Mailgun Pricing 2026: Free Plan, Tiers and Costs
Nov 8, 202613 min read
You pay a monthly plan fee that covers a set number of emails, plus a per-thousand charge for every email sent beyond that. That is how Mailgun pricing works, whether you send from your own code or from an automation tool such as Activepieces.
Mailgun pricing today: every plan, price and limit
The plan table
Read the price and the included volume together, because the price alone tells you nothing about what you'll actually pay. The table lists the four current plans from Mailgun's pricing page.
| Plan | Monthly price | Included emails |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 per day |
| Basic | $15 | 10,000 |
| Foundation | $35 | 50,000 |
| Scale | $90 | 100,000 |
Prices and plan limits checked against mailgun.com on November 8, 2026.
Checked 2026-11-08.
What each tier includes
Divide each price by its volume and the tiers stop looking alike. According to Mailgun, Basic at $15 for 10,000 emails works out to $1.50 per thousand.
Divide each price by its volume and the tiers stop looking alike.
Per Pricetape, Foundation at $35 for 50,000 drops to $0.70 per thousand, so a sender who moves up pays less than half the rate per email.
Scale is the odd one out. At $90 for 100,000 it comes to $0.90 per thousand, which means it's not the better deal per email than Foundation. You're paying for headroom, not a discount.
What the free tier does and does not allow
At $0, the Free plan allows 100 emails a day. That caps you at roughly 3,000 in a 30-day month, which means you're limited to sporadic sends or small subscriber counts.
You can't fit a launch-day spike into it, because the limit is daily, so a busy afternoon can't borrow from a quiet week. Once your real sending passes that line, Basic at $15 is the first step up.
If you are running this arithmetic for your own team, see what the same workload costs on Activepieces.
Small production app Mailgun costs
Every email past the included line is billed at an overage rate, so Basic stays the cheapest plan only while your monthly volume sits close to what it includes.
What follows is how the estimate works at three volumes. Check each plan's published price and per-email overage against these numbers before you commit.
A launch-stage app
At about 3,000 emails a month, you're sending password resets, receipts and sign-up confirmations. Doing nothing, meaning staying on Free, costs you nothing in dollars.
It can cost you in a launch week: if the free plan's daily cap is lower than your busiest days, you'll need to upgrade to a paid plan. That's not a bill you can pay your way out of.
Compare your busiest month, not your average, against the Free cap. If you clear it with room to spare, stay. If not, a paid plan is insurance.
A growing SaaS with transactional mail
At about 30,000 emails a month, the plans pull apart. Basic may cover you with little or no overage, or you may be paying overage every month on a plan too small for you.
Work it through: take the plan's base price, subtract its included volume from 30,000, multiply what's left by the overage rate, and add the two. Run the same sum for Foundation.
When the overage on the smaller plan exceeds the base-price gap to the next one, the bigger plan is the cheaper bill.
A product with marketing sends
At about 150,000 emails a month, one newsletter can double your volume. Overage on a small plan compounds quickly at this size, so Basic is rarely where you land.
Run the sum for Foundation and Scale, then look at what each includes beyond volume, such as how long logs are kept. The plan that includes your volume is almost always the one that costs less than the plan you outgrew.
Mailgun overage fees and limits
The moment you step past your included volume or need more than the basics, five other charges start, because the headline price covers only what your plan includes:
- Overage on the Foundation plan is $1.30 per 1,000 emails, so your bill scales upward with any excess volume.
- A dedicated IP address is $59 a month, which means you'll budget for this recurring charge each billing cycle.
- Email validation is $1.20 per 100 addresses, so validating large lists escalates your costs proportionally.
- Log retention is 1, 5 or 30 days, depending on plan, meaning you can't access or audit events older than your selected window.
- Each plan caps sending domains and inbound routes.
Each one catches a different kind of app, as the three parts below show.
Overage rates
At $1.30 per 1,000, an extra 10,000 emails in a busy month adds $13, so volume spikes translate directly to measurable overage charges. That's small once, but it repeats every month you run over.
The free tier's 100 emails a day is the same idea in miniature: anything beyond it needs a paid plan.
Not every email you send does its job, either. Dreamlit's benchmarks put 87.2% of sent email in the inbox, 6.1% in spam and 6.6% missing.
That means roughly one message in eight still counts against your volume without reaching anyone's inbox, so budget for 100 sent and 87 read.
$708 a year is what the $59 monthly dedicated IP comes to, so it only pays off once your volume justifies it. Validation at $1.20 per 100 means checking a 20,000-address list costs $240, and that's before you send a single message.
If you only get one day of retention, a bounce you notice on Monday may already be gone from your logs. A 30-day plan gives you a month to investigate.
Domain and route caps matter when you add a second product or client, because that can force a plan upgrade you didn't budget for.
Mailgun upgrade volume threshold
Once the overage you would pay on your current plan, month after month, exceeds the extra price of stepping up, the next Mailgun plan becomes cheaper.
Doing nothing has a cost. If you stay on a plan after outgrowing its included volume, every extra email is billed at the overage rate.
Against that, the step-up price is a flat cost. So the break-even is simple: divide the price difference between the two plans by the overage rate per email, then add the result to the volume your current plan already includes.
For two moves, Basic to Foundation and Foundation to Scale, the chart shows that send count.
Read it as a tripwire. If your monthly sending sits below a bar, the lower plan is still cheaper even with overage. If you sit above it, you're paying a penalty for not upgrading.
Check your own sending against both bars, using a typical month rather than your best one. Look at the current rate card before you commit.
If you want that check automated and the connector for it doesn't exist, you needn't wait on a vendor's roadmap: Activepieces can build the missing integration with AI-generated code that stays private to your own instance, and its 747 integrations, counted from the open source monorepo, are roughly 60% community-contributed.
When to stay put despite overage
If you cross your included volume only in a launch month or a seasonal rush, you pay the overage for a few weeks, while a higher plan charges its full price every month of the year.
Overage isn't always a reason to upgrade. Staying put is the cheaper call when the spikes are short and the quiet months are well under the limit.
It also makes sense to stay if the bigger plan's extras do nothing for you. Higher tiers come with more retention, more domains and other features, and paying for those only pays off if you'll use them.
Worth checking against a plan that does not meter every step: one credit covers a whole run on Activepieces.
Mailgun against SendGrid, Postmark, Amazon SES and Resend
For steady, mid-sized sending rather than either extreme, Mailgun tends to hold up best. When an upgrade is forced on you, that's the moment to price the other four.
Because the way a bill grows is what separates the vendors, the table shows how each one charges rather than a single headline number. Take from it which vendors bill you per message and which bill you by plan step.
| Vendor | Entry price | Included volume | Cost per extra 1,000 | Free tier | Log retention | Dedicated IP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailgun | Monthly plan | Set by plan | Overage at the plan's rate | Limited free plan | Set by plan | Paid add-on |
| SendGrid | Monthly plan | Set by plan | Set by plan tier | Limited free plan | Set by plan | Higher plans |
| Postmark | Monthly plan | Set by plan | Set by plan | Small test allowance | Fixed window | High-volume senders only |
| Amazon SES | No monthly plan | None, pay as you go | Flat per-message rate | Introductory allowance | Build your own | Separate monthly charge |
| Resend | Monthly plan | Set by plan | Set by plan | Limited free plan | Set by plan | Paid add-on |
Check each linked page before you commit, since vendors change these terms.
When your sending is steady and sits near the top of a plan's included volume, Mailgun wins. You pay for what you use, and nothing forces a jump to a bigger tier.
When SES, Postmark or others beat Mailgun
When volume is large and you can handle the setup yourself, Amazon SES wins, because you pay per message with no plan steps. The catch is that you build your own logging and monitoring.
Postmark wins when delivery of important messages, such as password resets, matters more than price. Resend and SendGrid suit teams who value their tooling or already use it.
Watch Mailgun usage and bounces with Activepieces
Once you have your monthly number, Mailgun's own webhooks and dashboard alerts can watch it for you.
Activepieces only earns its place if you want the check against your plan's limit sent somewhere you'll see it, and the free plan includes unlimited flows and 1,000 credits a month, with a run costing 1 credit however many steps it has.
Mailgun built-in alerts and webhooks
Start with what Mailgun already gives you. A webhook is Mailgun calling an address you choose whenever something happens to a message, such as a bounce.
The dashboard alerts cost nothing extra, so set them up before adding another tool. Otherwise you'll find out about a bounce problem or a blown allowance from the invoice.
You need a baseline for bounces. Postmastery's Q3 2025 benchmark puts Seznam, a Czech mailbox provider, at 0.08 %, Yahoo at 0.24 % and Outlook at 0.25 %. Google sits at 0.5 % and Office365 at 0.51 %.
If your list is mostly Google and Office365 addresses, about half a percent is ordinary. If you're far above the provider mix you actually send to, suspect your list, not Mailgun.
Where a workflow adds something
Sending never needed Activepieces.
What a flow can do is combine two things the dashboard keeps apart: your sending so far this month and your plan's included volume, and since flows are unlimited on every plan, including free, the check adds no cost of its own.
You get a warning while there's still time to change plans, not after overage rates apply.
80% is my suggestion, not a Mailgun default. Pick a number that leaves you a few days to act.
Mailgun plan selection steps
To turn your real volume into a plan choice, take five steps in this order. Skipping one usually means paying for room you never use or for overage you never saw coming. Each step produces one answer that the next one needs:
- Pull three months of send counts from your app or your current email provider.
- Count the sending domains you run and the days of log retention you need.
- Run those numbers against each plan in the table.
- Price one alternative provider using the same inputs.
- Set a usage alert at a percentage you choose.
Take the busiest of the three months, not the average. Your bill follows your worst month, because overage charges land on the spike, and an average hides exactly the month that costs you.
Check Mailgun plan costs against your volume
Count your domains and ask how far back you ever look at delivery logs when a customer says an email never arrived.
Then put your busiest month beside each plan's included volume, and add the overage on whatever spills past it. A plan with a higher headline price often comes out cheaper once nothing spills.
Price one alternative the same way, so you know whether Mailgun is a good deal or merely a familiar one.
Choose a percentage of your included volume that leaves you time to react, and set the alert there. Without it, you learn about a spike from the invoice. With it, you get a warning while you can still change plans or fix a runaway loop.
Frequently asked questions
The free plan
Check the pricing page before you build on it: Mailgun has offered a free plan with a small daily sending cap. Free tiers are the plan most likely to change, and discovering that after launch means an unplanned upgrade.
Failed and bounced emails
Does Mailgun charge for failed or bounced emails? Assume yes. Mailgun counts what you send through it, so a message that bounces generally still uses part of your included volume.
A list full of dead addresses is a bill you pay for nothing, and cleaning it costs less than sending to it. Mailgun's address validation is a separate paid feature.
Switching plans
Can I switch Mailgun plans mid-month? You can change plans from your account dashboard at any time.
How the current month is prorated is set out in Mailgun's billing documentation, so read it before switching late in a cycle. Otherwise you may pay for volume you never use.
Dedicated IP addresses
Does Mailgun charge for a dedicated IP address? Yes, on most plans a dedicated IP is a separate monthly charge, and the lowest plans may not offer one at all.
Without one, you share a sending address with other customers, and their habits can affect whether your mail reaches inboxes.
Exceeding your plan limit
What happens if I exceed my Mailgun plan limit? Extra messages are billed at your plan's overage rate rather than blocked.
That's why a runaway loop is expensive: it keeps sending at the overage rate until someone notices. Set the usage alert, and if you cross the limit most months, move up a plan.
Related reading
References
Running the numbers
See what the same workload costs here.
Free forever plan, and every paid plan self-hosts at no extra cost.
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