[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 62...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per
month
Email: Hi there, Mailgun is adjusting our plans and pricing to
more accurately reflect the value users get from the service and to
make room for some great new deliverability features we just
released. Throughout 2019, we were hard at work adding and
improving our email capabilities and optimizing our support to help
your business grow. While many of these updates were made behind
the scenes, the truth is that Mailgun can do a lot more than it
could two years ago when we last updated our plans. What does this
mean for you? On March 1, 2020, we will automatically transition
your account to the new Flex plan, a pay-as-you-go plan comparable
to the Concept plan you're currently on. You'll receive your first
invoice under the new plan on April 1 if your amount due is greater
than $0.50. According to your usage last month, your invoice under
the new price per message of $0.0008 would have been $0 for
December. It's a modest change, but we wanted to be transparent
about it. What's changing with the Flex plan? Flex offers you the
same pay-per-use model you were used to on the Concept plan. The
main differences are that we are no longer offering 10,000 free
emails or 100 free validations per month, and our support options
now include limited ticket support as well as enhanced self-service
Q&As so you can find answers faster. Additionally, while your
existing routes will still be functional, new routes will not be
supported on this plan. What other options do I have? We have
several other plans available with additional features and service
levels, including a new subscription plan called Foundation that
starts at $35 per month. This plan provides access to new
deliverability tools like Inbox Placement so you can effortlessly
increase your deliverability and email ROI. Looking for
validations, inbound routing, or more support? Foundation is a
great starter plan. If this is something you're interested in,
check out your plan options.
Author : kehphin
Score : 159 points
Date : 2020-01-30 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
| codegeek wrote:
| Not surprised. Pretty much all transactional email services have
| done this and I have have used mandrill, sendgrid, sparkpost so
| far. Perhaps it is not cost effective to provide such high tiers
| or not worth it due to spammers.
| jhloa2 wrote:
| I worked at one of these companies a few years ago in the
| department that dealt with spammers. The volume of attempted
| spam from these free (and low tier) plans was absolutely
| staggering.
| Carpetsmoker wrote:
| Anything that allows sending emails with custom content will
| attract spammers. We aggressively limited the free accounts,
| and that _still_ attracted spammers who would just create
| loads of news accounts to send out emails; we eventually put
| a stop to it by limiting it to 25 _recipients_ in total,
| after which they finally gave up (before, it was 25 emails
| with a max of 10 recipients each, which meant 250 spam
| emails).
| hundsim wrote:
| Their email today left me with a bad feeling. I assume that
| wasn't the intention, but $35/month and only one month notice
| shouldn't be buried in marketing speak.
|
| I'd be happy to hear about alternative providers.
| prawn wrote:
| 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 probably will be, but
| we still have to add your card." "What do you mean 'probably'?"
| brudgers wrote:
| The problem is having clients who expect free...or rather
| delivering free to clients who expect free. Your job isn't to
| save the client money on your services. If having your credit
| card on file provides value to the client, then charge the
| client. If it doesn't, charge them anyway because it has value
| to you.
| prawn wrote:
| We started with Mailgun when the free tier seemed established
| and permanent. No card required. Our CMS taps into their API.
| Then they required a unique phone number for each account and
| even that was a time sink getting clients to comprehend what
| was going on.
|
| I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some
| clients are. And how time poor some small businesses are.
| bigiain wrote:
| > 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 $35/month... Your business
| should be "cost sensitive" as well...
| christoph wrote:
| A lot of my clients fit this. What I've done to "solve"
| it for us, is to stop charging for hosting and "services"
| each month and realistically price it in to the initial
| contract. A lot of our projects are between PS5k and
| PS20k. I don't want to be raising invoices for PS20 or
| PS30 per month. Their corporate finance department
| doesn't want to be processing small amounts each month
| either. All these projects have limited lifespan - 1 year
| or 2 or most. It makes sense for all involved to just
| price it in early. They like it, I like it. Sometimes
| projects run longer, sometimes they run short, on
| aggregate, it seems to work for us and them. Yes, if
| something goes nuts and costs thousands a month, that's a
| conversation you want to have quickly, but in that
| scenario, the traffic they are getting is leading a
| different conversation anyway. YMMV.
| redsymbol wrote:
| Exactly. My business lifted off when I realized my market
| isn't the people who benefit from what I'm selling. My
| market is people who benefit from what I'm selling, _and
| are willing to pay for value_.
|
| Freeloaders are simply not in my market.
|
| And with that focus, I've been able to exponentially
| improve the value of what my company provides.
| prawn wrote:
| 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 transactional
| emails. I can't promise a client that they won't get a
| flurry of junk signups or password reset mailouts that
| hit their credit card.
|
| The bottom 50% of the market is heading to self-serve
| site-builders and it's savage for a small web business.
| vermontdevil wrote:
| Mailgun does not owe you or anyone a free tier.
|
| Start charging your clients money to cover costs that
| comes with their business.
| prawn wrote:
| They literally offered a free tier!
|
| My original point was not even anything to do with cost
| but hassle!
| bscphil wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| brudgers wrote:
| I don't underestimate how bad clients can be. I don't over-
| estimate how hard it is for some self-employed people to
| ask for more money. It's ok to be fired by people who
| aren't paying you. It's even better to fire clients who
| aren't.
| prawn wrote:
| These clients ARE paying me. I like them. They just have
| an overloaded plate of issues and it's no fun having to
| tax them further when a third-party setup changes.
| Initial point wasn't even about cost but hassle.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| black1101 wrote:
| Is there any other service instead of Mailgun who can also
| receive/resend incoming mails? I didn't find anything nice. thank
| you.
| mmcclure wrote:
| I think most of the big names in this space do both, but I can
| personally confirm that Postmark.app does outgoing and
| incoming.
| stefan_ wrote:
| 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 up in inboxes and "enhance" it with all sorts
| of tracking.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _despite sending an email being an utterly trivial, long
| solved problem_
|
| AFAIK, SPAM is a still a hard problem, and getting emails
| delivered isn't trivial.
|
| "Under the guise of Spam" is a very reductionist viewpoint.
| It's like saying "Under the guise of the measles, we now have
| an oligopoly of pharmaceuticals." The latter might be true, but
| its important not to understate the threat of the former.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| It is clearly _not_ trivial though. I get that it feels like it
| should be and probably is if you 're sending a few emails, but
| "at scale" (pardon the buzzword) it is not trivial hence why
| people use these services.
| luckylion wrote:
| No, we've created something far better. ~50% of the Spam that
| makes it to my inbox is sent via Amazon SES. Amazon does not
| give a fuck, I've reported it to abuse, they ignore it.
|
| I can't just block Amazon SES though, because there's also a
| ton of legit services that use them for mail transport. We've
| really helped spammers evade blocking and decrease their
| infrastructure costs, and because there's so much "normal"
| traffic on SES, spammers will blend right in. And as long as
| they pay for services rendered, Amazon couldn't be happier.
| ruffrey wrote:
| I've been running a SaaS in the email space since 2011. It is
| not surprising at all, to me, that Mailgun decided to do this.
|
| Sending an email _is_ trivial - you're right - but getting it
| delivered to the inbox, instead of the spam folder, is far from
| trivial. At scale, it is incredibly difficult. Even worse,
| spammers and fraudsters are utterly relentless. They hammer
| services like mine and Mailgun's constantly with fraud and
| phishing and porn and other garbage, inbound and outbound.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| 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.
| Eikon wrote:
| > 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 situation into
| consideration, sending emails becomes a more than painful thing
| you don't want to deal with.
| kick wrote:
| Sending an email is absolutely a solved problem.
|
| I can send a message to my address in 2020 using a 2003
| Fedora Core 1 box without a domain using only what's part of
| the POSIX standard, and I'll receive it just fine.
|
| I just did a few days ago, actually. It even got past my
| provider's spam filter.
|
| I could probably have done it using earlier software than
| 2003-era mail/mailx, but that was the quickest way I could
| find to send an attachment given the software on hand.
| ebiester wrote:
| 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.
| bigtunacan wrote:
| Please explain the difference to me. Mailgun is sending
| tons and tons of spam email; what is so special about
| them that they aren't ending up in people's spam/junk
| folders?
| aseipp wrote:
| Mail providers like Mailgun live or die based on their
| reputation. If they as a sender get marked as spam by
| "The Algorithms", then their product is useless. They
| almost certainly respond to abuse reports quickly and
| have enough reputation, and enough legitimate clients,
| that they have "leeway". But that leeway isn't unlimited.
|
| There was a big fit thrown on this website a year or two
| ago when one transactional mail provider (MailChimp?)
| said they were banning crypto companies with ICOs from
| their service. They literally put "ICOs are not welcome"
| in their Terms of Service. Why? Because first off, ICOs
| _are_ scams. And that means they buy email lists, and
| then spam the shit out of people with "buy into our
| ICO!" emails, which get immediately shitcanned into the
| spam folder by 99.99% of users -- they're no different
| than Nigerian Princes, as far as most people care. That
| behavior tanks the reputation of the sender, and you
| cannot reason with The Algorithm once it "recognizes" you
| as spam. That kind of problem is not a minor
| inconvenience to companies like Mailgun, it's an
| existential threat.
| slig wrote:
| They probably send much, much more valid emails, respond
| quickly to abuse reports, and since they're large/known
| enough, they won't get blacklisted because that would be
| disruptive to large, legit business.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| 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.
| space_ghost wrote:
| You're both right, but you're solving different problems.
| Just because your message got past _your_ spam filter doesn
| 't mean it would get past _all_ spam filters.
| kick wrote:
| _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 provider (a
| smaller, non-American one), which is good enough for my
| own use. My claim was that _sending_ electronic mail is a
| solved problem, because it is.
| bigiain wrote:
| > 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...)
| gwittel wrote:
| Sending at scale is the problem. A provider like Mailgun
| (aka an ESP), is a huge target for abuse. Free and low
| priced tiers are tricky since they need to draw in
| customers, but then get heavily abused.
|
| tl;dr: Abuse ruins it for everyone.
|
| I work on the filtering side of the world so I see a lot of
| the challenges that even purportedly good actors face. Each
| provider does better or worse at controlling abuse. These
| things all have a cost:
|
| * IPs -- You need to send from a variety of IPs. They have
| warmup time before they can be safely used. One bad guy can
| burn that IP and everyone who shares. Most ESPs aren't
| going to have dedicated IPs for each (or those are for high
| tiers).
|
| * Dmarc/dkim/spf -- Passing validation can be hard since it
| requires your client to work with you.
|
| * Abuse reports -- Likely huge volume
|
| * Bounces -- They can count against the customer. How much
| is OK (e.g. AWS SES will cut you off if your bounce rate
| gets too high)?
|
| * Throwaway account abuse -- Huge issue, this threshold is
| a simple hammer (so now bad guys need ~10x more throwaway
| accounts).
|
| * Account takeover -- That good guy is now sending out
| crap. Now what?
|
| * Post-abuse cleanup -- Good luck going around and working
| with major providers to get yourself unblocked. Its a huge
| time sink.
|
| By using Mailgun, etc all of the above becomes their
| problem. On top of it they'll offer analytics, help
| crafting content that works in varying mail clients, etc.
|
| A small business type sender doesn't need much of this
| (other than maybe the technical help). But at some point,
| the scales tip.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Most ISPs block SMTP traffic, which creates a pretty
| significant barrier to sending email. Even VPS services
| send through a secret gateways with all sorts of filters
| and controls on it.
| [deleted]
| lytedev wrote:
| Is this going to affect my current account? I've been using
| mailgun for years under this 10k limit to send mail from all my
| domains for free except once when a bunch of alerts sent
| thousands of emails.
| chipperyman573 wrote:
| Yes, I got an email about it this morning. You'll move to the
| PAYG plan automatically in a month.
| ukyrgf wrote:
| I submitted this under the title "Mailgun eliminates 'Concept'
| plan, no longer offering 10000 free
| emails/mo(https://www.mailgun.com/pricing)" but it was a dupe. I
| think mine might be a bit more descriptive title, though. They
| are not offering 625 for free. There is a 3 month trial that
| gives you 5,000 emails.
|
| Does anybody know the $0.0008/email is the real pricing, or if
| you have to pay $0.80/1000 up front like the footer of the price
| table says?
| zeefarmer wrote:
| If you're staying on the Flex plan, it's true pay as you go, no
| need to pay up front.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I really hope this means every dang blog/recipe page/random
| article will stop asking for my email so they can spam me.
| memset wrote:
| Hi! So, for the past year I've been working on a self-hosted
| service to allow people to switch between different email
| providers at runtime. Basically, how can we make it easy for
| people to configure how, or when, to use a given SMTP provider,
| or do failover, when changes like this happen.
|
| We don't have a landing page or anything- just working code!
| Would anyone here like to see it working or be willing to share
| feedback?
| duggan wrote:
| 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.
| sanj001 wrote:
| 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 pretty
| graphs, and other stuff.
|
| If anyone is feeling adventurous, it's https://messageray.com
|
| You give it an AWS access key with permissions for SES, and you
| can send 60k free emails a month. It's just a side project atm,
| and completely free.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Needs to be self hosted or otherwise it's just another mailgun.
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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 year they've
| priced me out of the service.
|
| It's disappointing the way these companies are happy to have
| enthusiasts, hobbyists, and side projects light-housing their
| products for them at the start, but eventually switch to paid
| tiers that alienate those same types of early adopters. It
| feels like it happens with every single service I use.
|
| Boo!
| veeralpatel979 wrote:
| 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...
| illnewsthat wrote:
| 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...
| rcfox wrote:
| 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.
| tln wrote:
| I'm a happy customer, and will be moving to foundation plan soon.
|
| If I didn't rely on their inbound email parsing, I could get by
| on the flex plan for less than $10/mo.... it's still super cheap.
| chrisgoman wrote:
| Maybe a better idea for them would be to say charge you $10
| upfront for 12.5k email credits which should last you a while.
| Seems like a better deal for "hobbyists" vs a bill at the end of
| a couple of months. For MG, they can collect payment upfront. I
| guess maybe for some people, going from free to $10 might be too
| much of a leap? We were on the "free" Mandrill plan which became
| PAID (which we were fine paying) but you have to pay for
| Mailchimp before you get the privilege to pay for Mandrill (we
| don't use Mailchimp at all), all our stuff is transactional. Hard
| to get out of it as we are using both inbound and outbound
| ticmasta wrote:
| This is what twilio does right? you buy credits ahead of time
| and then consume them via service usage?
| giarc wrote:
| Correct. Purchasing phone numbers is recurring ($1/month for
| residential and toll free numbers).
| zackkatz wrote:
| We have used Mailgun to power our SaaS emails for years with
| great deliverability and without paying a cent. It makes sense
| for them to charge for their service. It was too good to last
| forever!
| gshdg wrote:
| Unsurprising, given that that has to be a huge spam magnet.
| scaryclam wrote:
| Historically they've been very careful. No DNS, you don't get
| to send to non-verified test emails. High bounce rate? No more
| mailing for you until you contact them and explain.
|
| All in all they seem reasonably switched on and protective of
| their IP addresses.
| mrpotato wrote:
| I would be curious to know how many of their free tier users will
| be converted to paying customers. Is the bulk of their free tier
| users over the 625 mark or below?
| corobo wrote:
| I'll now be paying $2/mo as I only use them for transactional
| mail
|
| Honestly no complaints here, it's still basically free. Bonus
| points spammers will go elsewhere, making the already great
| delivery chance better
|
| Really wish inbound was sticking around though. I can't
| mentally justify paying for 50k emails/mo to receive a handful
| of messages as webhooks
| ukyrgf wrote:
| Here's a discussion from 6 years ago when they first announced
| their new plans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226964
| nodesocket wrote:
| I am trying to figure out where 625 comes from? Nowhere in the
| email or on the pricing page that I can find does Mailgun say how
| many free outbound emails you get now.
| zeefarmer wrote:
| The OP calculated $0.50 / $0.0008 per message to get 625
| messages, based on "You'll receive your first invoice under the
| new plan on April 1 if your amount due is greater than $0.50.
| According to your usage last month, your invoice under the new
| price per message of $0.0008"
|
| That's not quite how it works out though. Mailgun rolls over
| the balance till the balance hits $0.50 and when the balance
| hits $0.50, they cut an invoice for that amount.
| black1101 wrote:
| Is there any alternative to Mailgun for sending / receive mails
| for free? Let's say 500mails per month? Thank you.
| yyyk wrote:
| Most large Cloud Providers have an arrangement with at least
| one email service which allows some free service (at least no
| extra charge than whatever one is paying for the subscription),
| with a far higher limit than the typical free tiers - e.g.
| AWS/SES, Azure/SendGrid, IBM/SendGrid, GCP/Mailgun.
|
| So if you're already paying for some cloud hosting somewhere
| you likely have a free email service you can use.
| sam_goody wrote:
| Mailjet, even though it is owned by Mailgun, has a higher free
| tier.
|
| Sendgrid is owned by Twillio, and has a similar free tier.
|
| Ses is pretty cheap, for 500 mails, it is essentially free.
|
| Or get a dedicated IP, use mailinabox or other similar one
| click setups.
| pmlnr wrote:
| gmail? outlook?
|
| basically anything with imap access.
| sethammons wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work with Twilio SendGrid.
|
| We have the inbound parse webhook which turns incoming SMTP
| into an HTTP post to your URL. Our free plan is is 100/day
| after the trial period which has a much higher limit.
| corentin88 wrote:
| Gmail + a mail merge addon (like Mailmeteor.com or Gmass)
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Just curious if it is 500/month, why switch?
| mtmail wrote:
| There was an earlier discussion with 'Tell HN' title talking
| about 625/month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22192543
| When I access the page I read "Get 5,000 free emails per month".
| Maybe they're A/B testing?
| ukyrgf wrote:
| 5,000 a month free for 3 months. Previously, you got 10,000
| emails and 100 validations per month included. You had to have
| a non-prepaid credit card to sign up as well.
| neogodless wrote:
| I've been happy with Mailgun for free, super low volume sites
| (i.e. single digit emails per month.) However, I've been shopping
| around for alternatives because I have a domain that won't pass
| their dashboard validation of DNS records. I checked DNS from a
| wide variety of other tools, and everything works. I waited weeks
| but the dashboard still reports problems, but it doesn't tell me
| _what_ the problem is, and their support, naturally, isn't the
| best at the free tier. So I couldn't get any help from them on
| what the problem was. I'm open to the idea that I misconfigured
| DNS, despite it matching other domains, and the DNS tools
| validating my work, but without someone on their end giving me
| debugging information, I haven't been able to solve my issue, and
| have to use an alternative.
| taesu wrote:
| batch and switch from 10,000 to 625 is worthy of never using them
| ever again.
| Carpetsmoker wrote:
| So what you're saying is that if you're offering a free plan as
| a business, you can never change it?
| [deleted]
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Doesn't sound like you were a customer in the first place.
| foota wrote:
| Not much of a bait and switch when the change is coming after
| several years.
| gamedna wrote:
| 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.
| taytus wrote:
| Any chance they are A/B testing this?
|
| I'm a MG user and haven't received that email and their page is
| showing me 5K/month free tier.
| ilikepi wrote:
| Are you looking at the part that says, "Get 5,000 free emails
| per month for 3 months?" I would interpret that as an
| introductory quota for new accounts; after three months the
| monthly quota will be reduced.
| corobo wrote:
| Completely fine with going to a PAYG model for sent emails, it's
| a shame that inbound mail will no longer be supported at all on
| that plan though
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Whoa. Thank you so much for telling me this. I am literally in
| the middle of a one-day project to send nearly 10k emails and
| have been using the free tier for years with no issues. I was
| just thinking today about how good the free tier is. I am not
| surprised they are making this change. I will gladly upgrade,
| Mailgun provide a great service and I have never had an issue.
| veeralpatel979 wrote:
| 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.
| corobo wrote:
| As a hypothetical customer please don't send me 4 emails a day.
| Or week for that matter.
| Jedd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's if you're sending email every day of the week.
|
| If it's just Mon-Fr then it's 30 emails per day.
|
| If you have 5 customers ... then you can hopefully afford
| USD$0.80 for 1000 emails / month.
| ada1981 wrote:
| Who cares though? If you have customers the cost to send an
| email is still almost zero.
| veeralpatel979 wrote:
| Sure the marginal cost of sending another email might be
| zero. But typically you price based on what people are
| willing to pay -- not based on costs.
| rapfaria wrote:
| What service sends 4 e-mails to your inbox everyday?
| veeralpatel979 wrote:
| Heroku, Sentry, Jira, GitHub, any service that's notifying me
| of events via email regardless of company size.
| crankylinuxuser wrote:
| I have some free v1agra for you to buy from n1g3rian princ3.
| yangity wrote:
| I think 10000 was probably too generous, but 625 also seems a bit
| too little as well for hobbyists.
| flatiron wrote:
| I run a gitlab for around 30 users and that's around what I use
| on AWS to send my emails. It's a bunch. Rarely do I send emails
| on weekends so it's like 20 days a month I send emails just for
| merge requests and stuff.
| shampine wrote:
| I was trying to reason how they hit that number this morning.
| I'm guessing probably average or mean is much lower.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| Hobbyist to me means that you are doing it for fun and aren't
| engaging more than 5-10 people. So given that, I'm having a
| hard time understanding how 10 people could handle 625 emails a
| month.
| katsura wrote:
| I communicate with family and very few close friends only
| (less than 10 people) and my Mailgun stats show about 1k
| emails per month.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| That's 3 emails a day for 10 people... what have you built
| that requires that level of communication with family and
| close friends?
| avolcano wrote:
| As someone who has a noncommercial side project and has been
| using SendGrid's free 100/day plan, I'm actually thinking of
| switching to this. I've always been a bit concerned with what
| would happen if my app got a sudden burst of signups (since
| email verification is required to sign up), and have been
| looking for an uncapped plan, but don't want to spend $10 a
| month or more just for that possibility.
|
| The key here is that with the $0.80/1000 emails PAYG rate, you
| can still do like 2000-3000 a month for less than $5, which no
| one except SES will provide. Everyone else has a gulf between
| "free tier 100/day" (or even 100/month with Postmark) and their
| first actual paid tier ($10/month for Postmark, $15/month for
| SendGrid). No one else except SES has this PAYG for low rates
| as far as I'm aware. I think if your hobby project needs more
| than 625 emails a month, it's reasonable to spend a dollar or
| two on a month to handle that.
| jjeaff wrote:
| My account is still grandfathered in with 30k free per month.
| ukyrgf wrote:
| This takes place in March.
| jadbox wrote:
| 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 addresses. Sure it's simple, but
| it's far cheaper than getting GSuite. If anyone has any advice
| for my situation, I could love to hear it.
| veeralpatel979 wrote:
| 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
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-01-30 23:00 UTC)