
Important Changes to Mandrill - ceylanismail
http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/
======
rwhitman
Seriously cannot trust a new product offering from _anyone_ these days.

Newsletters and transactional emails are _not_ the same service. I signed up a
client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already
locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now
I need to explain to them why they need a _second_ monthly newsletter vendor
subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was
totally _free_ until recently.

Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first
place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor
in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.

I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp
and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.

I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up
looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled
the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake
again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.

~~~
kkt262
You and thousands of others man. I f*ckin hate Mailchimp.

~~~
homero
Scum bags

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kijin
MailChimp's pricing is best suited for companies that send a lot of bulk
messages to a relatively constant number of users (subscribers). This includes
weekly newsletters, catalogues, etc. In order to justify the cost, you need to
send at least a couple of bulk emails to your entire userbase every month.

Mandrill was best suited for companies that usually don't send anything to
their entire userbase, only random notifications and verifications for
individual users. This probably includes most non-annoying web services. The
only time they need to notify everyone at once is if they'd had a security
breach or if they're shutting down.

I'm not sure whether there's a large enough intersection between these two
sets to justify treating the latter as an "add-on" to the former.

Of course it's MailChimp's decision to make, and they might have found that
the first set of customers actually make them the most money. But given that
people around here seem to be increasingly wary of bulk email of any kind, I
wonder if that will continue to be true in the future.

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samsonasu
This reminds me of when Urban Airship shut down their free transactional push
notification service a while back. It turns out theres so much more money in
the marketing side than the transactional side (profit center vs cost center),
and if you're going to run a marketing company it doesn't make sense to give
away a service to people who will never become the type of customer you want.

We've been referring clients to mandrill for a long time on many different
project and although a few have had enough success to hit the level where they
start paying, for the most part it's been just a giveaway. It doesn't make it
any less painful for those clients that we now need to switch (especially the
few that are using the inbound features - ugh) but I can see where they're
coming from in this change.

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etjossem
$20 w/MailChimp Transactional: 25,000 mails

$20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails

So let me know if you're thinking about switching. I'd be happy to intro you
to someone on our team.

Disclosure: I'm with SendGrid. :)

~~~
jrs235
It's more expensive than that for MailChimp, if I understand things correctly.
On top of $20 for 25,000 emails you have to have a paid monthly MailChimp
account. Or did I misunderstand something?

~~~
etjossem
That's correct - you also need to have a paid MailChimp account. With
SendGrid, use of the marketing product is the add-on (not the other way
around).

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homero
Nice way to throw us under the bus! Not even a grandfather. Spending hours
hunting down api keys and installing new libraries. Thanks!

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nish1500
This is absurd. In my case, the monthly price just went up 8X.

Time to explore other options.

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cmrn
I guess this means I will be looking for a new transactional email service.
Those of you that have experience with MailGun and SendGrid, which do you
prefer and why?

~~~
jrs235
I don't have experience with MailGun but I do with SendGrid. I have been very
happy with SendGrid.

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homero
It's a cash grab, nothing more. There's people stuck without a developer and
are forced to pay or get a broken site. Mailchimp knows this.

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20years
Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark are all alternatives. Mailgun is what I mostly
use.

~~~
dceddia
For the people like me who were happily using Mandrill's free plan and would
like to continue to do that:

\- Mailgun offers 10,000 emails/month for free

\- SendGrid offers 12,000 emails/month for free

\- Postmark gives you 25,000 free emails when you sign up, but they start
costing money when those run out

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kkt262
Wow. Death to Mandrill. That sucks so much...

~~~
hodoublesy
Seriously... what were they thinking?! I hope someone from @mandrill can chime
in.

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homero
I'm using sendgrid for transactional. Sendy + ses for marketing. Costs me
cents per month.

~~~
homero
Beware that sendy comes with many backdoors though. Put it in a vm with a
strong firewall.

~~~
dceddia
Can you elaborate? I was planning to start using Sendy, but hiding it behind a
firewall seems like it would break the signups, click tracking, open tracking,
etc.

~~~
nathanelward
Compared to Sendy, I would suggest to use EasySendy Pro, I myself shifted to
this service, having previously used Sendy. Pro gives many independence of
connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES. Also, it is hosted
web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very
shortly. This cross channel will help us connecting our end customers
instantly and smoothly.

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mr_than
Do any other providers offer CSS inlining? This has been a great Mandrill
feature. I have a number of domains all sending only few 100 emails/month, but
the formatting is important. The cost jump to MailChimp monthly + Mandrill is
tremendous.

~~~
homero
sendgrid has transactional templates but it'll require more work

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nathanelward
So my move to shift with services like Easysendy Pro which connects to
multiple SMTP relay services and manages all my newsletter and templates was
worthful. Also they will be connecting my subscribers to push and social
notifications soon.

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techdragon
The matching thread from Mandrill's blog is being discussed over here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713)

