it was originally, but SES to me is still superior.
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.
Weirdly, the pricing calculator doesn't appear on the linked page - but it does on the pricing page. (using FF 20, ubuntu)
I think some people might like plan limits, to cap their costs (so they don't accidentally run up a huge bill). It might be nice to have a separate option to also impose a limit. Though this is an extra complication and I'm not sure how many customers would actually want this, if any.
This is awesome! I've been meaning to use mailgun for some small personal projects, but didn't want to pay to use my own domain. That's the biggest advantage of the change for me.
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.
This is RAD. I love mailgun's service, and now I have even more reason to never use the built-in mail server on my *nix boxes for processing or sending mail.
[+] [-] the_bear|12 years ago|reply
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 free, and then adding one subscriber cost $75/month. That just doesn't make any sense to me.
Related anecdote: My company doesn't have plans (most in the industry do) and customers tell me all the time how much they prefer our approach. There may be selection bias going on, but I have tons of feedback supporting my decision to avoid plans.
[+] [-] nmcfarl|12 years ago|reply
Plans can be done right - that is in a customer friendly fashion while still maintaining reoccurring revenue for the service.
[+] [-] aymeric|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bratsche|12 years ago|reply
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 that Mailgun's minimum was $19/month while Sendgrid's silver plan is $10/month. Easy, Sendgrid wins.
Oops, I want to support inbound email though. Sendgrid will give you that on the trial plan, but not on the $10 silver plan. Suddenly I'm up to $80/month to use Sendgrid. Mailgun wins here.
But before I even noticed that I had already signed up for Sendgrid (believing I'd be paying $10/month), but had to wait like 5 hours and then I received some email from them basically demanding that I tell them what my app is, why I need email, what is the purpose of me sending email. Maybe it's for market research, but it didn't come across that way. It came across as "we assume you're a dirty spammer". Of course if I was a spammer I'd just give them so BS answer, I wouldn't admit it. I can't say call a winner, only a lower: Sendgrid. Mandrill and SES both treat you like you expect; you sign up, they cap you at ~250 emails/day for a bit and then you're fine. Sendgrid fail.
Anyway, then my friend points me over to Mandrill and I sign up. The pricing model fit us well.. up to 12k emails free, then $0.20/thousand after that. In the state my app is right now I probably won't go over 12k for another few months, and once I do go over that limit I'm not going to find myself jumping suddenly to something like $80/month.
If I had been setting this all up just a week later (that is, now) I'd probably be on Mailgun due to this new pricing model.
[+] [-] kijin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veesahni|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ezl|12 years ago|reply
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 <100k emails level for staying with sendgrid?
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.
[+] [-] gingerlime|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangero|12 years ago|reply
This seems like for me, the ideal case. Automatically scaling down all the way to $0 so I never have to think about unsubscribing if I stop using it.
I was actually discussing with a friend that it seems like there could be a big opportunity in the cloud server space to have a zero scale server where you only pay for time that it is being used. I believe Heroku already does spin down instances that aren't needed behind the scenes, they just don't give you the cost savings. They keep it.
[+] [-] hayksaakian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twakefield|12 years ago|reply
As always, open to feedback.
[+] [-] dchuk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gog|12 years ago|reply
With the new plan, for 59 US$ you get the dedicated IP and 10k emails. Sending 118k emails with a dedicated IP would cost 113 US$
[+] [-] beambot|12 years ago|reply
Any idea when the Heroku plans will reflect the pricing changes...?
EDIT: From the article, old plans may be granfathered (if desired)...? If so, how do we switch to new pro-rated on Heroku? Just downgrade the addon?
[+] [-] lucasjans|12 years ago|reply
One feature I'm looking for that mandrill doesn't seem to have is multi-tenancy.
[+] [-] lubomir|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agilord|12 years ago|reply
Otherwise, looks good :)
[+] [-] flyingyeti|12 years ago|reply
1: http://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart.html#using-mailb...
[+] [-] DenisM|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktsmith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twodayslate|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejosh|12 years ago|reply
It is perfect and worth the $19. Now I'm unsure if I should just downgrade... but it's not really worth it for the value I get out of Mailgun.
[+] [-] everettForth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philip1209|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|12 years ago|reply
I typed in 300000 in the pricing calculator, and got $150.00/month as my price. For any startup, that is just too much. With SES, it's $30.00/month. I know that there's a premium to be paid for certain features, and I know the pricing is better than what it was originally, but SES to me is still superior.
[+] [-] riobard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|12 years ago|reply
It shows:
Emails Price / 1,000 Total Price
0 - 10,000 Free
Next 500,000 $0.50
Next 1,000,000 $0.35
Next 5,000,000 $0.15
Any Additional $0.10
Does that mean emails 10,001-510,000 cost $0.50 per thousand and then emails 510,000-1,510,000 cost $0.35 per thousand?
[+] [-] jmharvey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsr_|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] 6ren|12 years ago|reply
I think some people might like plan limits, to cap their costs (so they don't accidentally run up a huge bill). It might be nice to have a separate option to also impose a limit. Though this is an extra complication and I'm not sure how many customers would actually want this, if any.
[+] [-] adlpz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdjk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wijnglas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veesahni|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangayle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehulkar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manojlds|12 years ago|reply