- Price
- From $15/month for 10k emails
- Free plan
- Yes
- Setup
- Needs a developer
- Up and running
- An afternoon to send; add a day if you also build email receiving.
What Mailgun is for
Mailgun is an email API: your app calls it to send transactional email (login codes, receipts, alerts) from your domain. Its strong point is receiving too: replies to an address can be turned into a request to your app, so an email answer becomes a support ticket or a comment.
How it plugs into your product
- 1Create an account; you start on a sandbox domain that only sends to up to 5 authorized addresses, for testing.
- 2Add your own domain and paste the DNS records Mailgun shows where your domain is managed, then wait for verification.
- 3Create an API key, keep it on the server and send through the API or SMTP.
- 4If you want to receive email, create an inbound route that forwards messages to a URL in your app.
Does it fit your idea?
It fits if
- A help desk or community app where users reply by email and the reply must show up inside the product.
- A SaaS sending around 50,000 emails a month that wants many sending domains, like one per customer.
- A team that also wants to validate email addresses at sign-up from the same provider.
Look elsewhere if
- You need to investigate delivery problems from last week on a small plan: Free and Basic keep logs for 1 day.
- You want newsletters with a visual editor for the marketing team: use Brevo or Mailchimp.
- You only send a few hundred emails a month and want React templates and a simple SDK: Resend is quicker.
What people only find out after building
Read this before you build on it. Each item links to the official page that says so.
The sandbox domain only sends to up to 5 authorized recipients, who must click an invitation first. Real users get nothing until your own domain is set up.
Official source: documentation.mailgun.comLog retention is 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 days on Foundation and 30 only on Scale ($90/month).
Official source: mailgun.comThe free plan caps sending at 100 emails a day, with 1 custom domain and 1 user.
Official source: mailgun.comBasic includes 10,000 emails and charges from $1.80 per extra 1,000; each extra dedicated IP is $59/month.
Official source: mailgun.com
Price
From $15/month for 10k emails
100 emails a day, 1 sending domain and 1 day of logs.
- Free tier
- 100/day
- Price for 50k emails/month
- $35/month (Foundation, 50k)
- Setup
- REST API, SMTP and SDKs; inbound routes
Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing
What it costs in practice
A SaaS sending 30,000 emails a month: Basic would be $15 + 20 × $1.80 = $51, so Foundation at $35/month for 50,000 is cheaper. Rough estimate.
Estimate from the official price. Check it before you decide.
At a glance
- Free plan: yes
- Open source: no
“Not stated” means the official site doesn’t say.
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