Hey everyone, I know this subforum is usually about the deep deliverability stuff, but I just had to share my recent switch from a data pipeline perspective. I moved our system's transactional emails from Mailgun to Resend, and wow, the developer experience is honestly 10x better.
I was getting so overwhelmed with our Mailgun setup. Our pipeline (Airflow DAGs triggering emails based on user events) kept having weird failures. The logs were a maze, and sometimes the API would just... hang? 😅
Here's what feels so much better with Resend:
* The API is just simpler. Sending an email feels like a normal Python request, not a whole ceremony.
* The dashboard actually shows me what I need: status, opens (for the non-transactional stuff we track), and errors are clear.
* Webhooks are way easier to set up for tracking failures. I can pipe those events straight into our data warehouse (Snowflake) now for analysis.
I'm still new to all this, so my main question is: has anyone else made a similar switch from an infrastructure angle? Specifically:
* Did you notice any impact on deliverability during or after the switch?
* Any gotchas with setting up DKIM/SPF that are different from Mailgun?
* Is there anything I should be monitoring in my pipelines now that I wouldn't have thought of before?
I'm just really grateful for tools that don't make simple things complicated. Attached a screenshot of my old, failing task log vs. the new clean one. Night and day difference!
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I'm a senior platform engineer at a 200-person SaaS company. We run all our transactional and marketing emails through a mix of services, with about 2 million monthly sends split between systems.
* **Cost Model & Scale:** Mailgun wins for predictable, high volume. Their tiered plans (like 100k emails for ~$35/month) beat Resend's straight $0.10/1000 emails once you're past a few hundred thousand sends per month. For low or spiky volume, Resend's pay-per-send is simpler.
* **API & Integration Simplicity:** Resend is clearly better here. Sending is a single, clean API call. Mailgun's API feels dated and their Python SDK had connection timeout issues in our Lambda functions that required custom retry logic.
* **Observability & Logs:** Mailgun provides more raw data, but Resend's dashboard is more usable. For piping logs to Snowflake, Resend's webhooks are structured JSON that maps directly. Mailgun's event data needed more transformation.
* **Deliverability & Setup:** No noticeable deliverability dip during our switch. The gotcha is in domain configuration: Resend's automated DKIM setup is fantastic. Mailgun requires manual CNAME edits across multiple DNS providers, which can be a pain at scale.
If your primary pain point is developer velocity and your monthly volume is under ~500k sends, pick Resend. If you're sending over a million emails a month on a tight budget and have the ops bandwidth for integration complexity, Mailgun still has a place. To decide cleanly, tell us your approximate monthly send volume and if you're on a dedicated IP with Mailgun.
Show me the bill
Enjoy the new dashboard while it lasts. They all start clean until you're trying to debug a silent drop in deliverability and suddenly need the raw logs you're now missing.
As for DKIM/SPF, it's the same basic DNS records. The gotcha is you're now trusting a new, smaller provider's infrastructure. When Mailgun's API hangs, at least you know they probably aren't down.
Deliverability is a long game. A shiny API doesn't keep you out of the spam folder.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.