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Comment by veeralpatel979 | Hacker News Reader

10k emails per month is generous. Maybe too generous. Selfishly I wish they didn't increase the price, but as a aspiring SaaS founder, it's totally fair that they did. They do provide value.

But 625 emails per month amounts to around 20 emails per day. If you have 5 customers, then you can send them 4 emails per day. So not much.

I wish they found a middle ground here.

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As a hypothetical customer please don’t send me 4 emails a day. Or week for that matter.

Mailgun is transactional mail though. Not marketing mail. Mail that you want to receive like password resets, email confirmations, notifications, etc

I don't know about you, but I usually don't want to receive notification emails. Did you explicitly ask for it? Good. Is this some stupid notification that I won't care for and was enabled by default? Congratulations on getting flagged.

> Did you explicitly ask for it? Good

That's what 'transactional' means... it's supposed to be used for the end or beginning of a transaction (reset password, receipt for a purchase, things like that...)

No, that is not what transactional mail means, you're wrong.

Things like friend requests are also transactional email by definition. So are those "you left your cart behind, want to complete the purchase?". That doesn't mean that you asked to receive it.

Instead of being pedantic about it lets give it another name then. Whatever we call this new category of email that does not include password resets and does include friend requests and abandonment emails - don't send them 4x per day.

Come on, sometimes it's better to be understood than to be right. Fuck the definition.

> But 625 emails per month amounts to around 20 emails per day. If you have 5 customers, then you can send them 4 emails per day. So not much.

That's if you're sending email every day of the week.

If it's just Mon-Fr then it's 30 emails per day.

If you have 5 customers ... then you can hopefully afford USD$0.80 for 1000 emails / month.

I send between 500 and 1000 per month through mailgun. On high-usage months, I will pay around $1.

Even if I sent 5000 messages one month, I'd pay around $4.

This is not even close to a significant cost.

Who cares though? If you have customers the cost to send an email is still almost zero.

Sure the marginal cost of sending another email might be zero. But typically you price based on what people are willing to pay -- not based on costs.

I may have confused you. I mean who cares if you have to pay for mail gun, it’s basically free.

I thought you were referring to Mailgun.

I thought you were saying that since Mailgun has customers, and has built their email infrastructure already, the cost of providing a free service to people who aren't using the tool much is zero.

Thanks for clarifying.

Yeah I see how it sounded that way. Right the reverse is true, they are charging so little that if you have a customer it’s still almost free.

What service sends 4 e-mails to your inbox everyday?

Heroku, Sentry, Jira, GitHub, any service that's notifying me of events via email regardless of company size.

I have some free v1agra for you to buy from n1g3rian princ3.

It's seems to be working though, everyone knows about the Nigerian Prince. He's really good at marketing.

Interesting thing about that. One might ask why any scammer still uses Nigerian prince tactics since it is so we'll know and so obviously a scam.

The reason is that they are selecting for the most clueless marks. If you don't get a bunch of red flags from an email like that, then you are likely going to be an easy mark.

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