Sinch to acquire Mailgun | Hacker News Reader

Sinch to acquire Mailgun

mailgun.com

151 pointslox60 comments

I hope their customer support continues to be good.

I had a hit on HN with a side-project last year [0]. It delivers public domain books in chapters to your email. So I was needing to send over 1,000 emails a day from day one basically.

I initially used SendGrid for my project, but SendGrid's free trial had a limit of 100 emails a day. Well, I just needed to upgrade, right? Wrong. Sendgrid had a rule where it was impossible to upgrade from the free trial until the trial period was over. So 90% of my emails were not being delivered because I wasn't in a paid plan and I couldn't upgrade to a paid plan.

The worst part is that it wasn't very straightforward to understand I was in that catch 22. It took me about 4 or 5 days of sending their customer support messages and them taking too long to reply and not being very clear in their replies to understand the whole issue. And even proving that my traffic was legit (the HN post was enough evidence that I was not sending spam I think) was not enough for them to allow me to upgrade.

So I immediately changed to MailGun. They had similar worries about a new account with significant email traffic, but I sent an email to customer support right after signing up, they replied in an hour or so already allowing me to upgrade. Never had an issue with MailGun and I am very happy with their tech and service.

I am now creating a business on top of email delivery and staying with them. Hope this acquisition doesn't change much in that front.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752

> I initially used SendGrid for my project, but SendGrid's free trial had a limit of 100 emails a day. Well, I just needed to upgrade, right? Wrong. Sendgrid had a rule where it was impossible to upgrade from the free trial until the trial period was over. So 90% of my emails were not being delivered because I wasn't in a paid plan and I couldn't upgrade to a paid plan.

I feel like there's a business lesson in there somewhere, but can't quite put my finger on it.

“Never get in the way of someone wanting to give you money”

SendGrid was still right imo, and I hate shitty customer service. What they could've done better is explain that $$$ for sending @1000 emails/day isn't worth sidestepping procedures which are wholly designed to stop spammers that can have %% impact on bottom line by degrading email IP reputations.

Sorry for the winded explanation. I think the gist is there.

Sendgrid took the time to go back and forth and ended up doing nothing. Why not spend that time vetting the legitimacy of the emails?

That's my biggest issue.

One day at the front page of HN of a single page where the only thing you can do is sign up to receive emails is enough to justify 1,000 emails a day IMO. Without knowing anything else, I think the customer support person that took the time to reply me a few times to explain the issue, could have made the decision that likelihood of my service being spam is ~0%.

edit: that's exactly what they did at Mailgun btw. The first reply came with a "I'll need to check with other team". Hours later, without any followup from me, came the second reply with "Thanks for providing the information. We have removed the limitations to your account." (copied pasted). Excellent execution in both getting the account and keeping the risk of delivering spam through their service very low. Compare this to Sendgrid, with three or four cryptic replies, and a lost account.

Check Amplitude's CEO HN thread about what drove the success of the company to the IPO. Among other things, making it easy/free for small companies to use Amplitude, even though their sole business model was to aim at big corporate accounts. For a few small companies that would turn into big corporate accounts or that were acquired by big corporations that would then adopt Amplitude and become big corporate accounts.

I think it would make strategic sense for SendGrid to greenlight my account. It was not a sensible, necessary anti-spam policy IMO, it was just poor execution.

> making it easy/free for small companies to use Amplitude, even though their sole business model was to aim at big corporate accounts. For a few small companies that would turn into big corporate accounts or that were acquired by big corporations that would then adopt Amplitude and become big corporate accounts

I'm glad you shared that, because I've been all but completely against free trials lately. The advice is model dependent, but you've definitely made me think twice about considering free/low-cost options when I would've otherwise completely discounted the ideas due to the usual headaches(spam, abuse, etc).

It never ceases to be amazing how often I have to bite my tongue and not say that during meetings.

Someone wants to give us money, for our product, at a price that will make us a profit. Let them.

Every once in a while that profit will come at a large opportunity cost - so you can't commit freely to every such offering... but yea if you find yourself frequently turning down opportunities like this then you need to examine why your business direction doesn't seem to match customer needs.

Ghost just won't let users upgrade from a complimentary plan right now and it's _maddening_ because I had to comp a bunch of people who would probably be happy to pay me if it wasn't a hassle, because of a billing error.

I wish more businesses knew this lesson :(

Have you tried https://sendwithses.com or https://sendy.co/ ?

I changed at the time to Mailgun and I am happy there, so not looking into other options for now.

But at the time I look at those and preferred a solution with less upfront configuration required and less things to manage in general. It was a side-project that required a very quick solution. Mailgun was perfect for this.

It's not the same as what Mailgun does. Mailgun lets you send emails programmatically. Sendy/Sendwithses lets you send campaigns from an interface (using your SES).

I am a customer of both Sinch (actually mblox and mobile 365) and mailgun. Let's see how things works in the day to day operations.

More financials details here [1]

Using yesterday’s closing Sinch share price of SEK 165.9, and USD/SEK exchange rate of 8.8, this corresponds to an enterprise value of approximately USD 1.9 billion, or SEK 16.6 billion.

In the twelve months ending December 31, 2021, Pathwire is expected to record revenues of USD 132 million, Gross Profit of USD 104 million, and Adjusted EBITDA of USD 55 million. This corresponds to a gross margin of 79 percent and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 42 percent. The business employs around 290 people and is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.

If my math is right, they are paying x34 EBITDA, x14 ARR, huge multipliers if you ask me.

Too much cash in the system I guess.

[1] https://investors.sinch.com/news-releases/news-release-detai...

I recently switched over to MailerSend for all of our transactional e-mail. It's drop-dead simple to setup a new domain, and you can manage multiple domains under one account. Their domain validation is rock solid and IP address pool is clean and not blacklisted. Logging and analytics could use some feature upgrades, but it's not bad. Support has been excellent. I have no connection to MailerSend other than being a relatively new customer.

https://www.mailersend.com/

Thanks for your kind words! I’m a lead developer over at MailerSend and every happy customer is a driving force to make our product better!

Minimum $25 per month is not a good deal for many customers like me. Sometimes clients send $9-15 per month emails from their sites, sometimes $50 worth (with mailgun). I don't want to pay a fixed price like $25 when I may only use 1/5 of it.

For now, you can use the free plan, and pay 1$ per 1000 emails.

I love that the pricing page is simple instead of having multiple paid tiers each with their own pricing scale for # of monthly emails. I'm currently doing 100k/month with Mailgun, and while saving money on sending isn't much of a priority at the moment, I'll definitely look into this more down the road. Maybe try it out for a side project in the mean time.

I'm sort of surprised I haven't noticed this before when researching email providers.

Thanks! You are more than welcome to test out our services, we do provide 12k emails/month for free. And yeah, we are quite new in the scene of transactional email providers, but growing fast so you should hear more and more about us in the future :)

Wow, I've been looking for a Mailgun replacement for a long time. I was using it to receive emails at @mydomain.com and forward them to my primary email. Then they started charging for inbound routes, and I couldn't justify the price for <200 emails a month. So I switched back to my registrar's free email forwarding, and had to give up API support.

MailerSend seems to be a great alternative.

CTO at MailerSend here. We are happy to be mentioned here and if you have any problems or suggestions let us know - we want to keep it dead simple but also for customers to have all the features that are needed.

What is it that keeps Mailgun being passed from company to company like a hot potato?

Feel like I've had "oh here we go, incredible journey that needs me to reconfigure everything" a few times now

e: in fairness to Mailgun the most recent one I was thinking of (Pathwire) was a branding thing not a purchase

I woild say different expectations from each acquisition, less profit and more overhead.

Trying to squeeze profits out of what should be a non profit (like Let's Encrypt, Quad 9, etc).

Yeah, the first thing that I thought when I opened the blog post and saw "Mailgun by Pathwire" was "wait, I thought this was Mailgun by Rackspace".

Apparently I'm way behind on the Mailgun ownership saga.

I’m afraid how much sensitive information transits through email services. Notably, all credentials to access accounts, and possible viruses. Maybe, after the buyer takes ownership, they realize the immense liability it is, and decide to get rid of it.

> all credentials to access accounts

What?

Proof of ownership of an email address is often used to prove ownership of an account on a third-party site.

Common examples are "forget password" workflows and Spotify/Slack's magic login link workflows.

If you own the transactional mail service through which all these flow, you are now responsible for the security of a large chunk of the Internet.

The same is true for services that offer "Login with Google" etc.

It's actually really bad that I can sign up with many services using a traditional email and password combo and the "Login with..." options work straight away. They really should be opt-in for security.

Well, it seems the actual deal is that Sinch is acquiring Pathwire. Mailgun is their biggest brand, but they also own Mailjet and Email on Acid.

If you're looking for no-fringe transactional email sender that are going down the bootstrapped indie route, I can recommend https://ohmysmtp.com

I have no connection to them except being a happy customer.

How many emails do you send with them? I send > 200k and interested to know what their pricing turns into in the 'Enterprise' plan.

Thanks for the link though, good to see other people in the space (currently using Mailgun)

Not that many. I'm on their lowest plan. Sorry that I can't be of further help.

Thanks for the recommendation! I’m the founder of OhMySMTP, happy to answer any questions here or over our support email.

Keep up the great work!

How much work is it, really, to keep IPs "clean" from Spam filters? Or is domain rank more important?

The main method is to stop spam being sent from your IPs in the fist place. We have a number of mechanisms:

- Automated outgoing spam filters (via rspamd) to prevent obvious spam emails

- Enforced DKIM validation on all accounts

- Automated / manual review of sudden outgoing email spikes

- Automated bounce response management

- Automatic block lists for any emails that hard bounce

- No free plan

- Manual review of new accounts

Additionally behaving as a legit sender helps, so things like greylisting, the right encryption support, rDNS records etc all need to be in place.

We also monitor the public block lists and take action if our IPs are mistakenly added to them

Woah, can you actually get a response from SpamHaus?

Are your servers in the EU? I'm currently using Postmark but looking for alternatives to avoid US data transfer.

Currently everything is UK based- but we have been asked for an EU version quite a few times now. It’s in the pipeline.

Just a heads up: If scripts from cdn.paddle.com fail to load your pricing page is currently very confusing, with no real indication that anything is going wrong: The "Solo" plan shows as $40 per month, while the "Scaling" plan starts at $10 per month. In other words, Solo looks 4 times as expensive for 10% of the emails. I spent some time trying to find other differences, but it's just wrong.

Maybe default to showing something like $-- instead, as a clear indicator that prices have not loaded.

Thanks! We’ll rework this so it can work without paddle.

Mailjet has been acquired as well: https://www.mailjet.com/blog/news/sinch-to-acquire-pathwire/

Sounds like Pathwire had previously acquired both Mailgun and Mailjet (and "Email on Acid", which I hadn't heard of until today), then Sinch acquired Pathwire. So lots of consolidation happening.

I'd be curious to know how much of the marketshare they own now. Other players I know of are SendGrid, MailChimp, and Mandrill.

Ive been using mailgun since before they restricted the free tier to forward emails from my personal domain to my gmail (and respond to them with SMTP creds via gmail).

Thankfully my wildcard routes have been grandfathered when the change happened but I feel that my days are numbered on their service. Since I send/receive <100 emails/month, $35 is far too much for my simple use case.

Can anyone recommend a pay as you go, or a cheaper mail routing service that I can use this way?

I have catch all emails for 2 of my domain and wildcard subdomains for them all go to one inbox using fastmail. I have it sync emails from my gmail to fastmail so that I can continue to get mail to my old address. It's just $5/month, I'm pretty happy with it.

I also am a happy paying Fastmail customer w/ a custom domain, but perhaps you could look into Cloudflare Email Routing[1] that was announced just a few days ago? It's in private beta.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28670125

I've moved to Zoho mail. It's $1/month for a single user, which seems to be well worth it. The catch is, it's not possible to _send_ from Zoho without creating additional users (which has a cost).

Pobox (pobox.com) is probably what you are look for. $20 or $35 a year.

(Its the same company that runs Fastmail)

I just created an account on mailgun the other day for a project I'm working on. In case they go downhill, what are the best alternatives?

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28705793

I remember talking to some folks from Sinch in 2014, i always laughed because I thought they were just Twilio copycats...well now they have acquired two companies I worked at. Impressive. I guess they're the ones laughing now!

Seems like they are following the Twilio playbook.

Yea. I wasn’t familiar with Sinch but it does sound like they are a Twilio competitor.

I haven't heard of them either, but this is apparently the third company they've acquired for more than a billion dollars this year. The others were Inteliquent for $1.1B in February and MessageMedia in June for $1.3B.

https://investors.sinch.com/acquisitions

I send everything from Mailgun to quarantine due to all of the spam and phishing. How do folks that run email services sleep at night?

I know someone in the "unsolicited" business, their answer is literally, "money". The money that could be made in the industry is insane. Last year, they did $50m.

That's funny, I always thought they were the authoritarian email choice, they technically don't even allow sending marketing.

Do they just not police their service well?

Mailgun has the worst customer service I have ever come across, hope this might help them get back on track.

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