Mailgun's Foundation plan is $35 per month for 50,000 emails (Mailgun, 2026). Amazon SES is $5 for the same volume at $0.10 per 1,000 emails (AWS, 2026). At 1 million emails per month, Mailgun's Scale plan is roughly $1,080 ($90 base plus $1.10 per 1,000 in overage) and SES is $100. SES is dramatically cheaper at every published tier; the gap widens with volume, not narrows. This post walks through the per-tier numbers, the developer experience tradeoffs, and when each is genuinely the right call.
Cost Math at Every Volume Tier
The headline ratio: at 50,000 emails per month, SES is $5 and Mailgun's Foundation plan is $35, a 7x premium for the Mailgun-managed stack (Mailgun, 2026; AWS, 2026). At a million emails, SES is $100 and Mailgun's Scale plan plus overage lands near $1,080, an 11x premium. The published Mailgun plans are Basic ($15 / 10k), Foundation ($35 / 50k), and Scale ($90 / 100k), with overages priced from $1.10 to $1.30 per 1,000 above each included volume.
| Monthly volume | Amazon SES | Mailgun | SES vs Mailgun ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 emails | $1.00 | $15 (Basic 10k) | 15x |
| 50,000 emails | $5.00 | $35 (Foundation 50k) | 7x |
| 100,000 emails | $10.00 | $90 (Scale 100k) | 9x |
| 500,000 emails | $50.00 | ~$530 (Scale + 400k overage @ $1.10/k) | ~10x |
| 1,000,000 emails | $100 | ~$1,080 (Scale + 900k overage) | ~11x |
| 5,000,000 emails | $500 | Enterprise quote (Scale + 4.9M overage ≈ $5,490 list) | ~11x |
SES is cheaper at every tier in the table, and the ratio grows with volume rather than shrinking. The $5 SES bill at 50,000 emails becomes $100 at a million; the equivalent Mailgun bills are $35 and roughly $1,080. The Mailgun premium pays for the API, the dashboard, and the managed deliverability layer - not for raw send capacity.
Developer Experience
Mailgun ships a single-vendor email API with SDKs for Python, Node, Ruby, Go, PHP, and .NET and a unified dashboard for per-message status, click tracking, and bounce detail (Mailgun, 2026). Signup to first sent email is typically under 30 minutes. Amazon SES is a general-purpose AWS service: the SDK is the AWS SDK, per-message detail requires SNS feedback wiring plus CloudWatch metrics, and production access approval pushes the first-send timeline to 1-3 hours (AWS, 2026).
For prototypes and small-to-medium volume where the $30-50/month price premium is not material, Mailgun's developer experience saves measurable engineering time. For high-volume production systems where the cost gap is hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, the SES engineering investment pays back quickly.
Deliverability Posture
Both providers run high-volume sending infrastructure with strong inbox-placement track records; the operational difference is who owns reputation management. SES enforces the published AWS thresholds (5% hard bounce, 0.1% complaint) directly against your account and pauses sending if you cross them (AWS, 2026). Mailgun moderates reputation inside its shared pool, offers dedicated IPs from the Scale plan up, and intervenes before AWS-style automatic enforcement would trigger (Mailgun, 2026).
For senders with disciplined list hygiene, both deliver well in absolute terms. The split is about operating model. SES gives you full transparency: the bounce and complaint metrics belong to your account, you see them in CloudWatch, and you fix the underlying problem yourself. Mailgun's shared-pool model absorbs more of the day-to-day reputation work but also gives you less visibility into the levers, which suits teams that want email to be someone else's problem.
Where Each One Wins
Cost at scale settles it: above 100,000 emails per month, SES is roughly $10 per 100k while Mailgun's Scale plan is $90 plus $1.10 per 1,000 in overage (Mailgun, 2026; AWS, 2026). Pick SES when that monthly delta funds engineering time you already have and you want the AWS surface area (IAM, CloudTrail, fine-grained quotas). Pick Mailgun when the team is small, total volume sits under 50,000 a month, and the dashboard plus inbound parsing earn back the premium.
Choose Amazon SES when you are already inside AWS, when you want predictable per-thousand pricing for the long term, when fine-grained IAM and CloudTrail audit logging matter, or when send volume is large enough that the absolute cost gap (hundreds to thousands of dollars per month) buys real engineering effort.
Choose Mailgun when developer experience matters more than cost, when monthly volume is under 50,000 and the absolute price gap is modest, when email validation or inbound parsing are part of the requirement, or when you would rather not manage SES configuration sets, SNS topics, and IAM policies yourself.
Using both is also valid: Mailgun for transactional email where reliability and developer experience matter, SES for high-volume marketing where the per-thousand math dominates. Splitting on use case lets each provider do what it is best at.
If you want SES economics without writing the AWS-side integration code, a hosted management layer like Mailblast handles configuration sets, suppression lists, and bounce processing on top of your own SES account. See the SES pricing reference for the underlying SES numbers, or our SES vs SendGrid comparison for a similar cost-vs-managed-service tradeoff.
FAQ
Is Mailgun cheaper than Amazon SES?
No. At 50,000 emails per month, Mailgun's Foundation plan is $35 while Amazon SES is $5 at $0.10 per 1,000 emails (Mailgun, 2026; AWS, 2026). At 1 million emails per month, Mailgun's Scale plan is $90 base plus roughly $990 in overage at $1.10 per 1,000, totalling about $1,080; SES is $100. Mailgun is meaningfully more expensive at every volume tier published on its pricing page.
What is Mailgun used for?
Mailgun is a transactional email API and SMTP relay, similar in positioning to SendGrid and Postmark. It's designed for application-driven email (signup confirmations, password resets, order receipts) more than for marketing campaigns. Mailgun also offers email validation, inbound parsing, and analytics, which SES doesn't include directly.
Which has better deliverability: Amazon SES or Mailgun?
Both have strong sending infrastructure. The difference is operational: SES gives you account-level reputation that you manage directly, while Mailgun manages reputation more actively on the shared pool and offers dedicated IPs at higher tiers. For a sender with good list hygiene either provider delivers well. For a sender who wants someone else managing deliverability, Mailgun's managed posture is closer.
When should I use Mailgun instead of Amazon SES?
Choose Mailgun when developer experience matters more than cost, when you want managed deliverability rather than self-managed, when you need email validation or inbound parsing as part of the package, or when you're sending under 50,000 emails per month and the SES price advantage is small in absolute terms.
When should I use Amazon SES instead of Mailgun?
Choose Amazon SES when cost matters at scale (above 100,000 emails per month), when you're already in AWS, when you need fine-grained IAM and CloudTrail audit logging, or when you want predictable pricing for the long term. SES is the right answer for high-volume marketing where the per-thousand economics dominate.
Disclosure: Mailblast is a hosted management layer for your own Amazon SES account. We have no commercial relationship with Mailgun. This comparison reflects the publicly published pricing and features of both services as of June 2026.