18 ms·

Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

231 points by wmboy 11y ago

nbevans 11y ago
Bye Mandrill.
- samet 11y ago
  Agreed.
spronkey 11y ago
Wow MailChimp. SES as a replacement for Mandrill? What are they smoking. Maybe they don't even understand their own product...
- stephenhamilton 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
IgorPartola 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
mmilano 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
etjossem 11y ago
$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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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.
    - ROFISH 11y ago
      Definitely +1 on this. It's a great feature to see if A) emails are being sent and B) templates weren't messed up in some way. (I have had many a batch email with "{{name}" or some other templating error, heh.)
saluki 11y ago
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.
- etjossem 11y ago
  We're actively working to improve the dashboard and standardize UX across SendGrid - that's the design team's big push this year. 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.
- mrmch 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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!
siquick 11y ago
Bye Mandrill, Hi Mailgun
- wmboy 11y ago
  Do you prefer Mailgun over SendGrid for any particular reason (both offer free accounts)?
  - siquick 11y ago
    Never tried Sendgrid but will check it out.
    - wmboy 11y ago
      Note: Their free plan is down at the bottom of their pricing page
cmrn 11y ago
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?
garrettboatman 11y ago
Fuck this. Fuck this so fucking hard. Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you. (I'm a lil mad)
techdragon 11y ago
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.
- themagician 11y ago
  Postmark (https://postmarkapp.com https://postmarkapp.com)
  - etjossem 11y ago
    Another price comparison. $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.
    - jamestanderson 11y ago
      Just to add: $20 w/Mailgun: 50,000 mails
      - techdragon 11y ago
        For comparison before this shitty move by MailChimp, Mandrill used to be $14 for 50000 emails.
        11y ago
blissofbeing 11y ago
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 11y ago
  what isn't?
tomschlick 11y ago
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?!?
james33 11y ago
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.
lttlrck 11y ago
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.
- homero 11y ago
  Possible warrant canary?
- ilamparithi 11y ago
  Definitely. I noticed the tone too. Somewhat brash and arrogant.
asptimothy 11y ago
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.
imrehg 11y ago
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)
mrmch 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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).
ademup 11y ago
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).
garrettdimon 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Wow this is really interesting. Poooor showing from Mailgun!!!
  - jrodom 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      It's a pretty good sign that you're posting here to be fair :)
    - lucasjans 11y ago
      Can you please email me the results of this? lucas [at] agencyrevolution.com - I am considering Mailgun but am hesitant after seeing this.
  - timmipetit 11y ago
    As a Mailgun customer, I can unfortunately confirm this. A lot of our clients are having problems getting mails delivered in hotmail mailboxes. This started some weeks ago, and we haven't seen any improvement since. It is getting to a point that we're working on migrating to something else right now.
    - jrodom 11y ago
      I'm sorry we let you down. If it's not too late, I'd love to get to the bottom of this today. Can you share details with me? josh [at] mailgun [dot] com
dsizemore 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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
kintamanimatt 11y ago
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 11y ago
  It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally buried.
  - kintamanimatt 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
- dang 11y ago
  It set off the flamewar detector.
  - homero 11y ago
    I haven't seen much shilling except sales agents disclosing
karlshea 11y ago
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.
mehdym 11y ago
They had a pretty relaxed strategy on sender domain verification. which was great for white-labeling transnational email on multiple domains. Goodbye Mandrill.
mehdym 11y ago
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?
manidoraisamy 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Can confirm. Privacy policy Item 5.1 - Previous: http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.com/privacy/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.co... 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 11y ago
    "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 11y ago
      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.
ceejayoz 11y ago
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.
codinghorror 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- parkersweb 11y ago
  Exactly what I thought - we're a small dev team who have used Mandrill on a bunch of projects that have minimal transactional email needs. A proportion of those have moved into the paying tiers, the majority stay under the free limits. The tone of the announcement, and miserly transition period leaves a pretty bitter taste that will make recommending Mailchimp in future hard.
laxk 11y ago
Does anybody need a self-hosting transactional email app with Amazon SES integration? Similar to sendy but for transactional emails.
- homero 11y ago
  Yeah but i'd need smtp, maybe a plugin for ssmtp?
  - gingerlime 11y ago
    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-email-smtp.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-em...
    - laxk 11y ago
      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/notifications.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...
      - gingerlime 11y ago
        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(?)
losvedir 11y ago
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 $20 per month." So the transactional pricing seems to be increasing about 4x as well.
- stotro 11y ago
  I just contacted the mailchimp service twice and they confirmed it to me. you have to take the monthly plan that matches your mandrill users. So if you are using mandrill to send mails to 90.000 users, you have to buy a monthly plan of 90.000 users AND the mandrill package prices, which means 450$/month for mailchimp and 4*20$ for mandrill.
  - elif 11y ago
    based on the comments on the blog post, i don't think that's the case. I think you just need to buy the minimum paid mailchimp account ($9/mo)
  - verelo 11y ago
    This cant be right (but if it is, they're morons). In this scenario, we'll need a package for millions of members. With the rough math I just did, this would make our monthly Mailchimp bill a larger cost for us than our AWS accounts monthly cost. That would be insane... Mailchimp, PLEASE CLEAR THIS UP ASAP. YOU'RE FUCKING WITH MY LIFE AND I DON'T LIKE IT OR NEED IT!
    - losvedir 11y ago
      I don't think it's right. I contacted Mandrill about it, and they pointed me to this support article[0]. > Is this cost included in my MailChimp plan? > No. Mandrill is becoming a paid add-on for monthly MailChimp accounts. Any paid monthly MailChimp plan will satisfy the new requirements. Monthly MailChimp plans start at $10/month, and you can find more information on MailChimp’s Pricing Page. Purchasing Mandrill blocks will incur monthly charges in addition to your MailChimp plan. [0] https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/217467117 https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/217467117
rwhitman 11y ago
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.
olssonm 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
whatismybrowser 11y ago
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.
- spronkey 11y ago
  To be honest, the vague statements on pricing, blatant disregard for customers, and functionality from them have sealed the switch away for me. At least this crappy company has viable competitors. Imagine what we'd be saying if e.g. Adobe did this. Oh wait..
- mrobins 11y ago
  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.
losvedir 11y ago
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/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgfEh7r11OmPiTo_7e0/viewform 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.
- eugenoprea 11y ago
  Thant's a great thing to do, Gabe! What email service are you going to use? :) PS: Subscribed!
- thebenedict 11y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, include the number of responses you got in your email. I'm curious. Thank you for organizing.
  - losvedir 11y ago
    I've got 60 so far. Unfortunately came to this thread late, so I'm not how much longer it will have traffic. Haven't heard from any ESPs yet, but will reach out to them tomorrow.
andygambles 11y ago
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.
okholy 11y ago
my short list between Amazon SES and SendGrid, please let me know your suggestions and why?
- saevarom 11y ago
  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.
okholy 11y ago
my short list between Amazon SES and SendGrid, please let me know your suggestions and why?
eugenoprea 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    I agree with you. They are essentially saying "bye" to those that used Mandrill only for the "utility" path.
- tacobepo 11y ago
  That's a good point. As a longtime Mandrill customer who sends 750,000 + emails per month through their system, I have no problem with their decision to implement a new strategy. 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).
marwann 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Better I would suggest to use email delivery services from easysendy and connect it through sendgrid / amazon ses / mailgun.
ddutra 11y ago
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.
noahowen 11y ago
This is very bad news which came from Mandrill, we had never expected for this. But, few months back migrated all my marketing setup with https://easysendy.com/ https://easysendy.com/ which is also helping me to optimize email open rate with micro-delivery through many SMTP relay severs. The migration from Mandrill to MailGun was easy for this noon. Just add Mailgun to pro account. All thanks goes to new delivery provider services from easysendy. Apart from emails, why I shifted with them, is very simple reason. I want to keep all customer data at single place, where we can keep track of all information and activity of our customers. Looking long term, they have plans to integrate social and push notifications in their product which will help us connect with our customers instantly on any device and social network. This is one of the feature, which I have been waiting for long-time, but, never got this from ESP vendors like Mailchimp. Because they are way too reluctant to adapt new technologies. RIP Mandrill :P
josscrowcroft 11y ago
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
piyushpr134 11y ago
FUCK YOU MANDRILL. FUCK YOU MAILCHIMP
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
danieltillett 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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?
sideproject 11y ago
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 11y ago
  SendGrid it is. From what I've tested, it matches almost on par with what Mandrill offers.
upshot 11y ago
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-changes/ https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill-policy-...
petercooper 11y ago
BTW, a fun new latest development.. they've banned mass mailing from Mandrill with immediate effect.
- verelo 11y ago
  do you have reference to this? No one has spoken to us and we do mass mailing in Mandrill.
  - petercooper 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      hm that sucks. We certainly do this, i wonder when they'll start to try and enforce it. This seems very unreasonable.
paulgtips 11y ago
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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
spronkey 11y ago
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.
emilyfm 11y ago
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 ...
quadrant6 11y ago
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.
stephenhamilton 11y ago
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...
giovanni_lucas 11y ago
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/

231 points by wmboy 11y ago

nbevans 11y ago

Bye Mandrill.

samet 11y ago
Agreed.

spronkey 11y ago

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

stephenhamilton 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

IgorPartola 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

mmilano 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

etjossem 11y ago

$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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
  - ROFISH 11y ago
    Definitely +1 on this. It's a great feature to see if A) emails are being sent and B) templates weren't messed up in some way. (I have had many a batch email with "{{name}" or some other templating error, heh.)

saluki 11y ago

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.

etjossem 11y ago
We're actively working to improve the dashboard and standardize UX across SendGrid - that's the design team's big push this year. 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.
mrmch 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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!

siquick 11y ago

Bye Mandrill, Hi Mailgun

wmboy 11y ago
Do you prefer Mailgun over SendGrid for any particular reason (both offer free accounts)?
- siquick 11y ago
  Never tried Sendgrid but will check it out.
  - wmboy 11y ago
    Note: Their free plan is down at the bottom of their pricing page

cmrn 11y ago

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?

garrettboatman 11y ago

Fuck this. Fuck this so fucking hard. Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you. (I'm a lil mad)

techdragon 11y ago

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.

themagician 11y ago
Postmark (https://postmarkapp.com https://postmarkapp.com)
- etjossem 11y ago
  Another price comparison. $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.
  - jamestanderson 11y ago
    Just to add: $20 w/Mailgun: 50,000 mails
    - techdragon 11y ago
      For comparison before this shitty move by MailChimp, Mandrill used to be $14 for 50000 emails.
      - 11y ago

blissofbeing 11y ago

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 11y ago
what isn't?

tomschlick 11y ago

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?!?

james33 11y ago

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.

lttlrck 11y ago

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.

homero 11y ago
Possible warrant canary?
ilamparithi 11y ago
Definitely. I noticed the tone too. Somewhat brash and arrogant.

asptimothy 11y ago

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.

imrehg 11y ago

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)

mrmch 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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).

ademup 11y ago

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).

garrettdimon 11y ago

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 11y ago
Wow this is really interesting. Poooor showing from Mailgun!!!
- jrodom 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    It's a pretty good sign that you're posting here to be fair :)
  - lucasjans 11y ago
    Can you please email me the results of this? lucas [at] agencyrevolution.com - I am considering Mailgun but am hesitant after seeing this.
- timmipetit 11y ago
  As a Mailgun customer, I can unfortunately confirm this. A lot of our clients are having problems getting mails delivered in hotmail mailboxes. This started some weeks ago, and we haven't seen any improvement since. It is getting to a point that we're working on migrating to something else right now.
  - jrodom 11y ago
    I'm sorry we let you down. If it's not too late, I'd love to get to the bottom of this today. Can you share details with me? josh [at] mailgun [dot] com

dsizemore 11y ago

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 11y ago
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

kintamanimatt 11y ago

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 11y ago
It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally buried.
- kintamanimatt 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
dang 11y ago
It set off the flamewar detector.
- homero 11y ago
  I haven't seen much shilling except sales agents disclosing

karlshea 11y ago

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.

mehdym 11y ago

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

mehdym 11y ago

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?

manidoraisamy 11y ago

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 11y ago
Can confirm. Privacy policy Item 5.1 - Previous: http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.com/privacy/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.co... 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 11y ago
  "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 11y ago
    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.

ceejayoz 11y ago

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.

codinghorror 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
parkersweb 11y ago
Exactly what I thought - we're a small dev team who have used Mandrill on a bunch of projects that have minimal transactional email needs. A proportion of those have moved into the paying tiers, the majority stay under the free limits. The tone of the announcement, and miserly transition period leaves a pretty bitter taste that will make recommending Mailchimp in future hard.

laxk 11y ago

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

homero 11y ago
Yeah but i'd need smtp, maybe a plugin for ssmtp?
- gingerlime 11y ago
  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-email-smtp.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-em...
  - laxk 11y ago
    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/notifications.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...
    - gingerlime 11y ago
      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(?)

losvedir 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- elif 11y ago
  based on the comments on the blog post, i don't think that's the case. I think you just need to buy the minimum paid mailchimp account ($9/mo)
- verelo 11y ago
  This cant be right (but if it is, they're morons). In this scenario, we'll need a package for millions of members. With the rough math I just did, this would make our monthly Mailchimp bill a larger cost for us than our AWS accounts monthly cost. That would be insane... Mailchimp, PLEASE CLEAR THIS UP ASAP. YOU'RE FUCKING WITH MY LIFE AND I DON'T LIKE IT OR NEED IT!
  - losvedir 11y ago
    I don't think it's right. I contacted Mandrill about it, and they pointed me to this support article[0]. > Is this cost included in my MailChimp plan? > No. Mandrill is becoming a paid add-on for monthly MailChimp accounts. Any paid monthly MailChimp plan will satisfy the new requirements. Monthly MailChimp plans start at $10/month, and you can find more information on MailChimp’s Pricing Page. Purchasing Mandrill blocks will incur monthly charges in addition to your MailChimp plan. [0] https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/217467117 https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/217467117

rwhitman 11y ago

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.

olssonm 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

whatismybrowser 11y ago

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.

spronkey 11y ago
To be honest, the vague statements on pricing, blatant disregard for customers, and functionality from them have sealed the switch away for me. At least this crappy company has viable competitors. Imagine what we'd be saying if e.g. Adobe did this. Oh wait..
mrobins 11y ago
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.

losvedir 11y ago

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/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgfEh7r11OmPiTo_7e0/viewform 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.

eugenoprea 11y ago
Thant's a great thing to do, Gabe! What email service are you going to use? :) PS: Subscribed!
thebenedict 11y ago
If you don't mind sharing, include the number of responses you got in your email. I'm curious. Thank you for organizing.
- losvedir 11y ago
  I've got 60 so far. Unfortunately came to this thread late, so I'm not how much longer it will have traffic. Haven't heard from any ESPs yet, but will reach out to them tomorrow.

andygambles 11y ago

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.

okholy 11y ago

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

saevarom 11y ago
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.

okholy 11y ago

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

eugenoprea 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  I agree with you. They are essentially saying "bye" to those that used Mandrill only for the "utility" path.
tacobepo 11y ago
That's a good point. As a longtime Mandrill customer who sends 750,000 + emails per month through their system, I have no problem with their decision to implement a new strategy. 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).

marwann 11y ago

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 11y ago
Better I would suggest to use email delivery services from easysendy and connect it through sendgrid / amazon ses / mailgun.

ddutra 11y ago

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.

noahowen 11y ago

This is very bad news which came from Mandrill, we had never expected for this. But, few months back migrated all my marketing setup with https://easysendy.com/ https://easysendy.com/ which is also helping me to optimize email open rate with micro-delivery through many SMTP relay severs. The migration from Mandrill to MailGun was easy for this noon. Just add Mailgun to pro account. All thanks goes to new delivery provider services from easysendy. Apart from emails, why I shifted with them, is very simple reason. I want to keep all customer data at single place, where we can keep track of all information and activity of our customers. Looking long term, they have plans to integrate social and push notifications in their product which will help us connect with our customers instantly on any device and social network. This is one of the feature, which I have been waiting for long-time, but, never got this from ESP vendors like Mailchimp. Because they are way too reluctant to adapt new technologies. RIP Mandrill :P

josscrowcroft 11y ago

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

piyushpr134 11y ago

FUCK YOU MANDRILL. FUCK YOU MAILCHIMP

deleted 11y ago
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danieltillett 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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?

sideproject 11y ago

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 11y ago
SendGrid it is. From what I've tested, it matches almost on par with what Mandrill offers.

upshot 11y ago

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-changes/ https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill-policy-...

petercooper 11y ago

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

verelo 11y ago
do you have reference to this? No one has spoken to us and we do mass mailing in Mandrill.
- petercooper 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    hm that sucks. We certainly do this, i wonder when they'll start to try and enforce it. This seems very unreasonable.

paulgtips 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago

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spronkey 11y ago

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.

emilyfm 11y ago

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 ...

quadrant6 11y ago

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.

stephenhamilton 11y ago

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...

giovanni_lucas 11y ago

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