Mailgun Pricing: Plans, Volume Math and AI Options

Who This Guide Is For

Mailgun’s pricing page is written for engineers. Its tiers reward readers who already know how many emails their application will send each month, and who will call the sending API from code. This guide is most useful to two groups, and each should read it with a different question in mind.

Developers should leave with a plan and a threshold for upgrading. Marketers should leave with a shortlist of platforms that actually include the AI features they need, which in most cases is not Mailgun.

Comparison at a Glance

The table below sets Mailgun against the email platforms most often considered alongside it. Prices are the starting points listed on each vendor’s pricing page, with the plan and billing view named. Where a platform prices by contact or profile count, the starting price applies only to the count shown in the plan.

The table answers the question most readers arrive with. Mailgun is priced by sending volume and does its job well for code-driven email. The alternatives are priced by contacts or profiles, and most of them include marketing features that Mailgun does not provide. Read the limitation column as seriously as the price column.

Mailgun Plans in Detail

Mailgun’s pricing is organized around monthly email volume. The Free plan is a daily allowance, while the paid plans include a fixed number of emails each month. The table lists each plan with its price, what it includes and any trial offer, as published on the Mailgun pricing page.

The price per email falls as the plan grows. At the full Scale allowance, $90 across 100,000 emails works out to $0.0009 per email ($90 ÷ 100,000). At Basic, the full allowance costs $0.0015 per email ($15 ÷ 10,000). Those figures are arithmetic on the included volume only. Emails sent above the allowance are billed separately, so a team that regularly exceeds its plan should compare the cost of the next tier against the usage charges on the pricing page.

The Free plan is best understood as a testing allowance. A daily cap of 100 emails is generous for an integration check and too small for a live product that sends receipts to every customer. Once real users depend on the emails, a paid plan becomes the baseline.

How the Mailgun Plans Compare for Real Use

Choosing a plan is a matter of matching the included volume to a realistic monthly forecast. Start with the number of emails your application sends in a typical month, then add a margin for growth and for occasional spikes such as product launches or billing cycles. If the forecast sits comfortably below 10,000 emails, Basic is the natural choice. Between 10,000 and 50,000, Foundation is usually the right plan. Between 50,000 and 100,000, Scale covers the same forecast without usage charges.

The first-month offer on Foundation and Scale lowers the cost of testing a larger plan. It does not change the monthly price afterward, so the decision should rest on the price from month two onward. The offer is listed for those two plans, not for Basic.

Watch the boundary between plans. A forecast of 60,000 emails a month sits above Foundation’s 50,000 included emails and well below Scale’s 100,000. On Foundation, the extra 10,000 emails would be billed as usage, at the rates on the pricing page. On Scale, the same volume is covered by the $90 plan. Run the numbers for your own forecast before choosing, because the break-even point depends on the usage rate in effect when you sign up.

AI Features: What Mailgun Does and Does Not Offer

This site covers AI email marketing software, so it is worth being direct about Mailgun’s place in that category. Mailgun is a sending platform. Its plan details, as used for this guide, describe an API, an SMTP relay, volume-based plans and usage charges. They do not list AI writing assistants, AI-generated subject lines or AI-driven send-time optimization. A buyer who needs those features should not rely on Mailgun to provide them.

The clearest AI option in this comparison is Customer.io. Its Essentials plan, starting at $100 a month, includes AI Agent core skills, a visual workflow builder, and email and community support. Its Premium plan adds elevated AI Agent limits and custom profile volume pricing. Customer.io’s profile-based tiers start at $145 a month for 10,000 profiles, billed monthly, and reach $505 a month at 50,000 profiles or more. The AI features sit inside a lifecycle product, so the total cost depends on the profile count as much as on the AI tier.

Segment is also sometimes considered for AI-driven audiences. It is a customer data platform rather than an email service. Its pricing is custom, and its AI predictions and recommendations are described as add-ons on Connections or included in the Customer Data Platform tier. It is worth a look for teams that need data unification first, but it is not a direct replacement for a sending service.

The practical rule is simple. If AI features are the reason you are buying, shortlist platforms that list them in their plans and price them directly. If AI is a nice extra, treat Mailgun as the delivery layer and add a marketing platform only when you need one.

Cost at Realistic Volumes

The table below compares monthly costs at three sizes. Mailgun is priced by emails sent each month. Customer.io is priced by profiles, and ActiveCampaign by contacts, so the rows are not identical units. Where a platform does not list a price at that size, the cell says so instead of estimating.

The gap between the columns is the real finding. Mailgun charges for emails, so a large contact list that sends rarely costs little. Customer.io and ActiveCampaign charge for the audience itself, so a large list costs money even when most contacts receive few messages. A team with 100,000 subscribers who send one newsletter a month should model the audience-based price before it chooses a platform.

For a SaaS product, the shape of the sending matters as much as the size. Transactional mail scales with the number of customers doing things in the product. Marketing mail scales with the number of people on the list. Mailgun suits the first kind of volume. The alternatives suit the second, and many of them include AI features on top.

Mailgun Against Each Alternative

Each section below covers one alternative. It describes what the tool does well for a team that sends email from code or runs marketing campaigns, where it falls short, and the starting price from its pricing page. Read the section that matches your use case, and skip the others.

Customer.io

What it does well: Customer.io is built for lifecycle email triggered by what users do in the product. Its Essentials plan includes AI Agent core skills and a visual workflow builder, which makes it one of the few options in this comparison where AI features are part of a listed plan. For a SaaS team that wants onboarding and re-engagement flows without building them from raw API calls, it removes a large amount of engineering work.

Where it falls short: The cost rises quickly with profile count. Essentials starts at $100 a month, and the profile tiers run from $145 at 10,000 profiles to $505 at 50,000 or more, billed monthly. Premium carries custom profile volume pricing and the highest AI limits. A team sending only transactional mail will pay for marketing capability it may not use.

Price and link: Essentials from $100/month; profile tiers from $145/month at 10,000 profiles. See the Customer.io pricing page.

ActiveCampaign

What it does well: ActiveCampaign combines email marketing, automation and a standard CRM in one plan family. Its Starter plan at $15 a month for 1,000 contacts is a credible entry point for a small business that wants automation and contact management together, and a free trial is available.

Where it falls short: Starting prices scale with the contact count, so the list is the main cost driver. Advanced segmentation arrives on Pro and premium segmentation on Enterprise. A product team that only needs to send transactional mail from code will find the CRM and campaign features more than it needs.

Price and link: Starter $15/month at 1,000 contacts, billed monthly or annually. See the ActiveCampaign pricing page.

Brevo

What it does well: Brevo is priced by monthly email volume, so a marketing team sending many campaigns to a moderate list can plan costs around sends rather than contacts. Its free plan allows 300 sends a day and storage for up to 100,000 contacts, which makes it a practical starting point for a newsletter.

Where it falls short: The free plan’s daily send limit is a constraint for any product that sends on demand. Paid plans start at 5,000 emails a month, so the cheapest paid plan is not the right fit for a very small sender. The plan list also reaches into large volumes, so a team should confirm which plan covers its send count before committing.

Price and link: Starter from $9/month, starting at 5,000 emails a month. See the Brevo pricing page.

Loops

What it does well: Loops suits SaaS product newsletters and onboarding emails. Its Early Stage plan is free, with up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30-day period to the 1,000 newest contacts, and all features are included. Its Growing Audience plan at $99 a month adds unlimited sends to subscribers and transactional sends to users outside the audience.

Where it falls short: The free plan is capped on sends and on the number of contacts it reaches, and it shows a Loops footer in emails. Teams with a large audience will move to the paid plan quickly, and the jump from free to $99 is steep compared with Foundation’s $35.

Price and link: Early Stage free; Growing Audience $99/month. See the Loops pricing page.

SendGrid

What it does well: SendGrid is the closest match to Mailgun among the alternatives. It offers an email API with a free trial of 100 emails a day for 60 days, and a Marketing Campaigns product that includes a free plan for up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. Teams that want both transactional sending and campaigns from one vendor can consider it.

Where it falls short: Plan selection depends on contact and email ranges in the selector, which takes some effort to read. The API plans and the Marketing Campaigns plans have different included ranges, so teams should match the product they need before choosing a tier.

Price and link: Basic $15/month for up to 100,000 contacts and 300,000 emails in the plan selector. See the SendGrid pricing page.

Sender

What it does well: Sender is among the lowest-cost options in this comparison. Its Free Forever plan covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, and its Standard plan at $6.30 a month covers 6,000 emails for 500 subscribers.

Where it falls short: The paid tiers are limited by subscriber count, so a list that grows past 500 subscribers on Standard will need a higher plan. It is best for small senders who want low cost and do not need deep product integration.

Price and link: Standard $6.30/month; Free Forever for 2,500 subscribers. See the Sender pricing page.

Setting Up Mailgun for Production Sending

Most of the cost surprises with a sending API come from setup decisions made in the first week. The steps below are a practical sequence for a team moving from the Free plan to a paid plan.

1. Forecast monthly volume. Count the emails your product sends in a typical month, then add a margin for launches and billing cycles. Use this number to choose between Basic, Foundation and Scale.
2. Separate transactional and marketing mail. Send receipts, password resets and alerts from one sending domain or stream, and keep newsletters and campaigns separate. This keeps sending reputation easier to manage and makes the volume of each stream visible.
3. Test on the Free plan first. Use the 100 emails a day allowance to check your integration with the API or SMTP relay before any customer receives mail from it.
4. Start the paid plan at the right moment. If you choose Foundation or Scale, the first month is free, so start the subscription when production sending begins and note the date the free month ends.
5. Set a volume alert. Watch monthly usage against the included volume. Once usage regularly passes the plan’s allowance, compare the cost of usage charges with the next tier before the month closes.
6. Review the plan each quarter. Sending patterns change as the product grows. A quarterly check takes a few minutes and prevents months of paying for a plan that no longer fits.

For teams that also need lifecycle or marketing email, the setup is different. Mailgun can carry the transactional stream while a marketing platform handles lists, segments and campaigns. Keep one owner for each stream so that suppression lists and unsubscribe handling stay consistent across both systems.

How to Choose

Start with the job, not the brand. Mailgun is the strongest option when code produces the sending and volume is the main cost driver. A marketing platform is the stronger option when the work is segmentation, campaign writing and lifecycle flows, and the list is the main cost driver. Many teams end up using both, with Mailgun for the transactional stream and a marketing platform for the campaigns.

The decision table below turns that logic into a short set of routes. Each row names a need, the platform to start with and the reason, using only the plan details covered in this guide.

If none of these rows fits, use the volume and contact counts from the cost table as the deciding factor. Sending-led products will usually find Mailgun cheaper. Audience-led businesses will usually find contact or profile tiers easier to justify.

Where Mailgun Falls Short

Mailgun is a sending service, and it should be judged as one. Its plans do not include a marketing workflow builder, a campaign calendar or AI writing support, based on the plan details used for this guide. A team that expects a marketing dashboard from Mailgun will be disappointed, because the product is aimed at developers.

The other limit is the usage model. A plan’s included volume is generous for steady transactional mail, but a sudden spike in sending, such as a product launch or a large batch of notifications, can push usage above the allowance. The safe approach is to watch volume monthly, compare the next tier before the overage builds, and budget for usage charges separately.

Finally, the Free plan is a testing tool. Its daily cap and the absence of a paid support path make it unsuitable for a production product. Move to a paid plan before real users depend on the emails.

Mailgun Pricing FAQs