Three things to add here:

1. Our pricing reflects the quality of delivery due to being transactional only. With much higher engagement rates, our speed and delivery is superior. Customers never have to wait behind a bulk campaign.

2. Dedicated IPs are a way for ESPs to pawn responsibility onto customers instead of themselves (and get a few more bucks in the process). They only make sense if you are sending a huge volume, but we do offer dedicated IPs for free for higher volume accounts. Instead, most people use our shared IPs and benefit from the volume of great engagement to get their emails delivered to the inbox faster.

More details: https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...

3. We're the only ones to offer an extended full content history of every message for 45 days. You can search and see the exact email sent at no cost, which comes in handy when sending so many unique messages.

Full disclosure: I'm the founder of Postmark. Any questions, just email me: [email protected].

Postmark engineer here!

We are at the high end on pricing, but we constantly hear from customers about how great our deliverability and support is. Also if you purchase in bulk, our pricing becomes very competitive very fast. Since it’s a straight pay for what you use model with no monthly plans required, we think it’s a lot simpler to use.

Thats really nice, but when you're me, who sends around 30 million emails / month, that pricing gets insane (as in, more than my AWS bill).

So yeah...i'd love to entertain the idea but its just not possible.

Our lowest advertised rate is $.25 per 1000 for 5MM emails. After that you need to talk to us, but obviously we work with companies all the time.

(Sendgrid's lowest advertised rate is $.45/1000)

I'm sure that is likely the case, but you can understand why hiding your price is horribly frustrating. Amazon do a great job showing their price to the public and explaining how they can lower it further without talking to sales people...i wish more people would follow their lead.

Can you talk about why SendGrid over MailGun?

SendGrid is competitively priced - as @jamestanderson mentioned, $20 goes twice as far. Mailgun doesn't offer a marketing product at all, and I am not sure if they provide the 24/7 support we do.

At the 40k+ volume levels, you're also going to get a complimentary dedicated IP, which means better deliverability. You can get that at Mailgun too, but it's a $59 surcharge every month.

Finally, the InboxTrail comparison posted elsewhere in this thread shows Mailgun getting flagged as spam 37.5% of the time.

There are many factors that impact deliverability that aren't reflected in the type of simple test InboxTrail conducts. Like most ESPs, your reputation builds on Mailgun as you send with us. If for whatever reason you are experiencing a deliverability problem, you can always reach out to us and we'll help you with any issues you have. We support many large and fast growing customers who are all seeing a >99% delivery rate.

Our support team is here to help 24/7. We have a great team here that is proud of the work we do for our customers.

Disclosure: I lead product development at Mailgun.

> If for whatever reason you are experiencing a deliverability problem, you can always reach out to us and we'll help you with any issues you have.

As a Mailgun user, I can confirm that first hand.

Yup, me too. I had problems when I started using the service (some providers didn't accept the mail). Everything was immediately resolved.

To respond to the Mailgun developer above slash below - the InboxTrail result might not be reflective of all your service, but you're selling a premium service - 37.5% spam flagging on any of your active IPs is seriously offputting.

We're looking into how that test is being run, but it's not at all reflective of what actual users experience on the platform. There are many factors that could impact what is being sent to spam that aren't disclosed in these kind of tests.

It's true we offer a premium product, but we do so at a competitive price. At scale, our pricing model compares favorably with Sendgrid. Our pricing strategy is all about simplicity and providing lower prices as you grow with us. We don't have any kind of feature gating pushing you into higher tiers nor do we have punitive overages.

As others have mentioned, dedicated IPs are anything but a panacea for deliverability. There is an incredible amount of care and planning that must be taken when using a dedicated IP. Shared IPs that are well managed (ie no spammers) are often better for low-volume senders because they don't require warm-ups, constant deliverability monitoring, etc.

Just to add:

$20 w/Mailgun: 50,000 mails

For comparison before this shitty move by MailChimp, Mandrill used to be $14 for 50000 emails.

For comparison after this shitty move by MailChimp, Mandrill will be $60 for 50,000 emails (2 x 25k blocks @ $20 + $20 minimum plan on mailchimp).

50,001 will then cost you $80 (another block)

also interesting that their pricing page[0] still doesn't reflect the new pricing...

[0] http://mandrill.com/pricing/

Problem with SendGrid is if you want send more that 100k emails.

$95 w/SendGrid: 200,000 mails $95 w/mailgun: 200,000 mails

At the high end, we throw in a dedicated IP for free (a deliverability feature most high volume users need). Mailgun charges $59 extra per month for that, even as they level out their base price to be comparable to ours.

200,000 emails at Elastic Email = $33.25/month, a private IP would cost you an extra $17.70.