Mailgun vs Amazon SES for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Mailgun Overview

Mailgun is a developer-focused email platform now owned by Sinch. It handles transactional, bulk, and marketing email through both REST API and SMTP. The platform includes email validation, inbound routing, mailing list management, and detailed analytics. Think of it as a full email toolkit rather than just a sending API.

The developer experience is decent. The API documentation covers all the endpoints with examples, and there are official SDKs for most languages. Setting up involves domain verification, DNS records, and API key generation. The dashboard shows sending stats, delivery rates, and error logs. Webhooks let you track delivery events programmatically.

Mailgun's trial restricts you to a sandbox with verified recipients only. The Flex plan (pay-as-you-go) removes that restriction but has lower sending limits. The Foundation plan at $35/month gives you 50,000 emails with better support and features. Email validation is an add-on that catches invalid addresses before you waste sends on them.

Amazon SES Overview

Amazon SES is raw email infrastructure at the lowest price point available. You pay $0.10 per 1,000 emails with no monthly minimums. At that rate, 100,000 emails cost $10. No other service matches that pricing.

The trade-off is clear: SES is infrastructure, not a product. You get an API that sends emails. Bounce handling, complaint processing, suppression list management, template management, and deliverability monitoring are all your responsibility. AWS provides the building blocks through SNS topics, CloudWatch metrics, and configuration sets, but you assemble them yourself.

Initial setup requires requesting production access since you start in a sandbox. This review can take up to 24 hours. You also need IAM credentials with the right policies, domain verification, and SNS configuration for bounce and complaint notifications. None of this is hard if you know AWS, but it is time-consuming if you do not.

Key Differences

Price gap is significant at volume. For 50,000 emails monthly, Mailgun costs $35 and SES costs $5. For 500,000 emails, Mailgun costs around $200 and SES costs $50. The cost difference scales linearly and favors SES at every volume tier.

Setup and maintenance burden. Mailgun gives you a working email platform out of the box. Bounces are handled, analytics are visible, and suppression lists are managed automatically. SES requires you to build or configure each of those pieces. If you skip bounce handling with SES, your account can get suspended for high bounce rates.

Email validation. Mailgun includes email validation as an add-on service. You pass an email address to their API and they tell you if it is valid, risky, or bad before you send. SES has no validation service. You would need a third-party tool like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce.

Inbound email processing. Mailgun can receive emails and forward them to your application via webhooks. This is useful for reply parsing, support ticket ingestion, or any workflow where users send emails to your service. SES can receive email too, but the setup involves S3 buckets, Lambda functions, and receipt rules, which is more complex.

Vendor dependency. SES ties you into AWS. If your infrastructure is already on AWS, adding SES is natural. If you run on Railway, Vercel, or DigitalOcean, adding AWS specifically for email introduces unnecessary complexity and another set of credentials to manage.

Deliverability tooling. Mailgun provides deliverability insights, seed list testing, and inbox placement reports (at higher tiers). SES gives you raw metrics through CloudWatch but no deliverability consulting or inbox placement tools. You monitor your own reputation and troubleshoot issues yourself.

When to Choose Mailgun

• You want a managed email platform with validation, routing, and analytics included
• You need inbound email processing without complex AWS configuration
• You are not on AWS and do not want to add it to your stack just for email
• You want email validation to clean addresses before sending
• You prefer predictable monthly pricing over pay-as-you-go

When to Choose Amazon SES

• Cost is your primary concern and you send high volumes
• You are already on AWS with experience managing IAM, SNS, and CloudWatch
• You want complete control over your email infrastructure
• You have the time to set up and maintain bounce handling, complaints, and suppression
• You are comfortable building tooling around a raw API

The Verdict

For solo developers, Mailgun is the more practical choice. You get a complete email platform that handles the operational details, bounces, complaints, suppression lists, analytics, without building any of that yourself. The $35/month for 50,000 emails is reasonable for a tool that saves you hours of infrastructure work.

SES wins on cost and wins hard. If you send 100,000+ emails per month and you are already comfortable with AWS, the savings add up to hundreds of dollars annually. But that savings comes with real maintenance work that a solo developer needs to account for.

My honest recommendation: if you are spending your days building product and not managing infrastructure, pick Mailgun or honestly, look at Postmark or Resend for an even better developer experience. SES is for developers who enjoy infrastructure work or who have grown to a scale where the cost savings justify the time investment. Most solo developers are not at that scale yet.