Email Bump
Start For Free Join With Google
Comparison

The best Mailgun alternatives

Mailgun is one of the originals, it has an EU region, and it's now part of Sinch. People leave over two things: $1.80 per extra thousand emails on the entry plan, and log retention measured in days.

Sixteen alternatives below, with what each costs, what its free tier really gets you, and what it is bad at. We make one of them. It's marked, and its gaps — no EU region, not open source — are listed like everyone else's.

16 options Prices checked 2 August 2026 No affiliate links
The short answer

Pick by the reason you're leaving

Nobody replaces a platform in the abstract. Something specific stopped working. Start from that, not from a feature matrix.

Cheapest per emailAmazon SES

$0.16 per 1,000 against Mailgun Basic's $1.80. You build the rest.

Best developer experienceResend

Thirteen official SDKs and $0.90 per extra 1,000.

Best deliverability recordPostmark

And retention up to 365 days, against Mailgun's 1 to 30.

Best EU optionAhaSend

European infrastructure that keeps the data in Europe, with a usable free tier.

Best when you also send campaignsEmail Bump

Marketing and transactional on one contact-priced plan, with no per-email rate. That's us.

Context

What actually goes wrong with Mailgun

Mailgun is capable infrastructure with an EU region, which is why people choose it. The friction is in the plan design rather than the sending.

Log retention is one day on the cheap plans. Free and Basic keep one day of logs. Foundation keeps five. Only Scale, at $90/mo, gets you thirty. The entire point of a hosted provider is being able to answer "what happened to this email" — and on the plan most small teams are on, yesterday's answer is already gone.

$1.80 per extra thousand on Basic. That's level with Postmark's entry rate and twice Resend's $0.90. Foundation drops it to $1.30 and Scale to $1.10, but the plan people start on has one of the highest overage rates in the category.

The free tier is 100 emails a day. Not a month — a day, with one day of log retention behind it. It's enough to confirm the API works and not enough to run a staging environment.

Extra dedicated IPs are $59 each. Scale includes one. Every additional IP is $59/mo, which adds up quickly for anyone segmenting reputation across brands or streams.

It's part of a bigger company now. Sinch acquired Pathwire, Mailgun's parent, in a deal announced in September 2021. Nothing visibly broke, and it does mean the independent developer-tool positioning that attracted people originally is now a product line inside a communications group.

The baseline

What Mailgun costs, from their own pricing page

Everything below is compared against these numbers, read on 2 August 2026.

Priced on emails

The plans

$0
100 emails a dayFree — 1 day of log retention
$15/mo
10,000 emails/moBasic — $1.80 per extra 1,000 — 1 day of logs
$35/mo
50,000 emails/moFoundation — $1.30 per extra 1,000 — 5 days of logs
$90/mo
100,000 emails/moScale — $1.10 per extra 1,000 — 30 days of logs, 1 dedicated IP
Worth knowing

The fine print

  • Log retention is 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 on Foundation, 30 on Scale.
  • Additional dedicated IPs are $59/mo each.
  • Email validation is sold separately, from $1.20 per 100.
  • US or EU sending from a single account — a genuine advantage over most of this list.
  • Sinch acquired Pathwire, Mailgun's parent, in a deal announced in September 2021.
Side by side

All 16, on the things that decide it

ProviderStarts atFree tierMarketing emailLicenceData region
Email BumpHosted$19/mo at 10,000 contacts5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails a monthIncluded — campaigns, flows, segments and the API share one billProprietaryUnited States (Amazon SES, us-east-1)
ResendHosted$20/mo for 50,000 emails (Pro); marketing contacts are a second plan from $40/mo3,000 emails a month capped at 100 a day, 1 domain — plus a separate 1,000-contact marketing free planBroadcasts, on a separate contact-priced plan. No journey builder.ProprietaryUnited States
PostmarkHosted$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)100 emails a monthBroadcast streams only — 15 on Basic, 30 on Pro, unlimited on Platform. No visual automation builder.ProprietaryUnited States
Amazon SESHosted$0.16 per 1,000 emails (Essentials, first 10M/mo)Up to $200 in AWS free-tier credits for new accounts, over the first 6 monthsNone. SES is a sending pipe.ProprietaryYour choice of AWS region, including several in the EU
MailtrapHosted$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)4,000 emails a month, capped at 150 a day, 3 days of logsBulk stream on Business and above; no journey builderProprietaryUnited States, with EU sending available
MailerSendHosted$5.60/mo for 5,000 emails (Hobby)500 emails a month, 1 domain, 1 templateTemplates and basic automation; MailerLite is the sibling product for campaignsProprietaryUnited States and European Union
Zoho ZeptoMailHostedCredits, where 1 credit = 10,000 emails, valid 6 monthsFirst credit free — 10,000 emails, valid for one monthNone. ZeptoMail is transactional-only by policy; Zoho Campaigns is the other product.ProprietaryMultiple, including EU data centres
AhaSendHostedPaid tiers start at 25,000 emails/mo (Pro); the rate isn't published as a flat figure1,000 emails a month, unlimited domains, no card requiredTransactional focus; no campaign builderProprietaryEuropean Union, multi-region
Scaleway TEMHosted€0.25 per 1,000 emails after the first 300 a month (Essential)300 emails a month, every monthProhibited by policy — TEM is transactional onlyProprietaryEuropean Union (multi-region, France-headquartered)
LoopsHostedPaid plans are priced by subscribed contacts via a slider, not published as a fixed table1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends a month, with a Loops footer on your emailIncluded — that's the core of the productProprietaryUnited States
useSend (formerly Unsend)Self-hostableFree to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sendingSelf-hosted — the software is freeIncluded: contacts, campaigns and transactional in one appAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
PlunkSelf-hostableSelf-host free, or $0.001 per email on Plunk CloudSelf-hosted — the software is freeIncluded: campaigns plus a trigger-and-condition automation builderAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
FreeResendSelf-hostableFree to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sendingSelf-hosted — the software is freeNone — transactional onlyMITWherever you deploy it
NotifuseSelf-hostableSelf-host free, or Notifuse Cloud from $16/moSelf-hosted — the software is freeIncluded: visual builder, scheduling, A/B tests, segmentationAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
listmonkSelf-hostableFree to run; you pay your SMTP provider for the sendingSelf-hosted — the software is freeThat's the whole product: lists, subscribers, campaigns, templatesAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
PostalSelf-hostableFree to run; you pay for servers and IPsSelf-hosted — the software is freeNone; it's infrastructureMITWherever you deploy it

Read off each vendor's own pricing or documentation page on 2 August 2026. Where a vendor renders prices from a slider and publishes no static table, the cell says so instead of repeating a number from someone's affiliate post.

In detail

Every option, and what it's bad at

01Hosted service

Email Bump

Best for: Teams paying twice — once for the transactional API, again for the newsletter

Marketing and transactional email in one product, billed on contacts rather than sends. The transactional API takes the same field names most developer email APIs use, so the migration is a base URL and a key. Also the only one on this list with a first-class CLI and MCP server, so an agent can run the whole account without a browser.

Starts at
$19/mo at 10,000 contacts
Free tier
5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails a month
Marketing
Included — campaigns, flows, segments and the API share one bill
Data region
United States (Amazon SES, us-east-1)
What it does well
  • One price covers campaigns, automated flows, segments and the transactional API.
  • Sending is uncapped on paid plans under fair use — a viral week doesn't produce an overage bill.
  • Unsubscribed and bounced contacts stop counting, so the bill tracks your real audience.
  • Unlimited team seats and unlimited sending domains on every plan, including free.
  • CLI, MCP server and agent skills cover the same surface as the API, including creating the account itself.
  • Inbound email, SMTP on the same key, and webhooks are part of the plan, not upsells.
What to watch for
  • Sending is US-only today — there is no EU data region.
  • Not open source, and there's no self-hosted build.
  • The free plan puts a 'Powered by Email Bump' badge on marketing footers. Transactional sends never carry it.
  • Younger than Postmark or SendGrid, without their decade-plus of public deliverability history.
02Hosted service

Resend

Best for: Developer experience, and an official SDK in whatever you write in

The current default recommendation for developer email. Thirteen official SDKs, a CLI, a clean dashboard, and react-email — the open-source library that made writing email in React tolerable. Transactional volume and marketing contacts are billed as two separate plans.

Starts at
$20/mo for 50,000 emails (Pro); marketing contacts are a second plan from $40/mo
Free tier
3,000 emails a month capped at 100 a day, 1 domain — plus a separate 1,000-contact marketing free plan
Marketing
Broadcasts, on a separate contact-priced plan. No journey builder.
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Official SDKs for 13 languages plus a CLI — the widest first-party coverage here.
  • react-email is open source, genuinely good, and portable to any provider.
  • Inbound receiving, SMTP and webhooks are all first-class.
  • $0.90 per extra 1,000 emails is half Postmark's Basic overage rate.
What to watch for
  • Transactional volume and marketing contacts are billed as two separate subscriptions.
  • 30-day data retention on every plan, including Scale.
  • Overage is charged automatically per extra 1,000 emails against the card on file.
  • No EU region, and sending domains are capped by plan: 1 on Free, 10 on Pro.
03Hosted service

Postmark

Best for: Transactional mail where a receipt arriving late is a support ticket

The long-standing deliverability specialist. Separate message streams keep transactional and broadcast reputation apart, retention goes to a year, and support answers with an engineer rather than a bot.

Starts at
$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)
Free tier
100 emails a month
Marketing
Broadcast streams only — 15 on Basic, 30 on Pro, unlimited on Platform. No visual automation builder.
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Deliverability track record is the longest of anything on this list.
  • Retention is customisable up to 365 days on Pro and Platform, against Resend's flat 30 days.
  • Inbound email processing on Pro and above.
  • Support is a genuine differentiator, not a plan checkbox.
What to watch for
  • Overage is $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic — twice Resend's $0.90 — so bursts get expensive.
  • Broadcasts are a stream, not a marketing tool: no segments, no journeys.
  • Dedicated IPs start at $50/mo per IP.
04Hosted service

Amazon SES

Best for: High volume where you already have engineers to own the plumbing

The wholesale layer most of this list resells. Nothing is cheaper per email, and nothing asks more of you: no dashboard worth the name, no templates, no contact model, no suppression UI beyond the basics.

Starts at
$0.16 per 1,000 emails (Essentials, first 10M/mo)
Free tier
Up to $200 in AWS free-tier credits for new accounts, over the first 6 months
Marketing
None. SES is a sending pipe.
Data region
Your choice of AWS region, including several in the EU
What it does well
  • $0.16 per 1,000 is roughly a fortieth of Resend's Pro rate at the same volume.
  • Regions everywhere, so data residency is a config value.
  • Scales past anything a SaaS plan will sell you.
What to watch for
  • You build the dashboard, the templates, the retries, the suppression list and the reporting.
  • New accounts start in a sandbox; production access and quota increases are reviewed.
  • Attachments are billed separately at $0.12/GB, and deliverability tooling costs extra.
05Hosted service

Mailtrap

Best for: Teams who want the test sandbox and production sending from one vendor

Best known for its email-testing sandbox, which catches staging mail before it reaches a real inbox. The sending product grew out of that and keeps the same debugging bias.

Starts at
$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)
Free tier
4,000 emails a month, capped at 150 a day, 3 days of logs
Marketing
Bulk stream on Business and above; no journey builder
Data region
United States, with EU sending available
What it does well
  • The staging sandbox has no real equivalent at Resend.
  • Free tier is 4,000 emails/month against Resend's 3,000.
  • Bounce categorisation and per-domain debugging are unusually good.
What to watch for
  • Log retention is short on cheaper plans: 3 days free, 5 days on Basic.
  • Dedicated IP and bulk stream only arrive on Business, which starts at $85/mo.
  • Two products in one console takes a minute to get used to.
06Hosted service

MailerSend

Best for: Small teams who want the cheapest paid tier with a template builder

From the MailerLite family. Drag-and-drop templates non-engineers can edit, an inexpensive entry plan, and SMS bolted on for the same money.

Starts at
$5.60/mo for 5,000 emails (Hobby)
Free tier
500 emails a month, 1 domain, 1 template
Marketing
Templates and basic automation; MailerLite is the sibling product for campaigns
Data region
United States and European Union
What it does well
  • $5.60/mo for 5,000 emails is the cheapest real paid plan here.
  • Non-developers can edit templates without a pull request.
  • 100 SMS a month included on every plan.
What to watch for
  • Free plan is 500 emails/month — a sixth of Resend's free tier.
  • Hobby caps you at 1 domain, 3 templates and 1,000 API requests a day.
  • API log retention is 7 days even on Professional.
07Hosted service

Zoho ZeptoMail

Best for: Low, spiky transactional volume you'd rather not subscribe for

Pay-as-you-go credits instead of a monthly plan. One credit is 10,000 emails and lasts six months, which suits products that send in bursts.

Starts at
Credits, where 1 credit = 10,000 emails, valid 6 months
Free tier
First credit free — 10,000 emails, valid for one month
Marketing
None. ZeptoMail is transactional-only by policy; Zoho Campaigns is the other product.
Data region
Multiple, including EU data centres
What it does well
  • No subscription: buy credits, use them within six months.
  • 10,000 free emails to evaluate with is the largest trial on this list.
  • Backed by Zoho, with EU data-centre options.
What to watch for
  • Strictly transactional — marketing sending will get the account closed.
  • Being inside the Zoho console is a taste thing.
  • Credits expire; unused volume is money gone.
08Hosted service

AhaSend

Best for: EU teams who want a modern developer API with the data kept in Europe

The closest thing to a European developer email API: the same shape of REST endpoint and SMTP relay you already use, multi-region EU infrastructure, and a free tier you can actually ship on.

Starts at
Paid tiers start at 25,000 emails/mo (Pro); the rate isn't published as a flat figure
Free tier
1,000 emails a month, unlimited domains, no card required
Marketing
Transactional focus; no campaign builder
Data region
European Union, multi-region
What it does well
  • Data stays in Europe, not just the sending — the usual gap in 'EU-friendly' claims.
  • Unlimited sending domains even on the free plan.
  • USD and EUR billing, OIDC SSO on the top tier.
What to watch for
  • Smaller company; fewer public deliverability case studies.
  • No marketing or automation side at all.
  • Retention is 14 days on Pro, 30 on Max.
09Hosted service

Scaleway TEM

Best for: French and EU public-sector-adjacent teams who need sovereignty on paper

European cloud infrastructure rather than a developer-experience product. Cheap per email, GDPR-clean by construction, and deliberately narrow.

Starts at
€0.25 per 1,000 emails after the first 300 a month (Essential)
Free tier
300 emails a month, every month
Marketing
Prohibited by policy — TEM is transactional only
Data region
European Union (multi-region, France-headquartered)
What it does well
  • €0.25 per 1,000 undercuts every hosted SaaS here except SES.
  • European sovereignty story is the strongest on this list.
  • Scale plan at €80/mo includes 100,000 emails, a managed dedicated IP and a 99.9% SLA.
What to watch for
  • Marketing email is against the acceptable-use policy — this is not a newsletter tool.
  • No inbound email support.
  • Billing counts recipients, so one message with three CCs is four emails.
10Hosted service

Loops

Best for: SaaS teams who want lifecycle email without assembling it

Contact-priced like Email Bump, with transactional sending folded in at no extra charge. Opinionated and pleasant; less of an infrastructure product than Postmark or SES.

Starts at
Paid plans are priced by subscribed contacts via a slider, not published as a fixed table
Free tier
1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends a month, with a Loops footer on your email
Marketing
Included — that's the core of the product
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Transactional sending is included rather than billed as a second subscription.
  • Free plan is generous enough to run a small product on.
  • Genuinely quick to set up.
What to watch for
  • The free plan puts Loops branding in your footer and caps you at 10 emails/second.
  • Paid pricing lives behind a slider, which makes budgeting a guess until you sign up.
  • Thinner on raw email infrastructure — inbound, SMTP nuance, deep log retention.
11AGPL-3.0

useSend (formerly Unsend)

Best for: Self-hosters who want a modern dashboard on top of their own SES account

The best-known open-source answer to this search. It wraps Amazon SES with a dashboard, contacts, campaigns and webhooks, so you pay AWS rates and keep the UI.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sending
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: contacts, campaigns and transactional in one app
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • SES pricing with a real interface on top.
  • Transactional and marketing, REST API and SMTP, webhooks and inbound.
  • Docker images and a one-click Railway deploy.
What to watch for
  • Still described as beta by its own maintainers.
  • Bring your own AWS account, DNS, Postgres and Redis — and your own on-call.
  • AGPL-3.0 has real obligations if you build a product on top of it.
12AGPL-3.0

Plunk

Best for: Open-source teams who want campaigns and automation, not just an API

Transactional sending, newsletters and a workflow automation builder in one AGPL codebase, with a hosted pay-as-you-go option if you'd rather not run it.

Starts at
Self-host free, or $0.001 per email on Plunk Cloud
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: campaigns plus a trigger-and-condition automation builder
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • Automation flows out of the box, which most open-source options lack.
  • $0.001/email hosted pricing is genuinely pay-as-you-go — no monthly floor.
  • SMTP relay, so existing tooling keeps working.
What to watch for
  • Smaller ecosystem than the commercial APIs; fewer integrations.
  • AGPL-3.0 again — read it before embedding.
  • Self-hosting means owning deliverability, which is the hard part.
13MIT

FreeResend

Best for: Self-hosting behind Resend's API surface, whatever you're coming from

A deliberately narrow project: a self-hosted server that speaks Resend's API. Point the official Resend SDK at it with RESEND_BASE_URL and your sends go through your own SES account instead.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sending
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
None — transactional only
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • Drop-in: the official Resend Node SDK works against it unchanged.
  • MIT licensed, so no AGPL obligations.
  • Optional DigitalOcean integration creates the DNS records for you.
What to watch for
  • Small project — a few hundred stars and a short commit history. Read the code before you depend on it.
  • Needs Amazon SES, PostgreSQL and Node 18+ that you operate.
  • No campaigns, no contacts, no automation.
14AGPL-3.0

Notifuse

Best for: Self-hosters who want a visual builder and to keep their existing sending provider

Go and React, AGPL, and provider-agnostic: it drives SES, Mailgun, Postmark, Mailjet, SparkPost or plain SMTP rather than replacing them. Campaigns, A/B tests and segmentation on top.

Starts at
Self-host free, or Notifuse Cloud from $16/mo
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: visual builder, scheduling, A/B tests, segmentation
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • Bring your own delivery provider — switching costs you a config change, not a migration.
  • Liquid templating, REST API and webhooks for the developer side.
  • A hosted tier exists if self-hosting stops being fun.
What to watch for
  • You still need a sending provider underneath; this is the layer above it.
  • Younger and smaller than listmonk.
  • AGPL-3.0.
15AGPL-3.0

listmonk

Best for: Newsletters at volume, on hardware you already pay for

A single Go binary and a Postgres database that will happily push millions of newsletters through whatever SMTP you point it at. Mature, fast, and unapologetically list-first.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay your SMTP provider for the sending
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
That's the whole product: lists, subscribers, campaigns, templates
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • The most established project here — over 22,000 GitHub stars and years of production use.
  • One binary plus Postgres. No Redis, no queue broker, no Kubernetes.
  • Handles very large lists on modest hardware.
What to watch for
  • It is not a transactional email API product — that's not what it's for.
  • Bring your own SMTP and your own deliverability.
  • The admin UI is functional rather than beautiful.
16MIT

Postal

Best for: Running your own mail server on purpose

Not an SES wrapper — a complete MTA that sends and receives. If you want to own the IPs, the queues and the reputation, this is the mature option.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay for servers and IPs
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
None; it's infrastructure
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • MIT licensed, ~16,700 stars, years of production use.
  • Sends and receives — a full mail platform, not a relay.
  • Total control over IPs and routing.
What to watch for
  • You now own IP warm-up, blocklist removals and abuse handling. This is a job, not a weekend.
  • Needs a database, a message queue and correctly configured DNS.
  • Nobody to call at 3am when Gmail starts deferring you.
FAQ

Mailgun alternatives, asked and answered

What is the best Mailgun alternative?

For price, Amazon SES at $0.16 per 1,000 — a fraction of Mailgun's rate, with none of the product around it. For developer experience, Resend. For deliverability and long retention, Postmark, which goes to 365 days against Mailgun's 30.

If you're on Mailgun for the EU region, AhaSend and Scaleway TEM are the European options that keep the data in Europe rather than only the sending.

Why is Mailgun's log retention so short?

It's a plan feature rather than a technical limit: 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 on Foundation, 30 on Scale. Longer retention is one of the things the higher tiers sell.

If debugging matters to you, Postmark's 45-day default and 365-day option is the strongest in the category, and here retention isn't tiered by plan at all.

Does Mailgun have an EU region?

Yes — you can send through the US or the EU from a single account, which is one of the main reasons European teams choose it over Resend or Postmark.

Worth being clear that we don't: Email Bump sends from Amazon SES in us-east-1. If the EU region is why you're on Mailgun, staying is reasonable, and AhaSend and Scaleway TEM are the other European options here.

Is Mailgun cheaper than Amazon SES?

No, and it isn't close — SES is $0.16 per 1,000 against $1.80 on Mailgun Basic. What Mailgun sells is everything around the sending: the dashboard, the logs, the validation, the support and a plan you can buy with a card.

The question is whether that's worth roughly eleven times the per-email rate, and for teams without an engineer to spare it usually is.

Try the one we make

No per-1,000 rate, and logs that don't expire in a day

Contacts are what's metered, so sending is uncapped under fair use — and retention isn't a plan feature. Marketing campaigns and the transactional API share one bill. 5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails free.

Start free Read the API docs

Keep reading

Email Bump vs MailgunThe head-to-head, including where Mailgun is the better buy.Every comparisonAll the platforms we've priced and compared, in one index.Email Bump pricingWhat contact-based pricing costs at every list size.