Mailgun pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Mailgun (mailgun.com) is a email API. Volume tiers per plan plus per-1k overage. Free plan: 100 emails/day.
What Mailgun costs
- 10k emails / month: $15/mo
- 50k emails / month: $35/mo
- 100k emails / month: $75/mo
- 500k emails / month: $400/mo
- 1M emails / month: $700/mo
Plan compared: Basic, Foundation, then Scale. Cheapest paid plan (plus overage when that's cheaper) covering the monthly volume, billed monthly. Contact-based pricing assumes 4 emails per contact.
Mailgun price hikes
- Mailgun doubled its Flex pay-as-you-go rate · Dec 1, 2025
Flex closed to new users around September 2025, then its per-email rate doubled for everyone still on it.
Cheaper alternatives to Mailgun
At 100k emails/mo, Mailgun costs $75/mo. 4 email APIs cost less:
- Amazon SES: $10/mo (À la carte, $0.10 per 1k (any account can switch to it))
- SendGrid: $34.95/mo (Essentials (Pro above 100k))
- Resend: $35/mo (Pro (Scale above 100k))
- MailerSend: $68/mo (Hobby + overage, then Starter)
Mailgun alternatives: 4 cheaper email APIs compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Dec 1, 2025 · Price increase: Flex closed to new users around September 2025, then its per-email rate doubled for everyone still on it.
- Jul 2024 · Price increase: Overage raised again and a $15 Basic plan added (seen between June 2023 and July 2024 snapshots).
- Jun 2023 · Price increase: Foundation overage raised and the Growth plan dropped (seen between June 2022 and June 2023 snapshots).
Sources
Pricing page: mailgun.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Current tier prices come from the pricing page's embedded data. Ghost's newsletter sending runs on Mailgun, which is why the Flex rise hit many Ghost self-hosters.