Mailgun Pricing Explained: Plans, Costs, and Overages (2026)

Mailgun’s paid tiers start at $15/month for 10,000 emails and top out at $1,250/month for 2,500,000 emails on the Scale plan, with Foundation ($35 or $75/month) sitting in between and custom Enterprise pricing above that. Overage beyond your included volume bills separately per 1,000 emails, at a rate that drops the more you commit to. Dedicated IPs, email validation, and Mailgun Optimize (a separate deliverability-monitoring product under the Sinch Mailgun family) are all priced independently of the base plan. All figures below come directly from Mailgun’s pricing pages as of July 2026; treat the tier structure as more durable than the exact dollar amounts, since vendors change prices without much notice.

Mailgun’s Four Send Plans: Free, Basic, Foundation, and Scale

Plan	Monthly Price	Included Volume	Log Retention	Support
Free	$0/mo	100 emails/day	1 day	Ticket only
Basic	$15/mo	10,000 emails/mo	1 day	Ticket only
Foundation	$35/mo or $75/mo	50,000 or 100,000 emails/mo	5 days	Ticket only
Scale	$90/mo to $1,250/mo	100,000 to 2,500,000 emails/mo	30 days	Live phone & chat
Enterprise	Custom (request a quote)	Custom	Custom	Dedicated account manager

Source: Mailgun’s official pricing page, verified July 2026.

Two details are easy to miss. First, Foundation isn’t a single price: it’s $35/month for 50,000 emails included, or $75/month for 100,000 emails included, with the same 5-day log retention either way. Second, Scale scales in six committed-volume steps rather than one flat number: $90/mo (100,000), $215/mo (250,000), $400/mo (500,000), $550/mo (750,000), $700/mo (1,000,000), and $1,250/mo (2,500,000). Enterprise, above Scale, bundles in Deliverability Services and a “Rapid Fire Burst Sending” SLA, quoted individually through Mailgun’s sales team rather than published.

What Overage Actually Costs

Every paid plan bills overage per 1,000 emails once you exceed the included volume, and the rate drops as you move up:

Plan / Tier	Overage Rate (per 1,000 emails)
Basic	$1.80
Foundation, 50,000 tier	$1.30
Foundation, 100,000 tier	$1.10
Scale, 100,000 tier	$1.10
Scale, 2,500,000 tier	$0.40

The Free plan has no overage option at all: it’s a hard 100-emails-per-day cap, and sending simply stops once you hit it.

Here’s where that math gets counterintuitive. Take a SaaS app sending 75,000 emails/month:

• Foundation’s 50,000 SKU + overage: $35 base + 25,000 overage emails × $1.30/1,000 = $35 + $32.50 = $67.50/month, with 5-day logs.
• Foundation’s 100,000 SKU: $75/month flat, no overage, same 5-day logs.
• Scale’s 100,000 tier: $90/month flat, no overage, but 30-day logs, live phone/chat support, 5,000 included validations, and dedicated IP pool eligibility.

At this volume, paying overage on the cheaper Foundation SKU is $7.50/month less than pre-paying for the 100,000-email SKU, and $22.50 less than Scale. The lesson: don’t upgrade for headroom alone. Upgrade to Scale only when you actually need the longer log retention, live support, or dedicated IP access that come bundled with it, not just to avoid an overage line item.

Add-Ons: Dedicated IPs, Email Validation, and Log Retention

Dedicated IPs are included starting on the Scale plan (“Dedicated IP pools” is a Scale-only feature). On any plan, additional IPs cost $59 per IP per month, added from the control panel or through support. There’s no universal volume threshold at which a dedicated IP becomes worthwhile; deliverability specialists at Validity note internal discussions “ranging from 100,000 messages per month to 1M” as reasonable starting points, and Mailgun’s own dedicated IP eligibility begins right at the low end of that range, 100,000 emails/month on Scale.

Email validation is billed separately on every plan except Scale. Free, Basic, and Foundation charge from the first validation, starting at $1.20 per 100, dropping to $0.80, $0.50, $0.35, and $0.25 per 100 at higher volume brackets. Scale includes 5,000 validations a month before the same declining schedule kicks in, starting at $0.80 per 100 for anything beyond that.

Log retention scales by plan, not by an add-on you can buy separately: 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 days on Foundation, 30 days on Scale. That matters beyond debugging convenience. Google requires bulk senders, those sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses, to authenticate mail and keep spam rates below its published thresholds. A team auditing bounce or complaint history to stay under that threshold has a much shorter lookback window on Basic than on Scale.

Mailgun Optimize Is a Separate Product With Its Own Price List

Mailgun has been part of Sinch since the company’s 2021 acquisition of Pathwire, Mailgun’s former parent, alongside sibling brands Mailjet and Email on Acid. Under that Sinch Mailgun family, “Mailgun” (the API and plans covered above) and “Mailgun Optimize” are two separate products with two separate price lists.

Optimize is a deliverability-monitoring product, not a sending platform. Per Mailgun’s Optimize pricing page, it runs two published tiers, Pilot at $49/month and Starter at $99/month, both with a first month free, plus a custom-priced Contract tier. Pilot includes 2,500 email validations and 25 inbox placement tests a month; Starter includes 5,000 validations, 50 inbox placement tests, spam trap monitoring on one domain, blocklist monitoring, and Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS integrations. Mailgun’s own FAQ is explicit that “Mailgun can be used independently as your email service provider,” and separately, “Mailgun Optimize and Deliverability Services can be used independently and with other email service providers.” You can buy Optimize without touching Mailgun Send, or run both together, and you’re billed for each independently.

How Mailgun’s Total Cost Stacks Up Against Alternatives

Mailgun’s per-email cost sits in the middle of the transactional email market: cheaper than Postmark’s per-message pricing at low volume, but without a bundled templating and automation layer. If pricing increases since the Sinch acquisition are your main concern, Best Mailgun Alternatives for Developers breaks down which competitors solve for cost, deliverability, or developer experience specifically. For a direct head-to-head against the closest volume-based competitor, SendGrid vs Mailgun compares plan structures and add-on pricing side by side. A wider field, including flat-rate and contact-based pricing models, is covered in Best Transactional Email Services Compared. If you’re still deciding how to wire up sending in the first place, Email API: How to Send Email Programmatically covers the integration side of that decision.

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