The cheaper alternative to Mailgun

What you pay

Both platforms price by monthly volume. The table takes seven volumes. Each row shows the cheapest plan on each side, in your region’s currency.

Dedicated IPs are included from the Elite plan. Elite carries one at 100,000 emails a month, and Volume carries six at 750,000. Each new one warms on a six-stage ladder, from 50 messages a day to 10,000. Mailgun includes one from its Foundation plan at that same volume, and sells further IPs at $59 a month each.

Feature by feature

The rows below hold what each platform documents today. A docs link opens the mailkube page behind that row.

Log retention is where the two part company. Your plan keeps 7 days on Free and 90 days on Volume, so a support question from last month still has an answer. Mailgun keeps one day on its two cheapest plans, five days on Foundation and 30 days on Scale.

Where your data lives

Customer data is stored in the European Union. Our infrastructure runs in European data centres, in the French OVHcloud group.

Mailgun sells a European region as well, and the messages you send through it stay there. mailkube runs one region, and every account is in it.

The detail is in the data processing agreement.

Two transports, headers included

POST to the REST API, or point the SMTP client you already run at smtp.mailkube.com. Everything the API takes as a JSON field, SMTP takes as a header. Those headers are stripped before the message reaches the recipient.

• X-Mailkube-Tags carries the same tag list as the REST tags field
• X-Mailkube-Topic attributes the send to a topic, so recipients who opted out are filtered
• X-Mailkube-Template-Id and X-Mailkube-Template-Version render a saved template server-side

An SMTP send is the same message as an API send. It lands in the same logs, counts against the same quota and fires the same webhook events. The SMTP reference(opens in a new tab) lists every header, reply code and rate limit.

Mailgun relays SMTP on smtp.mailgun.org and documents headers of its own for a tag, a template and a template version. A message there carries up to 3 tags, against 20 here, and its documentation describes no per-topic opt-out on a send.

Your stack, already covered

Official SDKs cover Node, Python, Go, Java, PHP and Ruby, the same six languages Mailgun’s own clients cover.

Django, Laravel, Rails and Spring Boot each get a package of their own. It plugs into the framework’s own mail layer. Every client verifies your webhook signatures for you.

The CLI is one binary. It sends over either transport and manages scheduled sends. While you develop, it runs a local webhook receiver. It ships a skill file, so a coding assistant reads the real command surface. Start from the SDK documentation(opens in a new tab) or the CLI guide(opens in a new tab) .

Migrating from Mailgun

Install the client for your language, then swap the constructor and the key. The send call keeps its shape, and the domain argument drops out of it.

import FormData from "form-data";
import Mailgun from "mailgun.js";

const mailgun = new Mailgun(FormData);
const mg = mailgun.client({
  username: "api",
  key: process.env.MAILGUN_API_KEY,
});

const message = await mg.messages.create("example.com", {
  from: "Acme <hello@example.com>",
  to: ["customer@example.com"],
  subject: "Hello world",
  html: "<p>It works!</p>",
});

import { Mailkube } from "@mailkube/mailkube-node";

const client = new Mailkube({ apiKey: process.env.MAILKUBE_API_KEY });

const email = await client.emails.send({
  from: "Acme <hello@example.com>",
  to: "customer@example.com",
  subject: "Hello world",
  html: "<p>It works!</p>",
});

Migration is frictionless over SMTP as well. Change the host, the port and the credential in your mailer, and keep everything else as it is. The messages you already send go out unchanged, and tags, topics and templates ride along as headers when you want them. Nothing has to move on a set day: run both platforms side by side and switch one service at a time. The quickstart(opens in a new tab) covers the REST path and the SMTP guide(opens in a new tab) covers the relay.

When Mailgun is the better fit

Mailgun sells address validation beside the relay, and an inbox-placement product on top of it. mailkube sends your application’s mail and tells you what happened to it.

Its plans also carry mailing lists and send-time optimisation per message. Those answer a different job than this platform does.

The pricing page has every plan in full. The REST API and SMTP relay pages go deeper on the two transports.