Mailgun pricing and review

Reachkit makes a competing cold email tool. Every price below was checked in October 2026 against Mailgun’s own pricing pages and help center.

Mailgun pricing starts at $15 a month for 10,000 emails on Basic, with a free plan below it. The figures here are list prices for Mailgun Send from mailgun.com/pricing, billed monthly, as of October 2026.

Above 2.5 million a month, Enterprise is quoted by sales. Free and Basic allow one sending domain and keep logs for a day. Foundation adds 1,000 domains, templates, 5 days of logs and unlimited users. Scale adds SAML SSO, send time optimization, 5,000 validations, 30-day logs and phone and chat support.

Dedicated IPs: one is included from Foundation 100k and on Scale, and each extra one costs $59 a month. Mailgun’s plan matrix also says Foundation gets “Access at 50k”, without spelling out the terms.

Paid extras: address validation from $1.20 per 100 for the first 5,000, Optimize for inbox placement tests at $49 a month, or $99 with blocklist monitoring (Optimize pricing), and Inspect for email previews at $99 or $199 (Inspect pricing). Mailgun’s help center lists the old pay-as-you-go Flex plan as deprecated. Forum users reported its rate doubling to $2.00 per 1,000 in December 2025, which no Mailgun page confirms.

What a typical setup costs: an app sending 30,000 emails a month pays $51 on Basic with overage, or $35 on Foundation 50k, which is cheaper from about 21,000 emails up. At 250,000 a month, Scale’s $215 beats Foundation 100k plus overage ($240).

Mailgun delivers email that your code sends. Mailgun’s own pricing FAQ puts it plainly: “There’s no send button in Mailgun.” Your app calls the HTTP API or connects over SMTP, Mailgun hands the message to mailbox providers, and events, webhooks and logs show what happened to it.

You add and verify your own sending domain, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC on every plan. Lower plans send from shared IP addresses that Mailgun assigns. Higher plans add dedicated IPs with automated IP warmup, and Scale adds IP pools. Accounts can send from US or EU data centers.

Mailgun says it “does not manage or host inboxes”. Incoming mail is handled by inbound routes, which forward a message or post it to your app as data. Around Send sit three add-ons: Validate checks addresses, Optimize runs placement tests and reputation monitoring, and Inspect previews emails across clients.

For AI tools, Mailgun publishes an official open-source MCP server, a standard way for assistants like Claude to use other apps. It runs on your own machine and exposes 50+ operations. Mailgun was founded in 2010, and Sinch bought it in 2021 as part of Pathwire, together with Mailjet.

Strengths

• A low paid entry point. $15 buys 10,000 emails with no daily cap, and every tier shows its overage rate on the pricing page.
• Developer tooling. G2’s review summary says users praise its reliable delivery and easy integration, and reviewers point to its detailed logs for tracing what happened to each message (G2).
• Deliverability tools under one login. Validation, placement tests, spam trap and blocklist monitoring, Google Postmaster Tools data and previews are all sold by Mailgun.
• Room for teams. From Foundation, users are unlimited at no extra cost and an account can hold 1,000 sending domains.

Drawbacks

• Strict consent rules. The acceptable use policy requires “clear, explicit and provable consent” for non-transactional email and bans bought, rented or scraped lists (AUP).
• Sudden account disables. Several Capterra reviewers describe accounts disabled without warning or a clear reason, and the AUP leaves the call to Mailgun’s “sole discretion”.
• Ticket-only support below Scale. Live phone and chat start at $90 a month.

Mailgun’s public ratings are solid for an email API. As of October 2026, it rates 4.2 out of 5 on G2 from 321 reviews, 4.3 on Capterra from nearly 200, and 4.1 on Trustpilot from 1,538.

Reviewers like the API, the logs and the delivery. A Capterra reviewer wrote that “if you know your way around DNS records, Mailgun is remarkably easy to set up”. The complaints cluster around account reviews and support. A Capterra reviewer wrote that Mailgun “suddenly disabled my account without warning because of a flawed automated system”, and another called support “extremely slow”.

Mailgun fits developers and product teams whose app sends email on its own: sign-up confirmations, receipts, alerts and newsletters to people who opted in. It suits teams that want dedicated IPs, EU hosting or many sending domains without running a mail server.

Look elsewhere for cold outreach. Mailgun’s rules rule it out, and it has no mailboxes, no inbox warmup and no shared view of replies. A practitioner note: cold email lands better from real Google or Microsoft inboxes on separate domains, so if prospecting is the job, I’d leave Mailgun to your product’s mail and use a tool built for outreach.

• SendGrid: Twilio’s email API, from $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails on Essentials, with a 60-day trial instead of a free plan. See the SendGrid profile.
• Amazon SES: per-message pricing inside AWS, from $0.16 per 1,000 on its Essentials plan for new accounts. See the Amazon SES profile.
• Google Workspace: real mailboxes on your own domain, which is what cold email sends from. See the Google Workspace profile.
• Smartlead: a cold email sender running on mailboxes you connect, from $39 a month. See the Smartlead profile.
• Reachkit (our product): handles cold outreach, not your app’s mail. It sends from Google or Microsoft inboxes you connect free, or sets up new domains ($15 a year) and inboxes ($5 a month) that start warmup automatically, on plans from $39 a month.