Transactional email delivery service and API for developers.
Mailgun is a transactional email platform built around a RESTful API and SMTP relay, with tooling for sending, receiving (inbound routing), tracking, validating and previewing email. It splits into three separately priced products - Send (delivery), Optimize (deliverability suite) and Inspect (pre-send preview and accessibility checks) - and ships an official MCP server so an AI client can send mail and pull delivery metrics without custom code. It operates as part of Sinch.
Status: Actively sold and marketed under the Sinch brand ("Sinch Mailgun" on the vendor's own integration pages).
| Plan | Price | Included | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 100 emails/day | RESTful email APIs and SMTP relay, 1 custom sending domain, Tracking, analytics, and webhooks |
| Basic | Starting at $15/mo | 10,000 emails/mo; additional messages from $1.80 per 1,000; validations from $1.20 per 100 | No daily email limit, Monthly email overage options, RESTful email APIs and SMTP relay |
| Foundation | Free for 1 month, then $35/mo | 50,000 emails/mo; additional messages from $1.30 per 1,000 (falling to $1.10 at the 100k tier) | Everything on Basic, Full access to RESTful email APIs and SMTP relays, 1,000 custom sending domains |
| Scale | Free for 1 month, then $90/mo | 100,000 emails/mo; additional messages from $1.10 per 1,000, falling to $0.40 at the 2.5M tier; 5,000 validations included | Everything on Foundation, SAML SSO, 5,000 email validations |
| Enterprise | Contact the vendor to tailor an Enterprise plan | Described as the full service for high volume senders |
Checked 2026-08-07 against their pricing page. Vendors change pricing without notice.
Mailgun is infrastructure for application-generated email: signup confirmations, receipts, notifications, and high-volume campaigns sent programmatically rather than from a marketing UI. The plan ladder is metered on monthly message volume with per-thousand overage rates that fall as volume rises, and the tiers gate operational capabilities rather than raw sending - log retention runs 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 days on Foundation and 30 days on Scale; custom sending domains jump from 1 to 1,000 at Foundation; SAML SSO, dedicated IP pools, send-time optimization and live phone support appear only at Scale. Two adjacent products, Optimize and Inspect, are priced separately from Send.
Developers integrating email into an application - the vendor's own line is "built by developers, for developers" - from a single app sending thousands of messages to platforms sending millions, parsing inbound mail, or piping email event data into a CRM.
The Free and Basic plans give you one custom sending domain and one day of log retention, which is thin for anyone who needs to debug a delivery complaint more than 24 hours after it happened - real forensic capability starts at Foundation (5 days) and Scale (30 days). Multi-brand or multi-tenant senders are effectively pushed to Foundation, since the 1,000-domain allowance only appears there. Dedicated IPs are gated by volume: access at 50k messages and included at 100k+, so lower-volume senders who want reputation isolation cannot buy it at the bottom of the ladder. Deliverability monitoring and inbox placement are not part of Send at all - they sit in the separately priced Optimize product, so the sticker price on the pricing page is not the cost of a full deliverability programme. And this is a transactional/API platform, not a cold-outreach tool: buyers wanting a sequencer or prospecting workflow are in the wrong category.
No curated rival set covers this tool yet, so these are simply other tools in the same architectural layer and product form. Treat it as a starting point, not a shortlist.
Yes. It runs locally: clone the repo, npm install, add your API key and server path to the client's MCP settings.
Per the vendor: a Mailgun account with an API key, Node.js v18 or newer, Git, and an MCP-compatible AI client such as Claude Desktop.
It varies by plan and is one of the sharper differences between tiers: 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 days on Foundation, 30 days on Scale. Bounce classification retention follows the same ladder, and message retention is 1 day on Foundation and up to 7 days on Scale.
The plan comparison states dedicated IP access at 50k volume and included at 100k+ volumes; Scale includes one dedicated IP and adds dedicated IP pools. Automated dedicated IP warm-up is listed across the deliverability section.
Overage is tiered and falls with volume. Basic starts at $1.80 per 1,000 additional messages; Foundation at $1.30 (dropping to $1.10 at 100k); Scale at $1.10, stepping down through $0.90, $0.75, $0.60, $0.50 and $0.40 at the 2.5M tier. Validations are billed per 100 from $1.20 down to $0.25 in volume bands.
No - the comparison table marks inbox placement and reputation monitoring as "available on Optimize", which is a separately priced product alongside Send and Inspect. Budget accordingly if deliverability tooling is the reason you are buying.
Yes. Inbound routing is a documented feature: 1 route on Free, 5 on Basic, and full access to inbound routing from Foundation upward. The vendor also names message parsing as a use case.
The integrations directory lists quickstarts for Go, Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby and Python.
It operates under the Sinch brand - the MCP integration page runs a "Why Sinch Mailgun" section. The product is actively marketed and sold; this is a parent-company note, not a lifecycle warning.
This page tells you whether Mailgun fits. Cheetah builds and runs the system it goes into — enrichment, sequencing, CRM and the joins between them.
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