Mailgun Pricing 2026: Mailgun Cost Per Month, Per Email, and Per Plan

Mailgun Send costs $15 a month for 10,000 emails on Basic, $35 for 50,000 on Foundation, and $90 for 100,000 on Scale, with Enterprise quoted by sales. There is a free tier capped at 100 emails a day. Every figure here was read off the live pricing page at mailgun.com on August 17, 2026, with the currency switcher on USD, so these are the US prices rather than a number copied from a comparison post.

The sticker price is the easy part. What decides your actual Mailgun bill is the overage rate on your plan and where the upgrade crossover sits, and Mailgun publishes both, which not every sending platform does. Below is the whole ladder, the cost per 1,000 emails on each plan, and the two volumes at which staying put stops being cheaper than upgrading.

Mailgun pricing plans in full

Foundation includes 5,000 email validations. Scale includes 5,000 validations and one dedicated IP address, which is the feature most people are actually buying when they move up. Extra validations are sold separately, from $1.20 per 100 on Basic and Foundation, dropping to $0.80 per 100 on Scale. Enterprise adds a Rapid Fire Burst Sending SLA on top.

The plan prices climb as you move the volume slider. Mailgun's own embedded price data shows Foundation moving from $35 to $75 at higher volume steps, and Scale climbing through $215, $400, $550 and $700 to $1,250 at its top step. Basic stays at $15 across the whole slider, which tells you Basic is a fixed small plan rather than a scaling one.

How much does Mailgun cost per email?

Between $0.70 and $1.50 per 1,000 emails on the included allowance, depending on plan. Divide each plan price by the volume it covers and the ranking is not the one you would guess:

Foundation is the cheapest email Mailgun sells. Scale costs 29 percent more per email than Foundation, because you are paying for the dedicated IP and the cheaper validations rather than for capacity. If you do not need a dedicated IP, the honest advice is to stay on Foundation and pay the overage rather than upgrade on principle.

When does it stop being cheaper to pay the overage?

This is the calculation almost nobody runs, and it is where the money is. Mailgun bills overage per 1,000 emails, so you can work out the exact volume at which your current plan plus overage costs more than the next plan up.

Basic to Foundation. Basic is $15 for 10,000 emails with overage from $1.80 per 1,000. Sending 30,000 emails costs $15 plus 20,000 at $1.80 per 1,000, which is $51, against $35 flat on Foundation. The break-even is at roughly 21,100 emails a month. Under that, Basic plus overage wins. Over it, move to Foundation.

Foundation to Scale. Foundation is $35 for 50,000 with overage from $1.30 per 1,000. It stays cheaper than Scale's $90 until about 92,300 emails a month. So the natural moment to take Scale is not when you cross 50,000, it is when you approach 90,000, or when you decide you need the dedicated IP.

Both of those crossovers assume the "from" overage rates hold at your volume. Mailgun words them as "from $1.80" and "from $1.30", which implies the rate can move, so confirm your rate in the console before you plan a year around it.

Is Mailgun cheaper than SendGrid?

Only at the very bottom and the very top of the range. Here are the two platforms at matched volumes, using SendGrid's live plan calculator read on the same day:

Mailgun wins under about 15,000 emails a month, because its smallest paid plan starts at 10,000 emails while SendGrid's smallest paid step buys a 50,000 allowance whether you use it or not. From 50,000 to 100,000 emails SendGrid is dramatically cheaper, roughly half to a third of the Mailgun price, because Essentials covers 100,000 emails for $34.95. Add a dedicated IP to the comparison and the gap closes to five cents, since Mailgun bundles one into Scale and SendGrid puts it behind Pro. The full band-by-band breakdown is on our SendGrid pricing page.

One structural difference matters more than the prices. Mailgun prints its overage rate on the plan card. SendGrid says only that taxes and overages may apply. If you have volume that spikes, the platform that publishes the spike price is easier to budget.

Is Mailgun free?

There is a free tier, capped at 100 emails a day, which is a developer sandbox rather than a plan you run a business on. It is enough to wire up an integration and watch the logs. The moment you have real users receiving real mail you are on Basic at $15 or above. Foundation and Scale both advertise a free first month, which is a genuine discount worth taking if you are testing at real volume, but it is a trial rather than an ongoing price.

What most people are actually buying

Mailgun's customers are largely developers wiring transactional mail into an application: password resets, receipts, order confirmations, dunning notices, alerting. The pricing is shaped for exactly that, which is why it is metered on emails sent rather than on contacts stored. If the mail you care about is finance-driven rather than product-driven, the sending bill is usually the small problem: a system that chases unpaid invoices on its own schedule moves the number that matters more than shaving $20 off an SMTP plan ever will.

Can you use Mailgun for cold email?

You can technically connect it, but it is the wrong tool and the pricing quietly tells you so. Mailgun is built for consented, application-generated mail travelling through shared or dedicated pools that Mailgun manages. Cold outreach is the opposite shape: small volume, no prior consent, and the entire point is that the message arrives from a mailbox on your own domain that the recipient can reply to.

The volume comparison makes it obvious. A sensible outbound cadence is about 30 emails per mailbox per day, near enough 660 a month. A team sending 5,000 cold emails a month is running roughly eight mailboxes across three sending domains, and 5,000 emails is half of Mailgun's smallest paid allowance. You would be paying for a sending platform to do almost nothing, while the reputation you build sits on infrastructure you do not control. We went through the alternatives properly in our guide to the best SMTP provider for cold email, and the cold email infrastructure page covers how domains, mailboxes and warm-up fit together as one system.

If you are choosing between outreach platforms rather than sending platforms, the cold email software pricing comparison is the page you want instead.

What is the difference between Mailgun Basic and Foundation?

Volume, overage rate, and validations. Basic gives you 10,000 emails for $15 with overage from $1.80 per 1,000 and no included validations. Foundation gives you 50,000 emails for $35 with overage from $1.30 per 1,000 and 5,000 email validations bundled in. Neither includes a dedicated IP. That arrives on Scale at $90, alongside a cheaper validation rate of $0.80 per 100.

The short version

Mailgun is priced sensibly for transactional sending, and its cheapest email is on Foundation at $0.70 per 1,000. Stay on Basic until about 21,100 emails a month, stay on Foundation until about 92,300, and treat Scale as a purchase you make for the dedicated IP rather than for the volume. Compare it against SendGrid at your real number rather than at the headline price, because the winner flips twice across the range. And if the job is outbound sales email rather than application mail, neither platform is the answer.

Re-verified September 2026: dedicated IPs, validation tiers and the Foundation 100K rung

Mailgun's ladder was re-read from its own pricing page on 1 September 2026 with USD selected, and three details that most write ups miss came out of it.

Foundation has two rungs, not one. Foundation is $35 for 50,000 emails and $75 for 100,000. Almost every comparison quotes only the $35 figure, which makes Foundation look far cheaper than it behaves at the volume most people actually buy it for.

Extra dedicated IPs are $59 per IP per month. One dedicated IP is included from Foundation 100K and on Scale, and Mailgun describes dedicated IP access as starting at 50,000 with inclusion at 100,000 and above. Below that volume a dedicated IP will hurt delivery rather than help it, because an IP with irregular traffic has no reputation for mailbox providers to read.

Email validation is tiered per 100 addresses, and the tiers apply marginally.

Scale includes 5,000 validations, which at the first tier rate is $60 of value bundled into the $90 plan. That is the strongest argument for Scale over Foundation 100K at $75, and it almost never appears in a comparison.

One last thing, in Mailgun's own words from its pricing FAQ: "There is no send button in Mailgun." It is infrastructure, not an application. If somebody on your team expected to log in and press send, this is the wrong product and the disappointment will arrive after the contract does.

For how these numbers stack against the obvious rival, see SendGrid vs Mailgun pricing at every volume, where the two curves cross four times. For the wider field, SendGrid alternatives and competitors prices nine vendors on the same basis.