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Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

Co-founder of Mailgun here. One of the triggers behind this kind of analytics came from the excellent blog post by Paul Stamatiou (http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-em...) which highlighted the importance of detailed analytics for all types of emails you do, not just "weekly newsletters".

Additionally, we discovered that most of our users also use traditional email marketing companies, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone.

This new product we've launched basically allows you, the developer, to become your own Mailchimp over the weekend at a fraction of the cost. And slice/dice your email traffic with arbitrary granularity, down to individual message level.

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This looks great - I'm sold.

Question: what's the easiest way to send drip content via Mailgun? I'm putting together a few apps that rely on email, and I couldn't find drip email information in your docs.

Are there built-in features to make drip mails easy, or do I need to code a message sequence + cron job myself?

We don't get involved with your application logic for when to send emails. We just make it very easy to send and track them programmatically.

Edit: For example: you can create and destroy mailing lists programmatically, send emails without worrying about MIME, set a specific delivery time for your emails based on when users are most likely to click on them, access analytics through API, etc.

Corey from Custora here (http://www.custora.com) - if you're interested, we provide online retailers with an interface to manage lifecycle/drip messaging. We integrate with Mailgun, as well - and are very psyched for the new API features!

I often get asked by clients I get to use mailgun if you have any interfaces like YMLP does for managing lists / generating programmatic email templates. I know we can implement this on our end but do you have any plans to build something like this?

We have a mailing lists API[1] and working on templates now. Send us an email if you want to be in the templates beta program.

[1] http://documentation.mailgun.net/api-mailinglists.html

old-gregg, I find your pricing page a little confusing. e.g. does Express ($59) include 118K emails a month in the price and then $.5/1k extra for overage or is the $59 just a base platform cost and then even the initial 1k is charged $.5?

I find the sendgrid "credits" term doesn't have that ambiguity. e.g http://sendgrid.com/pricing.html

The $59 monthly minimum includes the 118k emails in your example.

You are charged the per message rate, subject to the monthly minimum amount.

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