Mailgun alternative with no middleman markupSend at Amazon's own rate, without a plan minimum riding on top.

Mailgun is a layer between your app and the actual delivery, and that layer is priced separately from the delivery itself. You are not paying a raw sending rate; you are paying Mailgun's plan rate, which bundles the API, the dashboard and the markup together into one number.

Foundation and Scale plans carry monthly minimums that still bill even in a quiet month when your actual volume dips below what the plan assumes. The API convenience is real, most engineers reach for Mailgun because integrating it is fast, but that convenience is worth less once the markup and the account risk outweigh what it saves in engineering time.

Stay on Mailgun if its support desk is genuinely the entire operations layer you want between your app and email delivery; that is a fair reason to keep paying for a managed relay. Stay too if creating an AWS account is not something you are willing to do, for any reason.

• Switch if you are already paying Mailgun's plan rates and want the economics of raw SES instead.
• Switch if you want an owned application, campaigns included, not only an SMTP or API relay.
• Switch if you scale to large bursts and do not want a middleman's markup riding on top of each one.

Mailgun's Basic and Foundation plans price by volume band with a monthly minimum attached, so a burst month costs more and a quiet month still costs the minimum. SendBunny is a one-time $199 license, then Amazon SES for sending, about $0.10 per 1,000 emails, with nothing owed when the account is idle.

At a million emails a month the gap is not close, and the plan minimums that applied at the lower volumes disappear entirely on SendBunny's side: you only ever pay for the emails that actually left the account.

1. Export the routes, templates and suppression lists you still need from Mailgun.
2. Buy SendBunny and complete the pre-filled one-click install in your AWS console, about ten minutes start to finish.
3. Authenticate your domains in Amazon SES, then import the contacts you exported.
4. Update your app's endpoints to point at your SendBunny install.
5. Cancel Mailgun once production traffic is stable on the new path.

Nothing about routes or templates copies over automatically, which is why the first step says to export what you still need. Mailgun's inbound routing rules and any HTML templates built in its editor live in Mailgun's account; recreate the ones you actually use in SendBunny before relying on the new path in production.

Run both accounts side by side for a short window before cancelling. Send the same burst of transactional traffic through the new endpoint and watch your SES bounce and complaint numbers in the AWS console; a healthy cutover looks boring, not eventful.

There is also no Mailgun account left to suspend once you have moved, but AWS's own thresholds for bounce and complaint rates still apply to your SES sending directly, and an account that ignores them can land in review with Amazon the same as any other sender.