I think some people underestimate how cost-sensitive some clients are. And how time poor some small businesses are.
Those aren't "clients", they're "moochers".
If they're prepared to walk away because it costs them $35/month to send to their mailing list, you probably owe it to yourself/your business to spend your time seeking new better clients rather than talking them thru how to get stuff/service for less than $35/month... Your business should be "cost sensitive" as well...
Freeloaders are simply not in my market.
And with that focus, I've been able to exponentially improve the value of what my company provides.
Our business found Mailgun to be a great solution when we anticipated clients would stick under 10k/mo and not need a card on file. With Stripe, every time they pay their cut, they've had a sale. Every time they mail-out through MailChimp, it's to a list of customers.
We are usually using Mailgun to send transactional emails. I can't promise a client that they won't get a flurry of junk signups or password reset mailouts that hit their credit card.
The bottom 50% of the market is heading to self-serve site-builders and it's savage for a small web business.
Start charging your clients money to cover costs that comes with their business.
My original point was not even anything to do with cost but hassle!
Discount stocks brokers make more money on float than trades.
Search engines make enough off ads instead of charging per search.
Photoshop didn’t have a free tier, but rampant piracy from home users created proficient corporate users.
e.g., I can set up their account and other technical parts after that, but I can't verify their mobile number (added since we started working with Mailgun), don't have their credit card details to put on file (same), and often end up agreeing to legal notices for them rather than asking them to complete signup (and stalling the project).
The responses to your posts are disgusting. I don't think a lot of people around here understand what it means to provide services to small local businesses.
I don't know about you, but I'm in a smaller community, people here still earn $7.25 per hour, and I just don't have access to deep-pocketed big businesses. I work with small businesses, individual business owner/operators, and mom and pop type places. $35 here, $50 there - it all adds up fast, and they are very conscious of these costs, and so am I.
Going to a small business owner and trying to explain any kind of price hike for a service they thought was free is just another burden to them, and it makes MY recommendation of the original service seem bad .... and I'm the guy they came to for GOOD advice.
If your advice was "you get 10,000 emails per month free via $service" without qualifying "right now, but that isn't guaranteed forever, their paid tier is $x per 1000 emails and switching mail providers in the backend of your website will take approximately $Y hours at $chargable_rate", then it _was_ "bad advice" (or at the very least "incomplete advice").
I made this mistake way to many times before I learnt that lesson. (Most recently with Google Maps on websites...)
I think most HNers currently serving mom-and-pops in a bespoke fashion should strongly consider exiting that market tomorrow. Those customers will, over time, gravitate to a Shopify or a site builder or similar because they can amortize engineering costs over 100,000 similarly situated customers and consultants can not.
I understand there are aesthetic reasons to prefer that non-tech-forward people in your local community have someone to ask questions to and help navigate options, but if you want you can throw free Set Up Your Shopify office hours every Friday as a pro bono gesture, underwritten by the piles and piles of money from the many businesses in the world that can afford professional labor.
Your problem cascades from a B2C approaches to a B2B relationships. Not just yours to your client, but Mailgun's B2C approach to its relationship with your business. Free commercial email is likely to be unsustainable. At best, it's money left on the table because at 10k emails a month, there won't be many conversions. They were delivering free to a customer who expected free with the same damage to the customer's perception of the relationship as between you and your client.
The only part under your total control was whether or not to charge your client money. If you had, then the bad part would be Mailgun raising its prices. You would have had the option of eating the cost. Or having the unpleasant conversation with your client.
Maybe there's something slimy about charging a client for a free tier mail service. That's also under your control. Just pay for a paid tier and pass along cost at normal markup. In the long run, and that's what B2B relationships are about, it will tend to be simpler and simpler tends to be better for everyone.