In their S-1, SendGrid disclosed that it earned about 73% gross margins, spending roughly $18M in cost-of-goods-sold to earn $52M in revenue (six months ending June 30, 2017). Around that time, we estimate that they were sending roughly 30 billion messages a month, suggesting that they were spending $18M to send 30 billion messages - that's about $0.60 for every thousand messages.

If SendGrid's costs are universal in the industry, then that 10,000-message free tier, therefore, is costing Mailgun perhaps as much as $0.60 x 10 = $6.00 a month. If you have thousands of free accounts, the cost adds up rapidly on the P&L statement. I could be off by an order of magnitude about the sending cost, but you get the point.

Mailgun did a pretty nice job by offering a pay-as-you-go tier, but they still took features from the free plan and moved them into a paid tier where you have to spend a minimum of $420 per year.

I use Mailgun for less than 100 emails per month, but happen to use the receive filtering that's not going to be available with pay-as-you-go. I don't expect them to give me anything for free, but I'm not going to pay $420 / year for something that costs $.72 using your estimates.

Yes, spammers are a big issue for all ESPs (my own biz in this space is no exception), but no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Or put another way: what value are they risking by force-deplatforming the freeloading accounts, besides a bit of splashback from frustrated (non-paying) users?

Those "freeloading" accounts are offered by companies to users, for the company's benefit, in order to strengthen their market position and lure users into a trap where they'll have little choice but to pay extortionate prices once they've developed a dependence on the service.

$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?

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?

Nobody can really be surprised by that, though? Meaning people who sign up are aware that it could happen eventually?

Everybody should realize that:

* there is no free lunch

* a VC-funded business is looking to maximize user base and then get sold, so as a customer you are likely looking at a time horizon of ~3-4 years: plan accordingly

* if a niche B2B SaaS offers pricing below $40/month, it's not sustainable and will disappear, so plan accordingly

* if anybody offers you stuff for free, something is wrong, so take advantage at your own peril

But most people do not realize all that, and expect things to be free forever, pay for software once, or for complex B2B applications to be available forever at $5-$19/month.

My biggest issue with the whole model is that by offering a free tier or by subsidizing everything for "~3-4 years" the VC funded companies make it difficult for anyone to build a business that charges fair value from day 1.

It's hard to deal with because so many people are choosing the "free" option that if you try to pick something that charges fair value, you could end up picking a losing side. Or, even worse, there aren't any alternatives and you get to choose between dying on a hill or running to the slaughterhouse along with the rest of the herd.

Look as Visual Studio Code vs Visual Studio Online. Watch as VSO slowly gets more features than VSC. It'll happen slowly, and intentionally, but VSO will eventually be significantly better than VSC. Then start to think about the integration MS can do with GitHub and Azure to streamline the development process and you get to the point where everything else is an inferior product.

Now we're paying $1k+ per year for a code editor that used to be "free". Right now it's possible to sacrifice time in place of money for almost everything, but I'm worried we'll hit a point where a lot of the development process has been usurped by SaaS offerings and the only way to play will be to pay.

I agree that VC funding makes it difficult to charge reasonable fees. It hurts everyone: both businesses and customers in the long term.

I would not mix a discussion of SaaS into this. I personally believe that subscriptions are the only sustainable way to develop and maintain software these days. "Buying" software, "owning" it forever and using it on rapidly changing operating systems and environments is fiction.

I'm still trying to figure out my new costs, I send approx 30 e-mails a month. I think it's like a handful of cents a month which is annoying.

Having a big free tier is just a growth hacking technique, and it worked: people know the product and developeed integrations.

But, all marketing tactics have a beginning and an end. If the market is mature, and it's ROI is not good enough or has decreased dramatically, it will end soon.

SES also monitors these signals, and if it detects signs of abuse, such as elevated bounces or spam complaints, then a sender's ability to send may be paused and the account's activity may be reviewed. FAQ on these processes [2]. Some of the tolerates are quite tight, and can result in action being taken even if much less than a percent of messages are getting these sorts of responses. There's a lot more that I can't describe in a short comment.

SES processes and reacts to spam reports sent in standard formats like the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF), and looks at signals like List-Unsubscribe and bounces, etc. But this does require the system to understand the format of the reports used by the feedback loops [3]. Do you happen to know if your feedback loop sent spam complaints in ARF format? If you'd like to discuss further, feel free to reach out to me directly.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/announc...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/e-faq....

[3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/email-d...

I think you've confirmed what I said in my parent comment...SES doesn't take a zero tolerance approach.

I think it is the shared IPs that I've blocked (54.240.27.189/24). You'll see they are on multiple blacklists.

If you really distrust mail from those IPs so much, why not just filter it straight to SPAM? At least you'd be delivering it and your users could whitelist senders (or domains) they trust.

For example, if you want a quota of 100 messages per day, you have to pay a one time fee of $.10 per message to get into the pool, so $10. If you want a quota of 50k messages per day you have to pay a one time fee of $.005 per message, so $250.

My good friend has worked on the email system for a mid-range consumer ISP for about the past 10 or so years. He told me 93% of all email they receive is spam. And they have a 60PB NAS for their mail store. So for every 1PB of storage they had to discard ~14PB of junk. And that’s just the stuff they summarily dismiss. Then some of the remaining 7% they accept makes it to your Junk folder.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 in. Bounce response with reason "non on white list"

It's a cultural change though: an email address won't get through unless you are unblocked, but technically easy.

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?

Joe manages his whitelist through his mail provider's web UI. Many providers already use the address book as a whitelist; the only difference is they default to filtration instead of assuming spam.

Joe's friend's mail gets routed to the spam box. Joe's friend gets a bounce notification that says "To be added to Joe's whitelist, click here (and optionally solve a captcha/enter Joe's dog's name/submit a blood sample/deposit $0.25 worth of bitcoin into Joe's wallet)." Joe's friend clicks here, and Joe's mail provider adds Joe's friend to the whitelist and promotes the email to the inbox.

Joe's spammer gets the same message and disregards it. Their email stays in spam forever.

Joe's spam box gets bombarded with "hey, read this email and see if the sender is a friend" a bunch of times. He can trawl through them for actual friends if he wishes.

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.

Pity we'll have to move off them. It was good while it lasted.

You might miss something valuable. Perhaps from a long-lost relative. Or a prospective client or employer.

And once you're actually looking through the spam folder, what good is it really?

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.

I'm curious, is that specific to IPv4 or you see the same phenomenon with IPv6 where providers allocate /64 or /48 to customers? Or there simply isn't enough sending volume from IPv6 at the moment to warrant specific filtering?

Blocking via IP on V6 is tricky since it’s not clear what a safe/useful block range would be.

Spamhaus has released a "blocking strategy" for IPv6 to exactly address this issue: https://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/668/spamhaus-releases-...

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.

Communication is much more than just broadcasting, just as email is about more than sending emails.

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...)

  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 service, [202.171.181.100]
  250-SIZE 157286400
  250-8BITMIME
  250-STARTTLS
  250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
  250-PIPELINING
  250-CHUNKING
  250 SMTPUTF8
  MAIL FROM: <bigiain@elided.org>
  250 2.1.0 OK k5si5682618pls.209 - gsmtp
  RCPT TO: <bigiain@gmail.com>
  250 2.1.5 OK k5si5682618pls.209 - gsmtp
  DATA
  354  Go ahead k5si5682618pls.209 - gsmtp
  Subject: Test
  From: bigiain@elided.org
  To: bigiain@gmail.com
  Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 13:07:00 +1100
  
  Foo baz nah
  
  .
  
  250 2.0.0 OK  1580436443 k5si5682618pls.209 - gsmtp
  QUIT
  221 2.0.0 closing connection k5si5682618pls.209 - gsmtp
  Iain-2:~ iain$

(Not sure I care enough to try...)

Is this mail relay actually elided.org or is it impersonating elided.org?

There does not appear to be an SPF record for that domain so Gmail cannot determine if this is a fraudulent message, especially if the machine this request came from does not match the IP of the A record for that domain.

If your domain has SPF headers which don't permit mail from the (residential?) IP you're connecting from, that'll be a major factor as well.

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.

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.

Answer: It's very difficult. Email is adversarial. Getting to the inbox is incredibly difficult to do _at scale_.

A public service where a lot will be spam and unsolicited emails? Must be hell to run.

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.

You don’t get a choice. That was made for you.

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.

It’s easy to make a proof of concept. Production grade is an entirely different story.

Remember to preserve conversations and forwarding. Make sure file attachments are handled and scanned for viruses. Make sure you watch out for recursive automatic forwarding. Make sure that any html is secure. And make sure it will scale well ... and I mean billions of emails a day well.

It's easy to send an email, but it's way harder to ensure that the emails you send are delivered properly.

All of them passed both SPF and DKIM.

How. Just how did these emails get spam filtered by Google? Everything about them screams that they're legit emails from ourselves to ourselves.

I was recently thinking about the email problem myself, and was reading about IP Warmups. Seems like every provider has different recommendations too. So sounds like not an exact science either. But maybe if it was an exact science it'd be hard to tell the good and bad guys apart. I guess one of the tricky problems with decentralized systems.

Then why do companies need transactional email providers?

“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’?”

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...

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.

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 mom and pop type places. $35 here, $50 there - it all adds up fast, and they are very conscious of these costs, and so am I.

Going to a small business owner and trying to explain any kind of price hike for a service they thought was free is just another burden to them, and it makes MY recommendation of the original service seem bad .... and I'm the guy they came to for GOOD advice.

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.

If your advice was "you get 10,000 emails per month free via $service" without qualifying "right now, but that isn't guaranteed forever, their paid tier is $x per 1000 emails and switching mail providers in the backend of your website will take approximately $Y hours at $chargable_rate", then it _was_ "bad advice" (or at the very least "incomplete advice").

I made this mistake way to many times before I learnt that lesson. (Most recently with Google Maps on websites...)

Start charging your clients money to cover costs that comes with their business.

e.g., I can set up their account and other technical parts after that, but I can't verify their mobile number (added since we started working with Mailgun), don't have their credit card details to put on file (same), and often end up agreeing to legal notices for them rather than asking them to complete signup (and stalling the project).

Discount stocks brokers make more money on float than trades.

Search engines make enough off ads instead of charging per search.

Photoshop didn’t have a free tier, but rampant piracy from home users created proficient corporate users.

My original point was not even anything to do with cost but hassle!

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.

Your problem cascades from a B2C approaches to a B2B relationships. Not just yours to your client, but Mailgun's B2C approach to its relationship with your business. Free commercial email is likely to be unsustainable. At best, it's money left on the table because at 10k emails a month, there won't be many conversions. They were delivering free to a customer who expected free with the same damage to the customer's perception of the relationship as between you and your client.

The only part under your total control was whether or not to charge your client money. If you had, then the bad part would be Mailgun raising its prices. You would have had the option of eating the cost. Or having the unpleasant conversation with your client.

Maybe there's something slimy about charging a client for a free tier mail service. That's also under your control. Just pay for a paid tier and pass along cost at normal markup. In the long run, and that's what B2B relationships are about, it will tend to be simpler and simpler tends to be better for everyone.

I've worked in this industry for over 20 years and found that the more complicated your explanation, the less likely clients are to want to work with you. Being a stick in the mud on usability is another example - they'll leave for someone who'll make them a splash page without question, etc.

As long as you understand the risk you are carrying you can price out the externalities of it going south.

To explain that, consider this artificial example made up based on what you just wrote; "I have a lot of clients using MailChimp's free plan ..."

Now lets say MailChimp has a tough few quarters, maybe they get a new CEO or maybe they just need to get more money for their services than they currently do and so they revise their "free" plans into non-free plans in ways that prevent some chunk of your customers from using their free plans.

Your customers are forced to change their previously working system for a different system. Four outcomes pop out of that event; They can use their current system but now it costs them more money, they can hire you (more money) to come up with another free system which they now know will only last for some random period of time, you can design a new system for them for free (costs you money), or they can go with a new contractor who will design a new system for them.

As the original provider of the system, you cannot predict when this event will occur. It may occur at a slow time, it may occur on black friday when it the customer's busiest time of year. And as the original provider you cannot predict the new cost of the system, or the cost of a replacement system.

So the risk you are carrying here is mostly reputational (some of your customers will say bad things about you if this event happens at a bad time or costs them a lot of money they were not expecting to pay.) Depending on what type of warranty you provide or imply for your services (most people disclaim these so the common case would be to leave the customer with the costs) you may be carrying some financial risk to correct the future situation.

I will reiterate that there is absolutely nothing wrong with carrying this risk, as long as you are aware you are carrying it. Because you can plan for the various cases (for example by continually researching equivalents to MailChimp so that in the event this happens you can quickly and easily move your customers over to the new solution)

When are they coming to an end? I'm also grandfathered in, and haven't heard about this.

I have a SaaS product with a free tier (like Mailgun) and I have had an app/game which was free with an upgrade.

(My initial point was not about the freemium model but about other changes that have made working with Mailgun difficult.)

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.

^(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!

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

Building some type of custom endpoint for it is too much work for what it does. I already pay for email where I can set up unlimited domain aliases, so I'll just wait for my Mailgun email and switch back to aliases.

The incoming mail filtering was the only reason I decided to try Mailgun instead of Twilio or SES. I already have SES set up for transactional mail and my usage is so low they don't even bill me for it.

The email doesn't even mention that 'email receiving' is switched off as a result of moving me to this plan! Pretty poor, IMO.

I'm not sure this is valid. Some users will consider anything spam, including password reset emails they asked for.

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 free for one user but the webapp is pretty rough to use.

https://forwardemail.net is an open source option but I wasn't sure about how reliable it would be.

ImprovMX has always worked great. I have used it for a handful of email addresses that all forward to my personal account. If your personal account is gmail it's also very easy to set up a "send as." I will definitely use this first next time I need something like this.

ForwardEmail is indeed open source and works pretty good. It's a little more setup than ImprovMX and I did have an issue where sometimes mail would bounce back to the sender and they would tell me about it. I don't know whose fault it was tho, because it was only one sender and her SMTP server was strict. I did also have an issue where all the mail was going into the spam folder of my personal email, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I clicked "spam" for a spam message and then gmail started assuming everything from forwardemail.net must be spam so silently "helped" me by hiding everything D-: Once I figured it out I was able to fix it by marking the emails as "not spam" but it occasionally would spam something I needed. So, if you use either of these services, never mark the message as spam. Also if you use forwardemail throw the dev a few bucks (https://forwardemail.net/en/donate) . Here's the code: https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding

We are on the verge to release a sending feature and the decision from Mailgun to drop this came at a great surprise for us.

I always thought of Mailgun like the "unreachable competitor", kind of like "reach for the moon" type of target. But since they moved their forwarding feature to a costly paid plan, it's just like the moon vanished from our trajectory.

Anyway, I'm open to answer any questions if you have any. I also posted about ImprovMX here on HN today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223783) and ready to answer all the questions there too.

https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding/blob/m...

[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

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

There is a free trial tier that only lets you send 10 emails a day.

You also have to own at least one domain.

Based in Switzerland.

The free trial and outgoing sending limits are the only limits. Not meant for automated emails so not a huge concern and keeps spammers away.

Check out Migadu.

I've used Gmail like this for maybe seven years to avoid gsuite and still have custom domains when using Gmail. The delay seems to vary based on how often there is new mail.

You could use a webmail solution or K9 mail to get mail instantly.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask! :)

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.

That's what 'transactional' means... it's supposed to be used for the end or beginning of a transaction (reset password, receipt for a purchase, things like that...)

Things like friend requests are also transactional email by definition. So are those "you left your cart behind, want to complete the purchase?". That doesn't mean that you asked to receive it.

Come on, sometimes it's better to be understood than to be right. Fuck the definition.

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.

Even if I sent 5000 messages one month, I'd pay around $4.

This is not even close to a significant cost.

I thought you were saying that since Mailgun has customers, and has built their email infrastructure already, the cost of providing a free service to people who aren't using the tool much is zero.

Thanks for clarifying.

The reason is that they are selecting for the most clueless marks. If you don't get a bunch of red flags from an email like that, then you are likely going to be an easy mark.

I built it because I was sick of the alternatives and it's 100% open-source.

https://forwardemail.net

And what about when forwarding it not to Gmail?

I've been using it on a few domains and it's been working great for me.

The response, aside the almost-automated one from the first ticket, has been that there might be an add on purchasable for the routing, in case anyone is interested.

I've always been happy to pay for my email where possible, the problem is that the pricing has never been balanced. $5/month PER ACCOUNT is excessive. For a family of 4, that's 20$/month for sending emails.

Mailgun is going to have the flex plan ($1/month basically) or the foundation plan, $35/month, nothing between those two. I hope they implement something for smaller companies and for single person

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...

Yes, it is nice they are still providing a pay as you go model, but it is frustrating to have another plan change and increase my cost.

One thing that has always been expensive and still is is email validation. $35 per month and you still have to pay $1.20 per 100 validation. Does anyone know why this feature is so pricey?

Email would only be allowed into my inbox if it was signed. Then, layer 2, it would only allow signed emails from senders whom I've accepted their public key.

A separate tab would show me all incoming request to accepts public keys (request to send email)

Now to opt-in to a marketing email I first accept their public key. To opt-out I delete their public key. Their email now goes to /dev/null.

Senders wouldn't have to re-implement unsub/subscribe, spammers would be /dev/nulled, and we could later add encryption on top of signing as a requirement.

Because it requires both parties to play along. Lets say I had such a service and I signed up for an account on Github. Github would have to implement this and give me a key. OK, maybe they do; but Stack Overflow don't. Then I end up reverting to Gmail or Fastmail.

However, I receive < 500 emails per month and that would cost $420 per year. That's just not possible for a small startup.

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.

All in all they seem reasonably switched on and protective of their IP addresses.

So if you're already paying for some cloud hosting somewhere you likely have a free email service you can use.

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.

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.

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.

What alternatives do I have to send and receive emails using my custom domain? I don't love the idea of paying for gsuite (too many features for what I need). But it's hard to think of email providers that allow me creating aliases / groups for my personal email.

All I really need is a redirect to gmail and a way to send through that domain

Maybe https://improvmx.com might be the solution you are looking for? (I'm the owner, to be totally transparent).

Since this is to use personal emails for my family, I can't justify $10/month for the email forwarding part just for the attachment size.

That being said, I really like your service and I hope will succeed! Cheers

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.

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?

Mailgun was the obvious choice when I set it up, since it would be completely free for the volume I send, and I'll probably stick with it for that forum that's already using it, but now maybe I'll look around at the other options again for my next project.

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.

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?

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.

I'm a MG user and haven't received that email and their page is showing me 5K/month free tier.

Disclaimer: I might feel this way because they gave me an awesome tshirt one time!

Hopefully we stay grandfathered on our old plan, doesn't seem like we've had this email through yet.

I’d be happy to hear about alternative providers.

When they launched the new pricing, they said that only the new users will be affected. Maybe they'll change that in the future, but for now, I don't worry.

I mean I guess I can disable it and... if you lose your password, you're fucked? Handling my own SMTP sounds like a nightmare.

Basically, we shot ourselves in the foot! Pun intended!