Mailgun Alternatives

Developer help Self-hosting
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I’ve been self-hosting Ghost since v3 and using Mailgun for bulk emails during that time as well. When Mailgun got rid of their free plan, I was disappointed but given that my utilization remained under 100 emails per month, relatively unaffected.

However, it looks like you cannot sign up for their Flex tiers any more, and free accounts are being turned into “Foundation” accounts. I am now hit with bills for minimum $35/month even when I send zero emails. While I can switch to Ghost + Zapier and use a different mail provider, I end up losing a lot of native capabilities to manage users, memberships, and content within Ghost. There are hacky solutions available to solve this problem, but most of us move from Substack or Wordpress or Mailchimp or other solutions to Ghost because it’s an all-in-one solution.

Why can’t bulks emails be a self-selected provider the same way that transactional emails are? There are plenty of competitors that offer more reasonable pricing and services than Mailgun and it’s silly to either be locked in to Mailgun or lose a lot of value that Ghost has been building.

Raising this as a new topic given that the information provided here about pricing tiers (Why do I have to set up Mailgun for newsletters?) is incorrect. A self-hosted ghost installation now costs you $35/month if you want to send bulk emails, on top of hosting costs (already $5-15 depending on providers).

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Additional Discussion:

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A quick search of the forum would confirm that you can sign up to their Flex plan.

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Why can’t bulks emails be a self-selected provider the same way that transactional emails are?

You already posted the link the contains the overview of how the architecture works. So the broader answer is that you can’t send newsletters with SMTP, and while it is trivial to support multiple SMTP providers, it is not at all trivial to support multiple bulk mail APIs.

A self-hosted ghost installation now costs you $35/month if you want to send bulk emails, on top of hosting costs [for ~100 emails/mo]

Or you could use Ghost(Pro) and pay $8 for both? There are lots of good reasons for self hosting Ghost, but “it’s cheaper” is generally not one of them. When you add up all the costs of running a Ghost installation that makes active use of newsletters, Pro is almost always lower in cost.

As @mjw mentioned, you can also switch to the Flex pay model on Mailgun, which is less than $35/mo.

it’s silly to either be locked in to Mailgun or lose a lot of value that Ghost has been building.

Is it though?

We have a small product team, and we have to very carefully choose where to spend our energy and resources. When deciding what to do next, we try to look at what would benefit most users, in most ways, most of the time.

Building a complex system to support multiple bulk mail API providers would take a huge amount of time, only benefit a handful of specific self hosted users sending low volume email who don’t like Mailgun, and increase the future-maintenance burden of having to support every new email feature across multiple providers. So the economics of working on it don’t make a lot of sense for the core team. Instead we try to prioritise things that hundreds/thousands of people all want, like all the things that you see on Ghost Changelog — The latest feature updates

We can’t do both. We don’t have tens of millions in VC money and hundreds of developers. So we have to choose.

It’s certainly possible for Ghost to support multiple bulk mail providers, but the most likely way that’s going to happen is via open source contributions from the community to add support for it, because they need it themselves.

The beauty of open source is that if enough people want something, they can easily get together on GitHub and make it happen themselves (or fund someone else to) - no need to wait on a company to deliver it. But if nobody is contributing something you want, then it’s likely that there isn’t enough demand or interest from the broader community to make it happen at the moment.

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Hello everyone,

I am developing a new ghost site for a client and they do not want to use Mailgun. They are asking me to look into alternatives and I wanted to come here to respectfully request support of more than a single mail provider. I have read your responses as to why you are only going with one so far, and I still think the right choice is to support multiple. Thank you for your consideration.

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I am trying to do this and it is not available to me. I have the Foundation Trial plan, and following the instructions for downgrading only leaves me with the option to unsubscribe. Downgrade is not shown.

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That’s what you need to do to get Flex…

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Thank you mjw!

HOW TO SWITCH FROM DEMO PLAN TO FLEX

  1. Log into Mailgun and find app/account/billing/plans
  2. Click the gear icon and Unsubscribe from your plan

Only after Unsubscribing will you be able to Downgrade

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Setting Up Mailgun

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Why not move from Mailgun to Sendgrid or another lucrative alternative for self-hosters who still have a low subscriber base and can make use of another email provider’s free tier.

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6000 emails is $6 on the PAYG plan with Mailgun. Sendgrid’s free tier is a little bigger, but that’s a pretty small cost for a pretty significant effort to get Ghost to talk to a different API.

Still, Ghost is open source. You could certainly make Ghost talk to another API, and I’m sure some other self-hosters would be interested. (Although I suspect that that work will never pay for itself, if it saves you $6/month.)

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Ghost may accept a pull request to use the adapter pattern to support alternate sending services.

But Ghost doesn’t just use Mailgun for sending, it also uses them tracking and analytics.

So if you only implement sending, the tracking features in the Ghost dashboard won’t work.

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Hello all I am happy to share an alternative to emails with Brevo. brevo.com

“mail”: {
“transport”: “SMTP”,
“options”: {
“service”: “SMTP”,
“host”: “smtp-relay.brevo.com”,
“port”: 587,
“auth”: {
“user”: “”, //Email
“pass”: “” // key
}
}
},

I dont have the work around for the “bulk” email emails yet. I will suss that out soon.

Part of the game is getting around the game

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What was the pass here? API key? I tried the same config on my website. Isn’t working :confused:

Followed the steps mentioned here.

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That Bravo can be used if a person wants an option

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I am not sure about new accounts. I have had bravo for many years when it was sendgrind. I just configured and got chat to put it together

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Edit: Removing recommendation to mail service I mentioned due to removal of free tier and features removed from paid tiers without notice.

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That’s only for transactional emails, right? Not for newsletter.

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Yes i think so. But i stopped botherinf as mailgun has a new plan that is cost effective for the small operator.

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Yeah the problem is not their plans, even tough it’s a bad UX how they hid it. But the problem is they don’t send emails for me.

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Oh ok… I had some similar problems.

What stage are you stuck on? If I can help, I will, or best to ask Janis. He will know.

Screenshot 2024-01-18 at 1.02.17 pm