Plunk vs Mailgun
Mailgun is a transactional email API service for developers. Plunk, is too! But we’re also capable of sending campaigns and automated actions emails.
But what makes us different? Well, a few things… We can even be used for free 👀.
In this article, we’ll humbly compare our bootstrapped Plunk to the behemoth that is Mailgun. Heads up, you’re on the Plunk website. To complete your research, please visit Mailgun’s site.
And just as we post this, 2 people mentioned this... we'll leave it there :)
The differences
Mailgun was founded in 2010, and has grown to be a common and very well used email API that developers use to send emails from actions in their applications. They claim over 150,000 companies use them.
They’re often believed to be among the cheaper providers, which is true amongst the bigger players. But with the rise of reliable ‘indie’ services and smaller tools like Plunk, this is no longer the case.
They have a free tier to get you started, and it tops out at 100 emails per day. This is somewhat similar to us, as you get 3000 free emails per month, although not capped at a maximum day limit.
Their first tier allows for 10,000 emails per month, and starts at $15 per month.
At Plunk, we do things differently. We don’t offer a fixed subscription that goes up with tiers. Rather, you just pay for what you use.
- Mailgun $ per email: $0.0015
- Plunk $ per email: $0.001
Making plunk 50% cheaper in this tier. Only when you go up to paying $35 per month for Mailgun (or $420 per year) for up to 50,000 emails per month, does it start to become more economical.
Although, that doesn’t tell the full story. Plunk also allows for sending campaigns (similar to tools like Mailchimp or Brevo) or set up things like newsletters. We also give you the option to make ‘automated actions’ which are things like welcome emails or other actions. Find all use cases here.
When you start to factor in those costs, we’re willing to bet Plunk comes out ahead. Not to mention the saved hassle of setting up and managing more tools and subscriptions.
Back to Mailgun, they lock certain features out of the free and $15 tier. Features that Plunk does provide for our paying customers. Mainly support.
At Plunk, we manage support through Discord. All tickets are public, and can be sifted through to find new ways of sending emails. This visibility also shows we are very active and try to help our users as fast as possible.
We also don’t create add-ons - unlike Mailgun - to put more pricing pressure on our customers.
One of those is called Mailgun Optimize which starts at $49 per month. It’s a series of optimizations which aim to increase the open and response rates of your users. Techniques include email address validations and ‘inbox placement tests’, but we’re not entirely sure what the latter means.
Increased monthly payments up to $99 and far beyond include more features.
Or if you don’t need extra features but your monthly sending goes beyond the artificially capped limits, you’ll start paying $1.80 per 1,000 emails (in the basic tier) which adds up fast.
How to use Plunk for free
New to Plunk is self-hosting. If you want to completely own your sending and flow yourself, you can! Plunk can be self hosted on AWS SES very easily. Follow this self hosting guide on our docs to set that up.
Doing that, Plunk is effectively free! Of course withholding the costs to AWS that you then pay yourself.
In summary
While Mailgun is a solid service, which is backed up by thousands of users, Plunk is more lightweight and perfect for smaller projects and developers that care about their bottom line.
Mailgun is a SaaS run by a modern company with a ton of employees. You’ll get a solid product, but it’s filled with small schemes to make you gently move upstream and increase your monthly payments.
Artificially capped limits, removing of features, and more which have become commonplace.
If you choose Plunk, you’ll find a streamlined yet complete tool run by 2 blokes from Belgium who care about people’s ability to create products. We’ve worked to keep those schemes to an absolute minimum, and actively try to remain the cheapest yet high quality solution. We’re very lucky and humbled to be found by thousands of users who are delighted to use Plunk.
