Mailgun Pricing: How Much It Really Costs in 2025

Most email API buyers land on Mailgun expecting simple per-email rates, only to find a layered system of plan tiers, overage fees, and separate Optimize subscriptions.

This Mailgun pricing breakdown covers every current plan from Free through Enterprise, maps real costs at different send volumes, flags hidden charges like dedicated IP fees and validation add-ons, and compares what you actually pay against alternative email service providers like SendGrid, Sender, and Mailjet. Use it to match your needs to the best solution.

Mailgun Pricing at a Glance

Mailgun Pricing Plans & Costs Reviewed

Free Plan Review

This Mailgun plan is perfect for developers testing API integrations or handling low-volume alerts like password resets for a side project. 

The 100-email daily cap is the primary bottleneck, you cannot “save up” sends for a weekly burst. Furthermore, the lack of an email template builder means developers must hard-code HTML, and the single-day log retention makes it nearly impossible to troubleshoot delivery failures that occurred over a weekend. 

It makes sense to upgrade to Basic or Foundation as soon as your staging environment goes live or your daily transactional traffic exceeds 50–70 emails.

Basic Plan Review

The Basic plan at $15 per month gives you 10,000 emails and removes the daily sending cap, which is a big deal for transactional email delivery. If you are a small business email sender doing order confirmations or password resets, this is where you land. 

But here is the catch: you are still stuck with 1-day log retention and just one custom sending domain. That means if something goes wrong with your email deliverability, you have less than 24 hours to diagnose it before the data vanishes. Overage at $1.80 per 1,000 is also one of the steepest in the industry. 

Switch to Foundation once you hit 20,000 monthly emails or require the template builder, as overage costs will quickly pass the Foundation plan’s flat fee.

Foundation Plan Review

The Foundation plan is ideal for agencies managing multiple clients and a go-to SaaS startup email solution. You get 50,000 bulk emails, 1,000 custom sending domains, and the template builder is finally unlocked.

Log retention jumps to 5 days, which at least gives you a working window to debug sender reputation problems. The overage drops to $1.30 per thousand, which is more palatable for high-volume senders.

The main upgrade triggers here are the lack of a dedicated IP for more control over deliverability or when volume exceeds 100,000 monthly sends. If you also need IP warmup control, send-time optimization, or phone support, Scale is the move.

Scale Plan Review

The Scale plan is for serious senders treating email as core infrastructure. It’s best for high-growth SaaS and ecommerce requiring a dedicated IP to own their sender reputation. 

Automated IP warmup is included and the 30-day log retention is a game changer for debugging, while 5,000 email validations help you keep your list clean without paying extra.

Send time optimization uses machine learning to figure out when recipients actually open email, which is a legitimate value-add for bulk email campaigns. Live chat and phone support mean you are not stuck waiting days for a ticket response. 

The upgrade trigger here is volume—once you are pushing past 1M emails per month regularly, or need custom SLAs and rapid-fire burst sending, Enterprise is the only option.

Enterprise Plan Review

This Mailgun plan is reserved for high-volume senders like large-scale fintechs or national retailers sending millions of notifications. You get everything in Scale plus deliverability consulting from actual experts, a Rapid-Fire Burst Sending SLA that guarantees 99% attempted delivery in the first five minutes, and a fully managed support experience. 

If you are a high-volume sender doing 2.5 million-plus emails monthly, this is where the value for money equation starts to favor Mailgun over competitors. 

Mailgun Optimize Pricing

Mailgun Optimize is a separate product suite focused on email deliverability tools. It is not bundled with the Send plans above, so if you need inbox placement testing, reputation monitoring, or advanced email validations, this is an additional monthly subscription.

Pilot Plan Review

The Pilot plan at $49 per month is a solid starting point if you are serious about email deliverability but not ready for a full monitoring suite. This is perfect for a single-domain operation or a small team that sends bulk emails and wants to optimize open rates. 

Twenty-five inbox placement tests per month let you verify that your emails are actually landing in inboxes across providers. The 500 email previews help catch rendering issues before campaigns go out. The biggest gap is the absence of Blocklist and Spam Trap monitoring; you can see an email failed to arrive, but Pilot won’t tell you if a blacklisted domain is the cause. 

It is a reactive tool rather than a proactive monitoring system. You should move to Starter the moment you need a proactive “Early Warning System” or Google Postmaster integration.

Starter Plan Review

At $99 per month, the Starter plan is where Optimize becomes genuinely useful for anyone managing sender reputation at scale. This plan makes sense for mid-size ecommerce, SaaS, or any business where inbox placement directly impacts revenue.

Blocklist monitoring, spam trap detection, and Google Postmaster Tools integration give you real-time visibility into deliverability problems before they become crises. The 50 inbox placement tests per month are enough for weekly testing across multiple campaigns. 

The upgrade trigger is multi-domain or multi-IP complexity—if you are running more than one sending domain or IP, you will need the Contract plan for custom monitoring volumes.

Contract Plan Review

The Contract plan is for enterprises that need full-service email deliverability consulting. You get a dedicated Technical Account Manager who will help you craft and implement tailored email strategies. 

If you are a high-volume sender managing multiple brands, domains, and IP pools, this is where you stop worrying about webhook limits and start getting expert-level guidance. Expect to pay well over $99 per month, but also the kind of hands-on deliverability expertise that can directly move your inbox placement rates.

Mailgun Hidden Fees & Extra Costs

Mailgun is pretty good about transparency, but here are some costs you might not think about before signing up for a plan.

Dedicated IPs cost $59 per month per IP, and you can add them from the control panel or by contacting support. If you are on Foundation and want a dedicated IP for better sender reputation control, that turns your $35 plan into a $94 plan overnight. 

Email validations on Foundation are an add-on at $1.20 per 100 validations, which adds up fast if you are cleaning a large list. Overages are billed automatically: $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic, $1.30 on Foundation, $1.10 on Scale.

There is no annual billing discount currently advertised on Send plans. Both Foundation and Scale offer a free first month, but after that, your billing cycle kicks in at the start of each month for the previous month’s usage.

Mailgun Pricing by Email Volume

This is where you really need to do the math. Depending on your monthly email volume, the cost per send changes dramatically.

Here is a breakdown of what you would actually pay at different volumes (base plan fee plus overage for emails beyond the included amount):

The Basic plan goes up to 10,000 emails, then overage fees start. The plan gets painfully expensive beyond 25,000 emails because of the $1.80 per 1,000 overage rate. 

Foundation is the sweet spot for most small-to-mid businesses sending between 25,000 and 100,000 emails. 

Scale becomes the clear winner once you pass the 250,000 mark due to its $1.10 per 1,000 overage and included dedicated IP. For anyone doing serious bulk email at high volumes, staying on Basic is essentially throwing money away.

Mailgun Pay-As-You-Go Costs

Mailgun previously offered what they called the Flex plan—a true pay-as-you-go option for businesses with unpredictable sending patterns. Now it’s only available for legacy users. Here is the credit system breakdown:

When Pay-As-You-Go Makes Sense

Pay-as-you-go used to be Mailgun’s biggest advantage for small senders and seasonal businesses. If you only send a few thousand emails during peak months and almost nothing the rest of the year, avoiding a fixed monthly subscription is obviously appealing. It also made sense for developers testing transactional email API integrations who did not want to commit to a billing cycle yet. 

It’s no longer accessible to new users and operates entirely as a legacy plan.

Credit System Explained

Mailgun’s Flex plan worked on a straightforward credit model: you pay based on the number of messages sent, with no monthly base fee. There was a three-month introductory period with free sends, after which credits were consumed at the per-thousand rate.

For legacy users, credits do not roll over or expire in the traditional sense because you are billed for actual usage, not prepaid blocks. Your billing cycle is monthly, and you are charged at the start of each month for the previous month’s usage.

2025 Flex Plan Price Changes

This is the big one that caught a lot of users off guard. In late October 2025, Mailgun announced that the Flex plan would double in price from $1.00 to $2.00 per 1,000 messages, effective December 1, 2025. That is a 100 percent price increase overnight.

For newsletter operators and other small senders who relied on the affordable email API promise of Flex, this was a significant blow. At $2.00 per thousand, the Flex plan is now more expensive per email than the overage rate on Basic ($1.80), Foundation ($1.30), or Scale ($1.10). In most scenarios, a fixed subscription now offers better value for money than pay-as-you-go unless your sending is extremely irregular.

Mailgun Transactional Emails Pricing

Transactional Plans Breakdown

At its core, Mailgun is a transactional email delivery service. Every plan includes RESTful email API and SMTP relay access, so from a feature standpoint, you can send transactional emails on any tier. The difference is volume, cost per send, and the surrounding infrastructure.

Per-Email Costs by Volume

The takeaway here is straightforward. Foundation offers the lowest effective cost per email for volumes between 10,000 and 100,000. Once you pass 100,000, Scale’s combination of a higher base with a lower overage rate makes it the clear winner.

Mailgun vs. Competitors: Which Costs Less?

Is Mailgun Worth the Price?

If you are a developer who wants a clean, API-first transactional email delivery service and you value deliverability tooling, IP warmup controls, and detailed log retention, Mailgun on the Scale plan is a strong choice. The combination of dedicated IPs, send-time optimization, and 30-day logs at $90 per month is competitive and purpose-built for the kind of sender who cares deeply about inbox placement.

If you are on a tight budget and need marketing features alongside transactional email, Sender or Mailjet offer way better value. If you are a high-volume sender primarily optimizing for the lowest possible cost per send and do not need the fancy deliverability suite, Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails is unbeatable.

Mailgun Pricing FAQs