Users in the thread Cheaper alternative to Mailgun? discuss cost-effective, reputable email services for Discourse forums. Jonathan5 seeks alternatives to Mailgun, currently paying $25/month for 25,000 emails. crcoli7307 suggests SendGrid’s Essentials plan at $19.95 for 50k emails, cheaper than Mailgun’s $35 option. jonathon mentions MXRoute at $45/year for 300 emails/hour, and Jonathan5 appreciates their customer service. ufukayyildiz and renato recommend Amazon SES, with renato noting $0.54 for 5,441 emails. Kuro22 warns of SES’s production access hurdles and tracking issues, while ufukayyildiz advises contacting support. Kuro22 praises SendGrid’s reliability, even in China. Lakuma recommends SendinBlue (free for 300/day) and Zoho’s ZeptoMail ($2.50/10k emails). agungor questions SendinBlue’s branding and compares ZeptoMail to SES’s $1/10k rate. Canapin estimates SES could cut their costs from $90/year to $15/year. Richie shares Zoho’s costs for 120k emails/month (~$37) and recalls SES reply issues, linking to a troubleshooting guide. RGJ questions reply handling and volanar suggests self-hosting via docker-mailserver, but Richie notes blacklisting concerns. RGJ clarifies blacklisting affects sending, not receiving. Jonathan5 confirms switching to SES and asks for a guide, later confirming a helpful idiot’s guide. Jacob_Peebles endorses Netcore for SES-like pricing and better reputation management. Ethsim2 briefly mentions Brevo.
Continuing the discussion from Mailgun is $1/month per 1,000 emails sent (and first 1,000 are free):
I’ve been happy with Mailgun but am paying about $25 per month now (25,000 emails).
What cheaper – but still reputable – alternatives can you recommend?
I wondered about Amazon SES. Also, a recent Mailgun communication said that they themselves had moved from Amazon to Google for their email infrastructure. Maybe Google has something suitable.
I know SendGrid has an Essentials plan where you can send up to 50k emails per month for $19.95 per month.
Thanks. That’s a good start. From memory, I think Mailgun’s 50k option is $35.
No problem. I can do a bit more research for you in a few.
MXRoute is an option up to 300 emails/hour for $45/year.
I’ve had fun reading their responses to bad reviews on Trustpilot. I like the cut of their jib!
hello,
try amazon SES.
This. I’ve sent 5,441 emails in June, being 0.0001 each = U$ 0.54.
I tried migrating to SES these days. They denied my request for production access for some security reasons that they won’t let me know (?). And it appears that it’s tricky to track emails with SES.
contact with support, i believe they will fix it.
SendGrid is indeed a good alternative. Their service is reliable even in China. (Mailgun’s verification code can’t reach me via SMS…while theirs can) The old price of Essential 50k plan was even cheaper, which is 15$.
I use SendinBlue, which is free for 300 emails per day, I have a very small forum. Another one you might want to look into is Zoho’s Transactional Email service. Reliable SMTP Relay & Transactional Email Sending API | Zoho ZeptoMail it’s $2.50 for 10,000 transactional emails from a pretty reputable company.
Does Sendinblue send clean emails as part of the free 300 emails per day, or do they insert their branding into your emails?
Thanks for mentioning this option. While Amazon SES sounds like a better deal to me at $1 per 10,000 emails, perhaps ZeptoMail would be a good option for anyone having difficulty setting up SES as discussed earlier in this thread.
It could be a good idea to make a table comparison somewhere.
I’m using Mailgun, but the fees are slowly increasing and maybe an alternative could suit my needs better.
I send between 7000 and 10000 emails per month.
An estimate of Amazon SES shows that it would decrease my email fees from ~90$/year to ~15$/year.
Did anyone ever find the time to put this together?
We’ve been using Zoho Transmail / Zeptomail for a couple of years but as our community scales, so do our Zoho costs.
We’re sending around 120,000 emails per month and now spend more money per month on sending email than we do on hosting over a million hires photos on AWS S3 - which is just crazy 
I seem to recall trying SES a while back but had problems with people replying to it (we use gmail to handle incoming replies to topics via email). I can’t remember exactly what that reply-via-email issue was now, but I seem to remember SES being a non-starter because of it.
How much are you currently spending on those 120k emails?
Maybe you shouldn’t do that anyway…?
Around GBP£29 / USD$37 per month.
Oh? 
What should I do? I’m completely open to options here 
But where do I host it that isn’t on a blacklisted subnet already? 
I found my SES issues from back in 2020: Troubleshooting Amazon AWS SES sending email via SMTP - #10 by pfaffman
Maybe I need to revisit the whole reply-via-email thing.
That’s very close to getting managed hosting including email 
Blacklisting only matters for sending, not for receiving.
I’ve got an Amazon SES account now! Is there a good idiot’s guide to changing Discourse settings from Mailgun to SES? I use Discourse’s mail-receiver too. Thanks 