Method: Official documentation and pricing checked September 28, 2026. No benchmarks were run. Recommendations reflect documented features and billing, not personal testing. Links in this article are ordinary source/vendor links.
Amazon SES has lower published sending charges at the volumes below; Mailgun packages sending with plan-specific features and retention. Compare the actual plan and operating requirements. Neither provider’s price establishes inbox placement or engineering time.
Current Mailgun prices
Mailgun’s pricing page lists:
| Plan | Monthly price | Included sending | Log retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 emails/day | 1 day |
| Basic | $15 | 10,000 emails/month | 1 day |
| Foundation | $35 after its one-month trial | 50,000 emails/month | 5 days |
| Scale | $90 after its one-month trial | 100,000 emails/month | 30 days |
The free offer includes one custom sending domain, API/SMTP sending, tracking and webhooks. Basic overage starts at $1.80 per 1,000 emails; Foundation at $1.30; Scale at $1.10. Validation has separate allowances or charges. Check the selected plan rather than assuming every deliverability feature is included at the entry price.
Amazon SES: distinguish the pricing options
AWS’s current SES pricing lists Essentials at $0.16 per 1,000 emails for the first 10 million monthly emails. New accounts and qualifying inactive account/region combinations start on Essentials beginning July 21, 2026. AWS says customers can switch to a-la-carte pricing.
A-la-carte outbound sending remains $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Attachment data is an additional $0.12/GB. Optional features and other AWS resources can add charges. The $0.10 rate should not be presented as the automatic total for every new account.
Illustrative monthly sending costs
| Volume | Mailgun plan allowance | SES Essentials sending | SES a-la-carte sending |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | Basic: $15 | $1.60 | $1 |
| 50,000 | Foundation: $35 | $8 | $5 |
| 100,000 | Scale: $90 | $16 | $10 |
These are arithmetic examples using the published rates, before taxes, data charges, optional features and credits. They are not observed bills or feature-equivalent bundles. Price the reporting, retention and support arrangement you actually need.
Free sending and production access are different
Mailgun’s daily free allowance cannot be treated as a freely movable monthly pool. Check expected daily peaks as well as total monthly traffic.
SES starts new accounts in a region-specific sandbox. Its production-access documentation limits sandbox sending to verified recipients or the mailbox simulator, with 200 messages per 24 hours and one message per second. Those are restrictions, not a free-tier allowance.
AWS provides an initial response to a production-access request within 24 hours, but approval can take longer. After approval, sender identities still require verification. Do not promise immediate production access or a universal post-approval sending quota.
SES does support tracking
The SES event-publishing documentation includes delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click events. Configuration sets control what is published and where it goes. Describing SES as lacking open/click tracking is inaccurate.
Mailgun lists tracking, analytics and webhooks in its plans. Compare how each integrates with your application and how long the selected plan retains the evidence needed for investigations. No setup-time or support-quality ranking is claimed here.
Recommendation
Evaluate SES when its account setup and event-publishing workflow fit your application and the sending economics matter. Evaluate Mailgun when its packaged workflow and retention options match your requirements. Before switching, validate sender authentication, bounce handling and the messages your application actually sends. The decision should follow those requirements rather than an unsupported claim that either provider always reaches the inbox.
Sources, checked September 28, 2026: Mailgun pricing, Amazon SES pricing, SES sandbox and production access, SES event publishing.