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...
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.
https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/mandrill-alternative-sparkpos...
In addition, as mentioned by meirelles a few hours ago, the free tier has been raised from 10k/month to 100k as part of a pricing adjustment which was planned prior to yesterday's events.
So stay tuned for more info!
-Codey
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!
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.
But for a service like yours, I need a lot more oompf in your documentation, sales pitch, or UX to know that it's not a thin layer of SES.
https://github.com/mcbobo/sendgrid-rails-smtp/blob/master/RE...
Here are some others : http://www.codeinwp.com/blog/mandrill-alternatives/
Maybe we could even band together and get a preferred negotiated rate Groupon-style if enough of us migrate simultaneously.
Haven't heard from any ESPs yet, but will reach out to them tomorrow.
PS: Subscribed!
$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. :)
Disclosure: I lead product development @ Mailgun.
Previewing content of the last 7 days of sent emails would also be a bonus.
Unlimited templates, and you can swap out backends (SendGrid, SparkPost, others)
If you're using a wrapper like sendgrid-ruby (https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-ruby), check out its documentation page on GitHub. For instance, here's how to use substitution tags in Ruby: https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-ruby#working-with-templ...
Our template engine (Jinja) is the most advanced of any email platform out 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.
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.
I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.
The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.
Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.
$20 w/Postmark: 13,000 mails
$20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails
Postmark also doesn't offer the option to upgrade to a dedicated IP later on, which many larger companies find is better for deliverability.
Full disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.
Mandrill used to be pretty cheap and it was free small services that didn't need to send more than 12k emails per month. Now they're forcing everyone to pay in blocks of 25,000 sent emails for $20. That means if I have a very small website and only send out 500 emails per month, I'm paying the same amount as someone who sends 25,000 emails in a month. That amounts to $0.04 and $0.0008 cents per-email respectively, so sending my 500 emails costs 50x more per-email than someone sending 25,000 emails. The pricing system just doesn't make sense and the lack of a free tier is unfortunate.
Another bad part is simply migrating to a new service. Most users can probably migrate in under an hour if they're only using Mandrill as a relay, but there are obviously users who use all of Mandrill's services (i.e. templates) and the migration will take a lot longer.
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 $20 per month." So the transactional pricing seems to be increasing about 4x as well.
you have to take the monthly plan that matches your mandrill users. So if you are using mandrill to send mails to 90.000 users, you have to buy a monthly plan of 90.000 users AND the mandrill package prices, which means 450$/month for mailchimp and 4*20$ for mandrill.
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-$550
About a 5x price rise.
Nice going MailChimp...
Clearly this is an attempt to squeeze more profit out of Mandrill. Was there a management change at MailChimp or something?
Mailchimp, PLEASE CLEAR THIS UP ASAP. YOU'RE FUCKING WITH MY LIFE AND I DON'T LIKE IT OR NEED IT!
Hit our support team (support@sendwithus.com) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.
Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me: matt@sendwithus.com
I opened your features page, everything looks good... I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer.
Sorry... But you're using the same "$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
There seems to be a lot of backlash against what they're doing and they likely don't want people to see that.
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.
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.The fact that they're willfully playing with merging customers' sensitive transaction info like financial statements, personal messages and treating it for demographic harvesting like a marketing mailing list is incredibly disturbing. Especially since that's not what we signed up for. That's not what we signed our clients and customers up for.
The ignorance and shameless nonchalance about data security that surrounds us in everyday life, in all corners or the internet and enterprise, is absolutely frightening. If you leverage a cloud vendor for anything, you're eventually putting your customers' data at risk. There's no safety net.
The tech industry can no longer self-police in this regard. I don't want regulation complicating my work any more than the next guy but I'm starting to feel there needs to be someone with authority enforcing some rules here. It's getting out of hand.
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.
Feedback would be very welcome. Shoot me an email (it's in my profile) with the details and I'll make sure it gets to the right people.
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...)
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.
What disappoints me is the way they've chosen to go about this -- specifically the fact that they've left us 3 weeks before these changes take effect.
That shows a lack of respect for their customers -- not just the "bad" ones and those looking for a free service, but all of us.
In making a change of this magnitude, they needed to allow more time between announcement and implementation and they needed to be much more clear up front about what the updated pricing structure will be (which they still have not done for high volumes).
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.
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).
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.
There is something off in the tone of the announcement.
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?
The tone of the announcement, and miserly transition period leaves a pretty bitter taste that will make recommending Mailchimp in future hard.
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 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.
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.
At least this crappy company has viable competitors. Imagine what we'd be saying if e.g. Adobe did this. Oh wait..
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.
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.
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?
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...
.. 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
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).
It's extremely unfortunate that we have to do this, but no way would I stay with Mandrill after this decision.
Hmm: I guess I was thinking of https://sendy.co which is a replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.
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.
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.
This move was probably more about the bottom line than anything else.
I'm thinking about trying SES.
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.
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?!?
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
If I wanted Mailchimp, I'd have Mailchimp. It's not the slightest bit useful to me.
Later Mandrill.
I'm more sad than angry.. it was an incredible product.
Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you.
(I'm a lil mad)
There's also a blogpost about this by the founder: 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)
https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill-policy-...
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).
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.
Goodbye Mandrill.
What we can and will do is dissuade all future clients from using Mailchimp.