How much does Mailgun cost in 2026?
Mailgun Send is the email delivery product: a perpetual Free tier at 100 emails/day, Basic from $15/mo for 10,000, Foundation from $35/mo for 50,000, Scale from $90/mo for 100,000. Mailgun Optimize (deliverability monitoring) and Mailgun Inspect (rendering QA) are billed separately, from $49/mo and $99/mo. The single most expensive mistake on this platform is staying on Basic past roughly 21,000 emails a month, where overage at $1.80 per thousand overtakes the Foundation subscription.
Mailgun is three separately billed products
Before any number means anything, you need to know which Mailgun is being priced. The brand covers three products with three price lists, and reviews routinely quote one while describing another.
| Product | Entry price | What it does | Who needs it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mailgun Send | $0 free, then $15/mo | SMTP relay and RESTful email API, the actual sending | Everyone. This is the core product. |
| Mailgun Optimize | $49/mo | Inbox placement tests, blocklist and spam-trap monitoring, address validation, Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS integration | Teams whose deliverability is a business risk |
| Mailgun Inspect | $99/mo | Email rendering previews across 100+ clients, HTML analysis, accessibility and spam-content checks | Teams shipping designed HTML templates |
Buying Send does not give you inbox placement tests, and buying Optimize does not give you sending volume. The exception is address validation, which appears in both: Optimize sells it as its core unit, and Send bundles some into the Scale plan. A team that wants the full Mailgun experience — Scale sending, Optimize Starter monitoring, Inspect Premium QA — is looking at $90 plus $99 plus $199, or $388/mo, before a single overage.
The rest of this page is mostly about Send, because that is what people mean when they say Mailgun pricing. Optimize and Inspect get their own sections further down.
Mailgun Send: the four self-serve plans
Send has a perpetual free tier and three paid tiers. Prices below are the USD monthly rates published on the Mailgun pricing page, read at the plan’s entry volume.
| Plan | Price | Included volume | Overage | Log retention | Sending domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100/day | None, hard cap | 1 day | 1 |
| Basic | from $15/mo | 10,000/mo | from $1.80 / 1,000 | 1 day | 1 |
| Foundation | from $35/mo | 50,000/mo | from $1.30 / 1,000 | 5 days | 1,000 |
| Scale | from $90/mo | 100,000/mo | from $1.10 / 1,000 | 30 days | 1,000 |
| Enterprise | Quote | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Foundation and Scale both carry one free month, described on the page as “Free for 1 month, then” the listed rate. Basic does not. The Free plan is not a trial: it is a permanent tier, capped daily rather than monthly.
The Free plan’s cap is daily, which is stricter than it sounds
100 emails/day is roughly 3,000 a month, but you cannot bank it. An application that sends 40 password resets on a quiet Tuesday and needs 400 on a launch day will fail on the launch day while sitting far under any monthly equivalent. Free also gives 1 user, 1 sending domain, and 1 day of log retention, which means a bounce reported to you on Thursday about a Tuesday send is no longer traceable.
What Mailgun actually costs as volume climbs
The headline prices are entry prices. Mailgun’s pricing page carries a volume selector, and the plan price moves with it. This is the part almost no comparison publishes, so here is the full self-serve ladder as the page renders it.
| Monthly volume | Cheapest plan covering it | Price | Cost per 1,000 included |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | Basic | $15 | $1.50 |
| 50,000 | Foundation | $35 | $0.70 |
| 100,000 | Foundation | $75 | $0.75 |
| 100,000 | Scale | $90 | $0.90 |
| 250,000 | Scale | $215 | $0.86 |
| 500,000 | Scale | $400 | $0.80 |
| 750,000 | Scale | $550 | $0.73 |
| 1,000,000 | Scale | $700 | $0.70 |
| 2,500,000 | Scale | $1,250 | $0.50 |
| Above 2.5M | Enterprise | Quote | Not published |
Two things fall out of that column that the marketing does not say out loud.
First, the volume discount is nearly flat until 2.5 million. Between 50,000 and 1,000,000 emails — a twentyfold increase — the unit cost moves from $0.70 to $0.70. It rises in the middle and comes back. You are not being rewarded for growth on this platform until you cross into seven figures, where 2.5M finally lands at $0.50 per thousand.
Second, Foundation reaches 100,000 emails too. At that volume Foundation costs $75 and Scale costs $90. Both include the same 100,000 emails. If you assumed Scale was the plan for 100k senders, you were reading the entry-price table, not the ladder.
Foundation at 100k against Scale at 100k: what $15 buys
This is the single most useful comparison on the platform, and it is invisible unless you move the volume selector. Same volume, two plans, a fifteen dollar gap.
| Log retention | 5 days on Foundation against 30 days on Scale. Same for bounce classification. |
|---|---|
| Dedicated IP | Foundation gets access at 50k and one included at 100k and above; Scale includes one at every volume. At 100k the two are equivalent. |
| Address validations | Scale includes 5,000. Foundation includes none and buys them from $1.20 per 100. |
| Overage rate | $1.30 per 1,000 on Foundation against $1.10 on Scale. |
| Support | Ticket and chat on Foundation. Scale adds live phone support. |
| Message retention | Foundation 1 day, Scale up to 7 days. |
Buying 5,000 validations on Foundation at $1.20 per 100 costs $60. Scale includes them and costs $15 more than Foundation at the same 100,000 emails. If you validate addresses at all — and at 100k a month you should — Scale is $45 a month cheaper than Foundation plus validations, and it throws in 30-day logs and phone support.
Our read. Take Foundation at 100k only if you genuinely never validate addresses and never need to investigate a delivery problem more than five days old. Otherwise Scale is the better buy at identical volume, which makes this one of the rare cases where the more expensive plan is the value plan.
The overage trap, with the crossover points
Mailgun does not throttle you when you pass your allowance and it does not auto-upgrade you. It bills the excess, at rates high enough that staying on a small plan is frequently the most expensive option available.
The published rates are $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic, $1.30 on Foundation and $1.10 on Scale, all quoted as “from”, meaning they can be lower at committed volume. Compare those to the included unit cost of the next plan up and the arithmetic is stark.
| If you send | Staying on the small plan costs | Upgrading costs | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15,000 | Basic $15 + 5 × $1.80 = $24 | Foundation $35 | Stay on Basic |
| 21,000 | Basic $15 + 11 × $1.80 = $34.80 | Foundation $35 | Crossover point |
| 30,000 | Basic $15 + 20 × $1.80 = $51 | Foundation $35 | Basic costs 46% more |
| 50,000 | Basic $15 + 40 × $1.80 = $87 | Foundation $35 | Basic costs 149% more |
| 81,000 | Foundation 50k $35 + 31 × $1.30 = $75.30 | Foundation 100k $75 | Crossover point |
| 100,000 | Foundation 50k $35 + 50 × $1.30 = $100 | Foundation 100k $75 | Overage costs 33% more |
Two thresholds worth writing on a sticky note
21,000 emails a month: above this, Basic is more expensive than Foundation. 81,000 emails a month: above this, Foundation’s 50k tier plus overage is more expensive than Foundation’s 100k tier. Neither threshold generates a warning email. Mailgun bills the overage quietly at the start of the following month, and a team that grew from 15,000 to 45,000 sends over a quarter will find its bill has tripled while its plan name never changed.
How the billing actually works
Mailgun’s billing timing is unusual and worth understanding, because it explains why your first invoice and your last invoice both look wrong.
- At signup you are billed only the prorated amount of the selected plan for the current month, not a full month.
- Thereafter you are charged at the start of each month for the prior month’s usage. The subscription is effectively billed in arrears alongside the overage, which is why a spike in March lands on your April invoice.
- On cancellation a final bill is issued before the account closes, covering the usage you have already incurred.
The practical consequence: you cannot cancel to avoid a bad month. The overage from the month you are trying to escape is already owed and will be collected at closure.
Every Mailgun plan except Free and Basic allows you to add as many users as you need at no additional cost. Free is limited to one user per account. For an agency or a team of more than one engineer, that alone rules out the two cheapest tiers regardless of volume.
Dedicated IPs and where they are actually included
Dedicated IP pricing is the detail most often reported wrong for Mailgun, partly because the plan names have changed over the years and old guides still circulate.
As published today: dedicated IP access starts at 50k volume, and one dedicated IP is included at 100k and above, which covers Foundation at its 100k tier and Scale at every tier. Additional IPs are $59 per IP per month, added from the control panel or through support. Dedicated IP pools — grouping IPs by traffic type, so your marketing reputation cannot damage your password resets — are a Scale-level feature.
A dedicated IP is a liability below roughly 100,000 emails a month
This is not a Mailgun policy, it is how mailbox providers work, and it is why Mailgun gates the feature at 50k rather than selling it to everyone. A dedicated IP has no reputation until you build one, and reputation is built by consistent volume. A sender pushing 20,000 emails a month across a single fresh IP will see worse inbox placement than the same sender on a well-warmed shared pool. If a vendor offers you a dedicated IP at 10,000 emails a month, that is a sales feature, not a deliverability feature.
Address validation pricing
Validation is sold two ways at Mailgun, and the price per unit differs by a third depending on which door you enter through.
| Inside Send, Foundation | From $1.20 per 100 validations. None included. |
|---|---|
| Inside Send, Scale | 5,000 included, then from $0.80 per 100. |
| Inside Optimize, Pilot | 2,500 included in the $49/mo, overage from $1.20 per 100. |
| Inside Optimize, Starter | 5,000 included in the $99/mo. |
At list rates that is $0.012 per address on Foundation and $0.008 on Scale. Validating a 50,000-address list once costs $600 at the Foundation rate and $400 at the Scale rate, minus the 5,000 Scale includes. This is a real line item, not a rounding error, and it is the reason list hygiene at Mailgun is usually cheaper done before import than after.
Mailgun Optimize pricing
Optimize is the deliverability product: it does not send anything, it tells you what happened to what you sent. Three tiers, two of them self-serve.
| Plan | Price | Validations | Inbox placement tests | Monitoring |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot | $49/mo, first month free | 2,500 | 25 | None |
| Starter | $99/mo, first month free | 5,000 | 50 | Blocklist and spam trap, 1 domain and 1 IP each; Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS; email health score |
| Contract | Quote | Custom | Custom | Custom domains and IPs, dedicated Technical Account Manager |
Overages are from $0.75 per inbox placement test and from $1.20 per 100 validations. All three tiers include unlimited user seats.
The $49 tier is validations plus 25 placement tests. Blocklist monitoring, spam trap monitoring, Google Postmaster and SNDS integration and the health score all begin at Starter. If you are buying Optimize because you want to know when you land on a blocklist, Pilot does not do that and the real entry price is $99/mo.
Note also the monitoring scope at Starter: one domain and one IP address per monitor type. A company running three sending domains needs the Contract tier, which is quote-only. There is no published per-domain add-on.
Mailgun Inspect pricing
Inspect is the rendering QA product, competing with Litmus and Email on Acid. It is priced per preview.
| Basic — $99/mo | 1,000 previews a month, 100+ clients and devices, API access, unlimited users. Overage $0.15 per preview. |
|---|---|
| Premium — $199/mo | 2,000 previews, plus accessibility tests, HTML code analysis, link and image validation, spam content checks. Overage $0.15 per preview. |
| Contract | Custom preview allotment, all Premium features, quote-only. |
Both self-serve tiers carry a free first month. The unit economics are unambiguous: Basic is $0.099 per included preview, Premium is $0.0995. There is no volume discount between them — the extra $100 buys 1,000 more previews at exactly the same rate, and the analysis features come free with the doubling. If you need accessibility or spam-content checking at all, Premium is the only sensible choice, because Basic plus 1,000 overage previews costs $249 and gives you fewer features than Premium at $199.
What real accounts pay
Five worked examples, using published rates only. Each one assumes USD monthly billing and no negotiated discount.
| Profile | Monthly total | Composition | The trap avoided |
|---|---|---|---|
| Side project, 2,000 transactional emails | $0 | Free tier, under 100/day | Only if daily traffic is even. One busy day breaks it. |
| SaaS, 30,000 emails, one domain | $35 | Foundation 50k | Basic plus overage would be $51 |
| Store, 100,000 emails, validating 5,000 addresses | $90 | Scale 100k with validations included | Foundation 100k plus validations would be $135 |
| Marketplace, 500,000 emails, 2 extra IPs | $518 | Scale $400 + 2 × $59 | Third-party IP add-ons quoted per pool, not per IP |
| Agency, 250,000 emails, full stack | $513 | Scale $215 + Optimize Starter $99 + Inspect Premium $199 | Optimize monitors 1 domain only; multi-client agencies need Contract |
How Mailgun compares on price
Mailgun sits in the transactional and developer segment, so the honest comparison is against other sending infrastructure, not against marketing platforms.
| Provider | Entry paid | Free tier | Dedicated IP | Cost per email at scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailgun Send | $15 Basic | 100/day perpetual | Included at 100k+, extra $59 | $0.0007 at 1M, $0.0005 at 2.5M |
| SendGrid Email API | $19.95 Essentials | 100/day | Included on Pro $89.95 | Overage $0.0006 to $0.0013 |
| Amazon SES | Pay as you go | None published here | $24.95/mo standard | $0.0001 per email |
| Brevo | $9 Starter | 300/day perpetual | Higher tiers only | $0.0033 at Professional volume |
Read that table with the right question in mind. On raw cost per email, Amazon SES is roughly five to seven times cheaper than Mailgun at every volume, and nothing in this category competes with it. What SES does not give you is a console worth using, log search, bounce classification, validation, support you can phone, or deliverability tooling. Mailgun’s price is the price of not building that layer yourself.
Against SendGrid the two are close enough that price should not decide it. Mailgun’s Free tier is perpetual and SendGrid’s is too; Mailgun’s entry paid tier is $5 cheaper but includes 10,000 against SendGrid Essentials’ volume at a comparable rate. The differences that matter are log retention, the number of sending domains, and whether your team wants the Twilio ecosystem.
Against Brevo the comparison breaks down, because Brevo bundles marketing campaigns and transactional on one meter while Mailgun is transactional infrastructure with no campaign builder. A team that wants both will pay Mailgun plus a marketing platform, or Brevo alone.
Who should pay for which plan
| Under 3,000 emails a month, evenly spread | Free. Watch the daily cap, not the monthly total. |
|---|---|
| Under 21,000 emails, one domain, one developer | Basic at $15. Above 21,000, stop and upgrade. |
| 20,000 to 80,000 emails, multiple domains or a team | Foundation at $35. The jump from 1 to 1,000 sending domains and free user seats happens here. |
| Around 100,000 emails, and you validate addresses | Scale at $90. Cheaper than Foundation 100k plus validations, with 30-day logs. |
| Deliverability is a board-level risk | Scale plus Optimize Starter, $189 combined. Skip Optimize Pilot, it has no monitoring. |
| Above 2.5 million emails, or you need SSO and an SLA | Enterprise. Everything above that volume is quote-only, as are Rapid Fire burst SLAs and Deliverability Services. |
What Mailgun does not publish
In the interest of not filling gaps with guesses, here is what we could not source from Mailgun’s own pages, and what we therefore do not state.
- Annual billing discount. Mailgun’s pricing page shows monthly rates and carries no published annual discount. Several competitors publish one openly. We do not claim Mailgun has one and we do not claim it does not; ask sales.
- Enterprise pricing. Quote-only. Any figure you see attributed to Mailgun Enterprise is somebody’s invoice, not a rate card.
- The exact conditions behind “from” pricing. Every overage rate is published as “from”, which means committed-volume accounts pay less. The schedule is not public.
- Per-region price variation. The page offers USD, EUR and GBP. We read and quote the USD figures; the EUR and GBP rates are not straight conversions and should be checked in your own currency.
A previous draft stated that Mailgun had no permanent free plan since 2019 and offered only a 30-day trial, and it listed Foundation at $15 for 10,000 emails. Both are wrong against Mailgun’s current published pricing: there is a perpetual Free tier at 100 emails/day, and the $15 tier is called Basic, with Foundation starting at $35 for 50,000. The plan names on this platform have changed more than once and older guides — including ours — carried the stale set. The figures on this page were read from mailgun.com in August 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Does Mailgun have a free plan?
Yes, and it is permanent rather than a trial. The Free tier allows 100 emails per day with 1 day of log retention, 1 custom sending domain and 1 user. The cap is daily, so you cannot save quiet days to fund a busy one. Separately, the Foundation and Scale plans each include a free first month, which is a trial of the paid tier rather than a free plan.
What happens if I exceed my Mailgun plan volume?
Mailgun bills the excess rather than blocking you. Overage runs from $1.80 per 1,000 emails on Basic, $1.30 on Foundation and $1.10 on Scale. Because you are charged at the start of each month for the prior month’s usage, the bill arrives after the fact. The two crossover points to know: above roughly 21,000 emails Basic costs more than Foundation, and above roughly 81,000 the Foundation 50k tier plus overage costs more than the Foundation 100k tier.
Is Scale worth $90 when Foundation also covers 100,000 emails for $75?
For most senders, yes. The $15 difference buys 30 days of log retention instead of 5, live phone support, a lower overage rate, and 5,000 address validations that would cost $60 bought separately on Foundation. Foundation at 100k only wins if you never validate addresses and never investigate a delivery problem older than five days.
How much does a dedicated IP cost at Mailgun?
Dedicated IP access starts at 50,000 volume and one IP is included at 100,000 and above, which covers Foundation’s 100k tier and every Scale tier. Additional IPs are $59 per IP per month. Dedicated IP pools, which separate marketing traffic from transactional traffic so one cannot damage the other’s reputation, are a Scale feature. Below about 100,000 emails a month a dedicated IP usually hurts deliverability rather than helping, because there is not enough volume to build a reputation.
Are Mailgun Optimize and Inspect included in my sending plan?
No. They are separately billed products. Optimize starts at $49/mo for validations and inbox placement tests, but blocklist monitoring, spam trap monitoring and the Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS integrations only begin at Starter, $99/mo. Inspect starts at $99/mo for 1,000 rendering previews. The full stack of Scale plus Optimize Starter plus Inspect Premium is $388/mo at entry volumes.
How many users can I add to a Mailgun account?
Unlimited, at no extra cost, on every plan except Free and Basic. The Free plan is limited to one user per account. This is a real constraint on the two cheapest tiers: a two-person team sharing one login on Basic is a security problem, and the fix costs $20 a month in the jump to Foundation.
Does Mailgun offer an annual discount?
Mailgun’s public pricing page shows monthly rates and does not publish an annual discount. That is a statement about what is published, not a claim that no discount exists — committed-volume accounts also get overage rates below the “from” figures, and neither schedule is public. If annual prepayment matters to your budget, ask sales for it in writing before signing.
How does Mailgun billing work when I sign up mid-month?
At signup you are billed only the prorated amount of your plan for the remainder of the current month. After that, charges are issued at the start of each month covering the prior month’s usage, so subscription and overage arrive together in arrears. If you cancel, a final bill is generated before the account closes — cancelling does not erase overage you have already run up.
Is Mailgun cheaper than Amazon SES?
No, and not close. Amazon SES runs around $0.0001 per email against Mailgun’s $0.0005 to $0.0007 at high volume, so SES is five to seven times cheaper on raw sending. What SES does not include is log search, bounce classification, address validation, inbox placement testing, a usable console, or support you can call. Mailgun’s premium is the price of that layer. Teams with an engineer who enjoys building it choose SES; teams who want it on day one choose Mailgun.
How much does Mailgun email validation cost?
From $1.20 per 100 validations on Foundation and from $0.80 per 100 on Scale, which also includes 5,000. That is $0.012 and $0.008 per address respectively. Validating a 50,000-address list once therefore costs on the order of $400 to $600 at list rates. Mailgun Optimize sells the same validations bundled with monitoring: 2,500 with Pilot at $49/mo, 5,000 with Starter at $99/mo.
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This review follows our email infrastructure testing methodology. We disclose affiliate relationships in our editorial independence policy.
