Mailgun alternatives (2026): free tiers & pricing compared

What do you optimize for?

Pick the priority that matters most for your project and we'll point you to the provider that wins on it.

Top Mailgun alternatives, side by side

Free tier, entry price, dedicated-IP cost and deliverability — pulled from each vendor's own pricing page. Sort any column; star a provider to watch it.

Mailgun: current pricing

What you actually pay on Mailgun today, for context. Source: https://www.mailgun.com/pricing/.

Where you should land

Mailgun remains a capable, developer-oriented sender with flexible routing and inbound processing, and its 100 emails/day free tier is enough for early testing. The reason teams put it up for comparison in 2026 is cost creep: paid plans now start at $15/mo for 10,000 emails on Basic and climb to $90/mo for 100,000 on Scale, and the free tier keeps only one day of logs, which is thin for debugging delivery issues.

For a JavaScript or Next.js codebase, Resend is the most comfortable switch. You keep a free tier (3,000/mo versus Mailgun's ~3,000/mo by day cap) but gain a type-safe SDK and React Email templates, so the migration is mostly swapping the send call. If your priority is inbox placement for receipts and account emails, Postmark's transactional stream and deliverability reputation justify its smaller free allowance.

At higher volume, Amazon SES undercuts Mailgun substantially at $0.10 per 1,000 emails, in exchange for AWS setup overhead and self-managed bounce handling. If you would rather not pay at all for a while, Brevo's 300 emails/day (~9,000/mo) is the most generous no-expiry free tier in this set, and Mailtrap's 4,000/mo free tier pairs sending with built-in testing — useful while you validate a migration before cutting over production traffic.

Swap Mailgun in one Route Handler

Most migrations are a one-call change. Here's the Next.js Route Handler for each top alternative.

import { Resend } from "resend";

const resend = new Resend(process.env.RESEND_API_KEY!);

export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const { to, subject, html } = await req.json();
  const { data, error } = await resend.emails.send({
    from: "noreply@yourdomain.com",
    to,
    subject,
    html, // was: sgMail.send({ to, from, subject, html })
  });
  if (error) return Response.json({ error }, { status: 500 });
  return Response.json({ id: data?.id });
}

The free tier you're reading will change

It already has. StackPulse records every pricing move so you're never surprised — here's what changed in this category recently.

Questions, answered