Staxly

DigitalOcean vs Mailgun

The developer cloud — Droplets, Kubernetes, Managed DBs, App Platform
vs. Email API for developers with deep deliverability tooling

DigitalOcean website ↗Mailgun website ↗

Pricing tiers

DigitalOcean

Functions (Serverless)
Free 90k GB-sec/month. $0.0000185 per GB-sec after.
$0 base (usage-based)
App Platform — Free
Static sites free forever. 3 static sites per account.
Free
Droplet — Basic 512MB
Shared CPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, 500 GiB transfer. Cheapest starting tier.
$4/mo
Spaces Object Storage
$5/month — 250 GB storage + 1 TB outbound. S3-compatible.
$5/mo
App Platform — Basic
$5/month per app. 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 GB bandwidth.
$5/mo
Droplet — Basic 1GB
Shared CPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD.
$6/mo
Kubernetes (DOKS)
Starts at $12/month (1 node). Control plane free.
$12/mo
Droplet — Basic 2GB
1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer.
$12/mo
Load Balancer
$12/month. Supports HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
$12/mo
Managed Postgres — Basic
1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD. Single node.
$15/mo
Droplet — CPU Optimized
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM dedicated. Best for CPU-bound workloads.
$42/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume discounts, dedicated support.
Custom
DigitalOcean website ↗

Mailgun

Free
100 emails/day. 1 custom domain, 1-day log retention, 1 inbound route. No credit card.
Free
Basic
$15/month. 10,000 emails/month, no daily limit, 5 inbound routes.
$15/mo
Foundation
$35/month (1st month free). 50,000 emails/month, 1,000 custom domains, 5-day retention.
$35/mo
Scale
$90/month. 100,000 emails/month, SAML SSO, 5,000 email validations, dedicated IP pools, 30-day retention.
$90/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Deliverability services, managed onboarding.
Custom
Mailgun website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing functions on DigitalOcean vs free on Mailgun.

MetricDigitalOceanMailgun
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

DigitalOcean · 14 features

  • App Platform — Heroku-style PaaS. Deploy from Git. Auto-HTTPS, auto-scale, zero-downtime deploy…
  • Backups — Weekly automated backups (20% of Droplet cost). Manual snapshots.
  • Block Storage Volumes — SSD block storage attachable to Droplets. Snapshot support.
  • DigitalOcean GenAI Platform — Managed AI agents, model-as-a-service (Llama, Mistral), knowledge bases.
  • DNS — Free DNS hosting for your domains.
  • DOKS (Kubernetes) — Managed Kubernetes. Free control plane. Node auto-repair.
  • Droplets — Virtual machines with shared or dedicated CPU. 20+ one-click Marketplace images.
  • Functions — Serverless functions. Node, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby. Pay-per-execution.
  • Load Balancers — Layer 4/7 load balancing with HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
  • Managed Databases — Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, Valkey. Automated backups + …
  • Marketplace — 300+ one-click Droplet + Kubernetes apps.
  • Monitoring — Built-in metrics + alerts for Droplets, DBs, Load Balancers.
  • Spaces — S3-compatible object storage with built-in CDN.
  • VPC — Private networking. Free. Automatic default VPC per region.

Mailgun · 14 features

  • Batch Sending — Send up to 1,000 recipients per API call via recipient variables.
  • Dedicated IPs — IP pools with auto warmup. Scale+ tier.
  • Deliverability Suite — Inbox placement testing, DMARC reporting, seed lists.
  • Email Logs — Searchable log of all send attempts + events.
  • Email Templates — Template builder + variables + versioning.
  • Email Validation — Real-time email verification (syntax, MX, role accounts, disposable).
  • EU Region — Data stored in EU for GDPR-sensitive customers.
  • Inbound Routing — Route incoming emails to URLs/SMTP. Attachment forwarding.
  • Mailing Lists — Unlimited mailing lists with bulk subscribe/unsubscribe.
  • Open/Click Tracking — HTML + text tracking with configurable tracking domain.
  • SAML SSO — Scale+ tier.
  • Send API — REST/SMTP send with MIME + tracking.
  • Tags — Tag messages to slice stats.
  • Webhook Events — delivered, opened, clicked, unsubscribed, complained, permanent_fail, temporary_…

Developer interfaces

KindDigitalOceanMailgun
CLIdoctl CLI—
SDKgodo (Go), pydo (official py), python-digitaloceanmailgun.js (Node), mailgun-php, mailgun-python, mailgun-ruby
RESTDigitalOcean REST APIMailgun REST API
MCPDigitalOcean MCP—
OTHER—Inbound Routing, SMTP Relay, Webhooks
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to DigitalOcean and Mailgun are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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