Mailgun seems to be speeding down the enshitification curve, limiting their free tier account to 100 emails per day, and no longer offering a pay as you go option.
I’m happy to pay them for their service, but $15 a month is absurd. What alternatives can people suggest for Ghost newsletters just starting out with approx. 120 subscribers?
I am working on integrating an option into our Ghost platform which will get around this and allow for people to use smtp of their choice for newsletters.
I really dislike being forced into a single provider, extremely centralized.
Mailgun has made it progressively harder to get onto their flex plan, but it seems to still be there.
My recent attempt (July 2024) documented here - I initially thought it was gone, too!
Just checked my account, and I’m still on Flex:
(Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that you’re able to get on it as a new user, but the process that worked a month ago was ‘sign up for foundation free trial ($35/month), put in credit card, cancel plan before getting billed, accept flex when offered’)
Totally with you on that! Thanks for working on alternatives!
Great - thanks for the info! I noted that even though the pricing page says >100 emails per day, I sent about 140 today with no problems. So I guess that’s calculated monthly, meaning that the current free plan will still work.
Still, all this misdirection on Mailgun’s part seems quite …sleazy. I’m grateful for the free plan, happy to play a dollar per thousand. But I’m not happy about all the dark pattern misdirection they’re engaging in, so would welcome any alternative.
I think there’s a difference between the free plan and the flex plan. You want to be on flex. :)
@markstos had some really helpful comments over here that are worth a read if you haven’t seen them: 📮 Postmark integration by andreascreten · Pull Request #19398 · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub
Also, quick side note from somebody who has integrated SES into Ghost: the issue is not the sending part, but all the other stuff that’s happening in the background, namely email events.
I presume you mean making sure that bounces and complaints are automatically handled as unsubscribes.
Yes, that’s essential to keep your list clean and your sending reputation in good standing.
Yes, though SES does that on its own (more or less). The tricky part is getting open events into Ghost, properly, to ensure feature parity with Mailgun. The recent refactoring in the Ghost core was the final nail in the coffin for me to abbandon that and slowly migrate to Mailgun 
I also wrote my own patch for SES sending. That PR is somewhere in the Ghost GitHub repo. I then also abandoned it in favor of Mailgun for now. I found the Mailgun free/flex plan meets me needs so I didn’t have a strong incentive to switch to something else.
If Doctorow’s theory of enshitification is correct, and all evidence would seem to support that Mailgun will continue to obfuscate and chisel away and funnel people into their overpriced tiers. Folks with technical backgrounds will figure out how to find the right plan, as most on this thread have. But it’s kind of a “First they came for the [less technically adept], then they came for the [moderately technically adept with enough patience to figure it out]…” type of situation.
Unless Ghost integrates robust support for alternatives, it’s just a matter of time until Mailgun hoovers us all into its $15 a month vortex of enshitification.
Having just one mail provider that handles all newsletters puts them in a dominate position and it looks like they know it too.
Would love to see SES integrated to provide some form of competition.
They won’t change this. They will keep Mailgun as the only provider, just as they delegate crucial tasks to Zapier (which is paid in most cases) and exclude countries by using only Stripe as fully integrated payment method. We have to adapt or return to the old days of the comfort zone of slow WordPress sites and all-in-one LAMP servers.
Maybe not, but maybe they will.
Of course, everything is possible, but they won’t. They are deeply integrated to MailGun. At best they will add some useless half-baked alternative integrations, the same way they do with payment processors. Don’t misunderstand me, Ghost is terrific, I migrated from Wordpress and this is heaven. But things evolve and at some point better solutions will show up.
