Mailgun Free Tier & Flex Plan

As I was setting up this website, I encountered a few issues. None too hard to fix.
However, I soon encountered my first 'road-block'.

Since this blog is being self-hosted using a DigitalOcean droplet instead of Ghost's hosting, some things don't work right out of the box. As is to be expected and the fun of maintaining my own little blog. One of these things is the member sign-ups.

Now granted, Ghost does have documentation on how to set-up Mailgun, but that's not what this is about. Instead, you have to jump through hoops to get the Pay As You Go (PAYG) tier of Mailgun.

Now let me be clear, it's great they offer this PAYG tier. Hell, this blog wouldn't be functional without it. But not being able to select the PAYG tier at any point in time when signing up, is shady practice.

Instead, if you wish to have a budget friendly experience you must sign up for their free trial and then you're allowed to 'downgrade' to this tier. Otherwise you're stuck with a £28/month ($35) payment plan.

But Mailgun offers a free tier... yet the free tier does not allow you to send emails.
If you try doing so you will be faced with: Error: Data command failed: 421 Domain example.com is not allowed to send: Free acc. Isn't that ironic? Mind you by then the domain was fully verified. So it's not a spam prevention tactic.
It does however allow you to send mails up to a maximum of 5 authorized recipients. That could be used as a sort of notification system for someone? But at that point an integration with Slack/Discord would probably be easier.

Not only that but when looking up Mailgun's flex tier on Google you will find a bunch of articles they made about it. However if you click on those, you'll be redirected to a generic "help" page. This wasn't always the case, according to the Wayback Machine. I tried to save the current state of that page, but was hit with an error I did not expect.

Perhaps you just can't save Mailgun webpages anymore. However a quick save of their homepage proved me wrong. They have gone out of their way to block the PAYG help page (which is just a redirect now, so perhaps that could be the problem instead?) from being saved. What kind of shallow practice is this?

In conclusion, setting up this blog has been super fun with a few struggles here and there but has gone surprisingly smooth so far. Aside from a few annoying business practices, it's been a blast so far. Most importantly I got a good laugh out of the free tier of a mailing service not allowing you to send emails...

- Lorenzo