
Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account - wmboy
http://blog.mandrill.com/important-changes-to-mandrill.html
======
losvedir
I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun,
postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a
migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're
scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this
ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this:

1\. Any HN user trying to figure out what to do next, leave me your email on
this Google Form:
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgf...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgfEh7r11OmPiTo_7e0/viewform)

2\. Any transactional email provider, write a blog post or something with how
to migrate to your platform. Include differences vs. Mandrill with regard to
pricing, API, DNS, etc and anything else you can think of to ease our
transition - maybe promise of an upcoming Mandrill template importer, coupon
to price-match, etc. Email me the link (contact info in HN profile)

3\. In one week (Thursday, March 3, 1200 UTC), I'll email everyone in (1) the
responses I get from (2)

I promise not to spam people who leave their email address and will only ever
send just the single email next week, and then delete the Google Form and its
responses. Check my HN history, I'm just a developer trying to figure out what
to do now. My hope is that enough hot leads in one place will be incentive
enough for the various competitors to spend a bit of time writing a detailed
migration plan (which would help me!), and they probably can't make a good one
while this thread is still on the front page.

~~~
jrperina
Hi this is Joshua Perina, CEO of Elastic Email.

[http://elasticemail.com](http://elasticemail.com) has a very simliar pricing
structure to Mandrill (their old pricing) including 25000 emails per month
free.

We've been around since 2010, are growing fast and have sent billions of
emails. Plus, we love our customers.

Mandrill refugees are welcome!

~~~
javifr
We are using actually on my company Mandrill and Elastic Email and, given this
mandrill change, are migrating from both services to a new one.

Elastic Email has been buggy for us since day one. The whole hooks system is
very buggy and has cause serious damage to our image with some clients.

------
techdragon
As a long time user... What the hell are they smoking over there.

Edit...

Just read the full thing. I'm now a very fucking angry customer. They are
destroying basically all of the value their product had for me. I was raging
and ready to comment on their blog post, but oh look they have comments turned
off, how convenient, let's ignore our customers further.

Dear Mailchimp... Fuck you.

Since there is fuck all chance they will backflip on this, who should I
migrate to, I've honestly been using mandrill for years and have no idea who
offers comparable services because I was so fucking happy with mandrill I
didn't need to look elsewhere... I hope a mandrill employee is on HN because
if this actually happens they're going to lose 10 paying customer accounts
when I find someone else hope your shitty management plan is accounting for
loss of goodwill and loss of customers.

~~~
dancablam
FWIW We're switching to Sparkpost (I'm not affiliated with Sparkpost). They do
the transactional email for the big dogs like Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc
and have a pretty simple UI. Just throwing that out there for all the fellow
Mandrill refugees.

~~~
techdragon
I just checked out Sparkpost, and unfortunately, they seem to have a crippling
price discrepancy. Their new "express" plan is sort of comparable to what
Mandrill charged, but as soon as I grow to the point where I need more, they
are x3 the price. Not sure what they were thinking with that sort of thing,
are they trying to discourage customers from growing their email volume on the
platform?

I find this sort of "nonsensical pricing" very off putting. If your pricing
page is so obviously 'wtf' like this, how can I take them seriously, even if
they do the emails for Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, they could be the secret
real host for Gmail for all it matters to me... Their pricing page tells me
they have a screw loose.

~~~
cristoirmac
We tweaked our pricing today so 100k free and fixed the confusing plans -
check it out
[https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing](https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing) We have
been doing transactional email for 15 years for the likes of Twitter,
Pinterest, Zillow smaller developers and startups and are not going anywhere -
we are very developer friendly. Also check out
[https://developers.sparkpost.com](https://developers.sparkpost.com)

~~~
wcossick
Which pricing is correct?
[https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing](https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing) or
[http://pages.sparkpost.com/sparkpost-vs-
mandrill](http://pages.sparkpost.com/sparkpost-vs-mandrill)

~~~
cristoirmac
We were midway through our pricing update at the time - but both pages should
now have the latest prices, including our 100K free tier. Please try it out
and if you have questions you can find us at developers.sparkpost.com and
slack.sparkpost.com

------
olssonm
Got the mail this morning (Europe) and my first thought was "WTF"? Then "How
the hell do I migrate all my customers"?

I've used Mandrill for transactional mails for 4-5 years now. And always when
I've had a project that requires some kind of e-mail notifications, password
resets etc. I've always recommended Mandrill to my customers.

So here I am, running and handling 8+ Mandrill accounts (many customers
requires exclusive access to account, have one for personal projects etc. ). A
few of them in the free tier, most of them payed.

These changes will involve a whole lot of headache for me, and will sadly
affect a few of my customers too.

Firstly; from around $40/month as our e-mail costs are today; to more than a
total of $240/month. Not the end of the world in itself, but:

Secondly: NOT A SINGLE ONE of my customers, or me, want or have any use of
MailChimp. They are two very different services with two very different
purposes. Now I will have walk through with my customers on how they set up a
Mailchimp account, explain to them why they have to do this and merge the
account with their Mandrill one, explain to them "Oh, no – this is just a
$10/month service that you don't need, or want, but have to signup to to
enable those password reset emails or yours".

Oh man... Of course I will change service in most of these cases, but that's
also a pain, have to get in touch with the customers IT-departments to change
DNS-settings, verify senders and all that – not a great start to this day...

The whole idea is what we in Sweden call "hål i huvudet"; "Hole in the head"
(as in missing a brain, not shooting someone).

~~~
mapunk
Completely agree with all of your points. I just finished migrating from
Mandrill to a new Sendgrid account and it was pretty seamless (although I had
a head start because I have used Sendgrid before). It took me about 45 minutes
to update everything, including: creating an account, adding appropriate DNS
records for whitelisting, and updating my application and server settings.

It's extremely unfortunate that we have to do this, but no way would I stay
with Mandrill after this decision.

------
manidoraisamy
There is something more serious than migration and price increase. By
migrating to mailchimp you are agreeing to mailchimp's terms and service. If I
understand it correctly, now they can read all your customers' email address
and content (presumably for machine learning & send optimization). This is in
direct conflict with the agreement we signed with our customers on data
sharing. Unless I am mistaken, this seems to be deliberately omitted in
mandrill communication to mislead and collect data to create "network effect"
from our customer data.

~~~
spronkey
Can confirm. Privacy policy Item 5.1 - Previous:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.com/privacy/)
vs new:
[http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/](http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/)
Item 5.1

Changes from:

    
    
      That information may include your IP address, name,
      physical address, email address, phone number, credit
      card information, and other details like gender,
      occupation, and other demographic information.
    

to

    
    
      That information may include your and your Subscribers’ 
      IP address, name, physical address, email address, 
      phone number, credit card information, operating 
      system, as well as details like gender, occupation, 
      location, birth date, purchase history, and other 
      demographic information.

~~~
manidoraisamy
"your Subscribers' email address, credit card information, purchase history"
\- These are super sensitive! It takes more than 3 months of legal process and
convincing to get our customers to share these under strict data privacy
clause. And here comes mailchimp and want to sniff it under the hood in the
name of migration. They will literally land us in jail, if we don't migrate.

~~~
spronkey
Yeah, this is a very big change in policy, and I suspect it might catch out
Mandrill customers who don't read the fine print. The privacy policies for a
couple of web applications I work with, for example, are incompatible with
this new policy.

~~~
ma1069
Guys, are you sure about this? Mailchimp subscribers and Mandrill users are
not the same thing... Otherwise the Mailchimp cost would skyrocket, as they
charge users in terms of subscribers amount

------
mmilano
This is too bad. Mandrill was a great product I've put several clients and my
own apps on. None of these have any use for Mailchimp integration.

In December, they began to require the more strict DNS configs for new
accounts... that was fine, but this latest change is horrendous in that it's
giving business' who've used this service for years, an ultimatum... one that
favors finding a new service.

It's going to be work one way or another so I guess I'll be moving mine and
client apps over to a more stable provider.

~~~
wmboy
Sounds like you're in the same boat as me.

Just quickly tried out Mailgun and SendGrid today as alternatives. SendGrid
looks more stable, but Mailgun has the advantage of at least being able to see
subject lines in emails sent (which can be a great help when troubleshooting
for clients).

~~~
mmilano
Yeah, I saw your other post... same boat. It was so nice to confirm emails
were sent/received while testing.

There's one project we integrated a private messaging system deeply into their
APIs. There's not gonna be a choice on moving that one, but all others will
move.

Not sure if it's more greed or incompetence behind the flippant decision.

------
rwhitman
Copying my comment from another thread because I want my rage to be heard!

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.

------
tomschlick
At work we have built an email delivery platform on top of Mandrill for
marketing/transactional emails. We have many clients that signed up for their
own accounts and give us api tokens to send on their behalf.

This is going to suck. Not only are they doing this but now we only have 45
days to migrate those customers to mailchimp accounts they neither want nor
need and we don't get to see the headaches there until March 15th. What the
actual fuck?!?

------
losvedir
Wait, so is there more detailed pricing information somewhere? I'm trying to
figure out how this will affect us.

What does a "a paid monthly MailChimp account" mean? The cheapest such plan
seems to be +$20/mo, so that's not so bad. Effectively just a small price
bump.

However, the MailChimp plans are confusing. Does every transactional recipient
need to be a "subscriber"? If that's the case, then we're looking at more than
a +$1000/mo increase! An order of magnitude more than we're paying for
Mandrill now!

Edit: Just saw I missed this from the post - "Our billing and pricing model is
also changing ... Mandrill credits will be sold in blocks of 25,000 emails.
Blocks will start at $20 per month." So the transactional pricing seems to be
increasing about 4x as well.

~~~
stotro
I just contacted the mailchimp service twice and they confirmed it to me.

you have to take the monthly plan that matches your mandrill users. So if you
are using mandrill to send mails to 90.000 users, you have to buy a monthly
plan of 90.000 users AND the mandrill package prices, which means 450$/month
for mailchimp and 4*20$ for mandrill.

~~~
techdragon
This confirms my worst fears. We just added a large wave of new email
addresses to one of our routine emails, taking it from 2k per day to 17k per
day.

We currently expect to pay approximately $75 to $100 USD per month with this
volume of email.

With the new "MailChimp pricing", this will cost us $150 for a MailChimp
account with enough subscribers, then between $270 and $400 USD per month in
data packs.

So from about $75 to $100 USD we get forced up to $420-$550

About a 5x price rise.

Nice going MailChimp...

Clearly this is an attempt to squeeze more profit out of Mandrill. Was there a
management change at MailChimp or something?

~~~
stotro
ok, i just received a mail from mailchimp that the information provided to me
by two of their service agents is indeed wrong. You really "just" need a
monthly paid account, which still is pointless.

------
spronkey
Based on their latest release of pricing information, I've done an old vs new
pricing comparison. Hopefully no errors - the tiered pricing is more complex
to calculate than a flat pricing.

From what I understand, if your volume is i.e. 1,000,000, you pay for 20
blocks (25,000 ea) at $20, plus 20 blocks at $18 for a total of ($20 * 20) +
($18 * 20) = $760/month, plus $10 for MailChimp account.

    
    
      Volume	Old Pricing	New Pricing
      10,000	9.95		30
      25,000	9.95		30
      50,000	14.95		50
      100,000	24.95		90
      300,000	64.95		250
      700,000	144.95		554
      1,000,000	204.95		770
      2,000,000	365.2		1410
      4,000,000	656.2		2450
      8,000,000	1157.45		4050
    

So, pricing has gone up 3x to 4x across the board. They're much more expensive
than both SendGrid and Mailgun now, and even more expensive than Postmark, and
their credits expire at the end of the month. Hoooly crap.

------
lttlrck
Oh great. Now we'll have to go and touch a system that has been working
flawlessly for years. That'll end well won't it? So as a big thank you I'll
migrate it to another provider while I'm there.

There is something off in the tone of the announcement.

~~~
ilamparithi
Definitely. I noticed the tone too. Somewhat brash and arrogant.

------
codinghorror
Two months notice and a huge price increase ultimatum. This heavily affects a
lot of Discourse open source installs as we recommended Mandrill as an email
provider for almost two years.

Free product so they can do what they want, but this feels a bit abrupt (how
about six months to transition) and cruel (forced MailChimp account plus giant
leap in pricing).

Would it cost them so much in brand loyalty to be a bit more generous with
time to transition and cost?

~~~
spronkey
They mentioned abuse of the free service as rationale - there are plenty of
things they could have done to avoid this. Charge $1 for the free tier, for
example. Massive slap in the face - we'll be reviewing our use of MailChimp
for our marketing as well. Campaign Monitor might get a knock on the door.

------
mrmch
Hey folks, cofounder of Sendwithus.com here -- we're a layer on top of
Mandrill, SendGrid, Sparkpost, etc. You can hot swap backends with us, making
a change trivial. We're also experts on all these platforms so can advice cost
vs support.

Hit our support team (support@sendwithus.com) if you have any questions, we
have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.

Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me:
matt@sendwithus.com

~~~
techdragon
So, realtime feedback...

I opened your features page, everything looks good... I open your pricing
page, and you've lost me as a customer.

Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that
seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill.

I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I
know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS, but that's a
different tool for a different job) effectively charging me per email. I want
usage pricing. If you don't offer that, you aren't really serving the same
market as Mandrill was. (I'm going to refer to them in past tense since
Mandrill is dead to me.)

    
    
      > Every Mandrill account comes with 2,000 free trial sends.  
      > Once you’ve finished your free trial, it’s $9.95/month for 25,000 emails.
      > After that, we charge on a per-thousand-email basis.
      > Since we build discounts into our payment structure, 
      > your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email.
      > 
      > $9.95             up to 25k emails per month
      > $0.20/thousand    next 1m emails per month
      > $0.15/thousand    next 5m emails per month
      > $0.10/thousand    remaining emails
      > Add a dedicated IP for $29.95 / month.
    
      Old Mandrill pricing: $10 + $X per email (with volume discounts)
      New Mandrill pricing: $X per Y emails
      MailChimp pricing: $X per Y emails per Z recipients per month
      Sendwithus (You) pricing: $X per Y email recipients per month
    

Sorry, you look nice and all, but your pricing model is just more of the same.

~~~
mrmch
That's fair feedback (pricing is per recipient), but it reflects the cost of
running our service (we store data about your customers long term, which adds
up more than the cost of each individual send).

~~~
jordanthoms
I'd be very surprised if running the database to store that information is the
major cost for running the service, and at any rate I'd say your pricing
should be a good match for the value you provide to customers, not your costs
for providing that value.

I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful
for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.

------
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. :)

~~~
wmboy
One advantage that Mandrill has over SendGrid is the ability to see the
content of emails (run a web agency so it helps a lot with troubleshooting for
our clients).

~~~
etjossem
That makes a lot of sense! On the backend, we've already built a way to view
content samples (for compliance reasons, e.g. if something looks spammy and we
need a human to confirm). It would certainly be possible to expose that
functionality to users. I'll run that by the PM on the relevant team - you're
not alone in wanting that feature.

~~~
wmboy
I just tried SendGrid out now, unless I'm mistaken you can't even see subject
line in the emails that are sent, is this correct?

~~~
etjossem
You can look in the Email Activity tab to see a history of events, along with
their category (you might use this for "receipt", "forgot password", etc.).

[https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html](https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html)

If you're doing one-to-many campaigns, we also have a marketing email product
called Marketing Campaigns that offers a more detailed content history.

------
kintamanimatt
As an aside from the topic at hand, this article is 3 hours old and has 52
points. Why is this hidden on the 11th page?

~~~
codinghorror
It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally
buried.

~~~
kintamanimatt
Possibly Mandrill/MailChimp employees flagging it because it's casting a bad
light on them. They've disabled comments on their blog posts too.

There seems to be a lot of backlash against what they're doing and they likely
don't want people to see that.

~~~
spronkey
Yeah... I can't imagine any of their customers are happy about this. I haven't
seen a single positive reply about it on twitter, HN, reddit etc.

------
james33
Add me to the list of people very shocked by this. We've been exceedingly
happy paying customers of Mandrill since its beta, and we use it in all of our
services that we offer. This change really makes no sense to me and pretty
much ensures we'll be looking elsewhere. Pretty frustrating having to move
aside actually important user-facing projects to completely re-do our e-mail
systems.

------
whatismybrowser
Ok, from the sounds of it, all MailChimp has to do to keep our business (and
thousands others from the sounds of it) is to change the requirement to a
Free-Tier MailChimp account instead of being a Paid MailChimp account.

I _get_ their desire to have a single unified system that manages everything,
but our situation is: we use Mandrill to send the System Info emails on
[https://www.whatismybrowser.com](https://www.whatismybrowser.com) to
thousands of people per month. We have absolutely zero requirements for a
mailing list.

If they're asking us to pay for a whole system we won't use; it's not even a
discussion, we'll be leaving and they lose money.

Go figure.

MailChimp's competitors must be rubbing their hands in glee.

Personally, I don't blame them.

~~~
mrobins
The per-message pricing is still way more expensive, but that's not nearly as
bad as how they've dumped this on customers.

If a PaaS provider doesn't realize that people build tons of code, businesses,
infrastructures, pricing models, etc. off of them than they'll never gain the
trust of savvy purchasers. The way they've effectively end-of-lifed Mandrill
w/ 2 months notice and zero response to complaints is a slap-in-the-face to a
customer-base that has largely loved their product.

Short of a response that recognizes they went about this badly it would be
hard to ever depend on a Mailkimp product again.

------
ademup
Bye Bye Mandrill. I have been a very happy customer for several years, but
your actions will now leave me with many hours of unwanted work. This is
unacceptable, so I'm moving to SendGrid (probably).

------
ceejayoz
I've been a paying customer of Mandrill for years (migrated two different
employers to them, ran probably tens of millions of emails through them) and
am a) really sad to see it go and b) completely freaking baffled by the tone
and out-of-the-blue nature of the announcement.

If I wanted Mailchimp, I'd have Mailchimp. It's not the slightest bit useful
to me.

------
asptimothy
This is such a shame.. I have no idea need for any of mailchimps services, yet
now I'm forced to pay for it? Why? From what I can figure out from the pricing
page, this nearly 10x's our monthly cost. NOPE

Later Mandrill.

I'm more sad than angry.. it was an incredible product.

------
garrettboatman
Fuck this. Fuck this so fucking hard.

Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you.

(I'm a lil mad)

------
IgorPartola
Time to fire up HN search for that product where you host your own Mandrill
clone that relies on SES on the backend and is like 5 times cheaper. Anyone
remember what it was?

Hmm: I guess I was thinking of [https://sendy.co](https://sendy.co) which is a
replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.

~~~
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, which include SendGrid, Sparkpost, Leadersend, Elasticemail and
MailGun. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social
and push services very shortly. This cross channel communication will help us
connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.

------
saluki
Oh Man-drill . . . I wish they would have went with a lower limit on their
free plan or even low cost plan that replaces current free plan. I use them on
lots of client sites with low volume emails. This is going to take some time
to sort out.

SendGrid's interface and dashboard are horrible.

Plus they don't store the message text for recent messages like Mandrill where
it's viewable from the dashboard.

Any other options out there for free or low cost or with a decent dashboard.

~~~
mrmch
If you want to enjoy SendGrid deliverability but a different interface, check
us out: sendwithus.com

We're designed as a higher level on top of email deliverability, offering some
pretty rich features (email storing, great A/B testing, drip campaigns...)

~~~
motoford
Jeez man I think we all get it. You have a product you want to sell. Spamming
is not the way to promote your email product.

~~~
mrmch
We had more than a few really worried people reach out (before this thread),
this change is very worrying to some. I'll dial it back though, thanks!

------
imrehg
I wonder in what Venn diagram do the sections of "People who need newsletters"
and "People who do transactional emails" overlap that much that this really
makes sense?

There's also a blogpost about this by the founder:
[http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-
mandrill/](http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/) (side
note: comments seem to be open there but when posting there, first I got a
"you are posting too quickly", then trying again it went into moderation)

------
dsizemore
I can't believe this. I use their free plan because I send a minimal amount of
email per month. Absolutely no way I'll consider going to $20 per month for my
basic needs. I'll probably go ahead and switch newsletter services over to
something else too. Who knows when they may get a wild hair and do away with
their free account there too.

~~~
jbail
It's actually $30/mo minimum with Mailchimp's new pricing. $10/mo for the
Mailchimp account + $20/mo for up to 25,000 monthly emails via Mandrill

------
spronkey
Wow MailChimp. SES as a replacement for Mandrill? What are they smoking. Maybe
they don't even understand their own product...

~~~
stephenhamilton
I haven't used SES, but I'm guessing it is complex, and "bare bones".

I got the vibe Mandrill didn't want to send any business to their _actual_
competitors.

The time period to make this change sucks. I accept they want to change, and
they can do that. But I have paid them money for a service, and the rug is
being pulled from under my feet with such a short period of time to work out
what to do, and do it.

~~~
spronkey
SES is pretty bare bones, and has had recurring issues with IP reputation
management. It's well suited for integration but there are no straightforward
simple APIs or dashboards as with Mandrill/SendGrid etc.

------
upshot
I went on a rather large rant about these Mandrill Policy Changes last night.
I picked apart the post by Kaitlin as well as Ben Chestnut. It is interesting
how they locked down the post so no one could publicly comment on the blog
announcement. I have never seen them do that before. If anyone wants an in
depth look at the policy changes, competitors available, or simply a good
laugh then I recommend giving it a read. Feel free to comment or give feedback
on the post.

[https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill-
policy-...](https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill-policy-
changes/)

------
garrettdimon
For folks looking for alternatives, there's a good list here with some
indicators on the quality of delivery as well.

[https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare](https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare)

~~~
spronkey
Wow this is really interesting. Poooor showing from Mailgun!!!

~~~
jrodom
As I mentioned in the other thread, we're looking into the details concerning
this test. It's not at all reflective of the _actual_ customer experience.

~~~
spronkey
It's a pretty good sign that you're posting here to be fair :)

------
josscrowcroft
This was an unwelcome surprise.

We've loved using Mandrill at Open Exchange Rates[0], and enjoyed their simple
"just works" approach. We've never trusted Mailchimp's primary product for
some reason.

Now we'll be switching to a brand we can trust not to tell us "FYI we're
shutting down your account in 45 days."

Personally feel disappointed that they seem to have transformed from a value-
giver to a value-extractor.

Looking at Sendgrid - but open to any providers who wish to get in touch
(email: cto@our domain).

[0] [https://openexchangerates.org](https://openexchangerates.org)

------
danieltillett
As a non-user of Mandrill or MailChimp I look on this whole episode as a
classic example of how not to make product changes. I suspect YC17 will be
studying this as how not to go.

One thing I don't understand if this is all about the Benjamins while not just
increase the price and leave the functionality unchanged. This way you would
only lose the customers who are price sensitive and not those that now have to
change their back ends.

~~~
verelo
This! Exactly! If money is an issue, then deal with that. What they're doing
here is just messing with everyone at a level that is way too deep.

~~~
danieltillett
Mandrill was a commodity service much like electricity or water which people
relied on it just working.

If the service was not making enough money then raise the price to whatever
you need to and either grandfather in old customers or give very long lead
times so your customers have the time to transition away if they wish.

This is such an obvious way to go that I think there must be something very
dysfunctional within the leadership of Mailchimp. Did nobody there foresee
what was the likely outcome of this move and advise against it? Did they talk
to any of their customers before making this change?

------
karlshea
Bye Mandrill. I've converted some of my clients' free accounts to paid once
they started needing more features or sending more email, but going forward
I'll be using someone else.

Amazon SES or alternatives might be a pain but at least they are an option for
people who need good deliverability for transactional email but don't have the
budget for a paid MailChimp account.

------
sideproject
I've been looking for a good alternative since I received this news.

Someone mentioned sparkpost, and it seemed to be the one that was closest to
what mandrill was offering (they offer 10,000 instead of mandrill's 12,000).

So I just tried SparkPost and at a quick glance, here is what I found

\- You have to specify the "sending domain". In Mandrill, I could just do
"from blah@whatever.com" and it worked. But with SparkPost, I have to specify
"whatever.com" as a sending domain. But you have to verify the ownership of
the domain, so the bottom line is you can't just change the "FROM EMAIL"
address to anything.

\- Also, I just sent a test email and it went straight to GMail SPAM folder.
This never happened with Mandrill.

~~~
sideproject
SendGrid it is. From what I've tested, it matches almost on par with what
Mandrill offers.

------
blissofbeing
This really doesn't make sense. Why not just implement Mandrill into Mailchimp
like they wanted and keep Mandrill around also? I don't see it as an either or
thing.

This move was probably more about the bottom line than anything else.

~~~
x5n1
what isn't?

------
marwann
Just made a small calculation: for 3,000,000 subscribers, our costs are moving
from 1,500$ to about 13,000$ if we go through Mailchimp. I don't understand
why they're making us pay for only storing an email list.

~~~
nathanelward
Better I would suggest to use email delivery services from easysendy and
connect it through sendgrid / amazon ses / mailgun.

------
siquick
Bye Mandrill, Hi Mailgun

~~~
wmboy
Do you prefer Mailgun over SendGrid for any particular reason (both offer free
accounts)?

~~~
siquick
Never tried Sendgrid but will check it out.

~~~
wmboy
Note: Their free plan is down at the bottom of their pricing page

------
mehdym
now I'm happy that we used SMTP plus tags in mail headers and not their API.
at least we can hot swap their service. any recommendations on transnational
email provider without initial sender domain verification?

------
andygambles
I pay for both services currently so moving from free isn't necessarily a
problem. But I am struggling to figure out what the pricing will be after
these changes. I am surprised at the lack of clarity.

------
giovanni_lucas
Hi, guys! We are eCentry, a company which provides digital marketing solutions
since 1999, and our focus product now is Maildocker - Transactional emails for
developers. Some of our features: Digital Signature + Email Tracking +
Customizable IP Pools + Sandbox + Docklets (Independent customizable servers)
among others. Try free: [http://maildocker.com/us/](http://maildocker.com/us/)

------
nbevans
Bye Mandrill.

~~~
samet
Agreed.

------
mehdym
They had a pretty relaxed strategy on sender domain verification. which was
great for white-labeling transnational email on multiple domains.

Goodbye Mandrill.

------
stephenhamilton
Has anyone here got any experience with using SMTP.com for sending
transactional and bulk email via SMPT relay? I would love to know what you
think of their service? I'm looking at potential services, and this is one on
my radar that doesn't appear to be getting discussed here. But that makes me
wonder if there is an obvious reason why not...

------
eugenoprea
I've been reading conversations here on Hacker News and noticed that this has
created a lot of frustration among existing Mandrill users, especially for
those that have setup the system for their customers.

I believe that MailChimp was aware of this before making this decision and
knew that they are going to loose some customers. At this point they will
become a bit expensive, even more expensive than SendGrid and a lot of their
customer base will migrate away.

However, I do believe that this is something they wanted with this move, so
that people using the service for free which took advantage and sent spam and
also small businesses that cannot afford to pay a high end service will move
away.

Then, they will keep the MailChimp fans, those that afford the service and
will spend more on the service.

In conclusion, it's a bold strategy change that will weed out some of the bad
accounts and will ultimately improve the revenue stream for MailChimp.

What is really sad is the fact that they are going to also lose a lot of their
genuine customers who do not want or need MailChimp.

~~~
manidoraisamy
I don't think it's as simple as that. This is a data mining exercise - to read
our customer's subscribers data and to move from a "dumb pipe" to a
"personalization engine". From mailchimp CEO's blog: "We came to a fork in the
road, and choosing the “personalized transactional” path with Mandrill suits
us and our customers better than the “utility” path."

[http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-
mandrill/](http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/)

~~~
eugenoprea
I agree with you. They are essentially saying "bye" to those that used
Mandrill only for the "utility" path.

------
piyushpr134
FUCK YOU MANDRILL. FUCK YOU MAILCHIMP

------
ddutra
I moved from mailjet to mandrill a couple years ago. Mailjet was great, make
sure you check'em out when you are doing comparsions. Really sad about the
mandrill change. Most of my projects I have no use whatsoever for mailchimp.
Best regards.

------
quadrant6
We have Mandrill implemented in a lot of past projects and can't easily switch
now. We'll get the mandatory MC account there, while screaming F U to them.

What we can and will do is dissuade all future clients from using Mailchimp.

------
emilyfm
Tinyletter is also a Mailchimp product. So I'll have to avoid using that now,
in case they decide to fold it in with a paid Mailchimp sub later. Fool me
once ...

------
paulgtips
I've signed up with Mailgun to try out, but there's also SendInBlue, which
I've used to migrate out of Mailchimp several months ago.

------
laxk
Does anybody need a self-hosting transactional email app with Amazon SES
integration? Similar to sendy but for transactional emails.

~~~
homero
Yeah but i'd need smtp, maybe a plugin for ssmtp?

~~~
gingerlime
I don't use SES, but a quick search led me to this page[0] which suggests they
do have an SMTP gateway.

What I'm more curious about is things like deliverability stats (in aggregate
and for individual emails), which is the biggest value-add Mandrill provides
us right now.

[0] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-
em...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-
smtp.html)

~~~
laxk
They have Bounces, Complaints and Delivery notifications[0]. Is it what you
need? or are you talking about open/read email notifications?

[0]
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notifications.html)

~~~
gingerlime
Thanks. Very useful to know. As I mentioned, I never used SES.

I'm sure SES provides great building blocks for something similar to Mandrill.
But the value-add of ESP is tying those things together, so one can easily,
e.g. search for an email address and find all previous emails sent, the
delivery status etc, not to mention a nice web interface...

Open/Click tracking is also quite useful in some cases, and probably isn't
supported by SES either(?)

------
petercooper
BTW, a fun new latest development.. they've banned mass mailing from Mandrill
with immediate effect.

~~~
verelo
do you have reference to this? No one has spoken to us and we do mass mailing
in Mandrill.

~~~
petercooper
Mailchimp sent a further email yesterday saying they had updated their TOS and
AUP with immediate effect. So I decided to re-read the AUP:
[http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/](http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/)

.. and it now says, under Prohibited Actions: "Send bulk emails, meaning
emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content, through
Mandrill."

I don't think it became news because not many people are as crazy as me and
read pages full of legalese when they change :-D

~~~
verelo
hm that sucks. We certainly do this, i wonder when they'll start to try and
enforce it. This seems very unreasonable.

------
okholy
my short list between Amazon SES and SendGrid, please let me know your
suggestions and why?

~~~
saevarom
My experience with SendGrid is not very good. Slow delivery, random halts on
e-mails due to low activity on account, which I was not notified about, the
list goes on. They did update their UI recently which was a good step, but the
other issues remain.

I'm thinking about trying SES.

