RIP Mandrill - Mailchimp is killing off Mandrill

CCarter

CCarter

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Another one bites the dust. RIP Mandrill. CEO literally said to go with Amazon instead of Mandrill if you aren't interested in Mailchimp:

Going forward, all Mandrill users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account and verify ownership of all sending domains. Here's the timeline: Starting 3/16, all new Mandrill users will create accounts through MailChimp, and current Mandrill users can merge their existing Mandrill account with a monthly MailChimp account. Current users will have until 4/27 to merge their accounts.

..

"Startup developers looking for a cheap, reliable transactional service may want to consider Amazon SES."

Sauce: http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/​

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Basically I got an email which told me in 21 days I need to head over to Mailchimp and pay some monthly price. Ironically I'm still working on a $100 total spend I deposited in may of 2015 if memory serves me right.

Looking into my current account, I was getting charged $0.20 per thousand emails sent, which is not bad (first 12K emails a month are free). It comes out to $0.0002 per email. With Mailchimp's "pay as you go" it's comes out to over 25,000 emails being $250 or $0.01 per email. Now alot of people won't notice this cause it looks like fractions of a penny, but that's a HUGE difference. Going from $0.0002 per email to $0.01 is a price increase of 4,900%.

That's crazy at any level. So the only logical solution in their minds is to use one of the monthly plans based on subscribers. So from paying $100 in May 2015, and still having $60 works credits left, to now paying a monthly fee... They are selling these mandrill blocks at 25,000 emails for $20 per month - making it $0.0008 per email (still a 4x increase) - and that's ONTOP of the mailchimp monthly fee which will be required.

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They are also discontinuing their reseller arrangement with Heroku, and going full on ecommerce solution for mailing. Anyone looking to send emails cheaply without having to waste time with Mailchimp's whatever it is the fuck they do, will have to go with Amazon SES or email.net (these boys are a bit gangster with it - shoutout to @flaw3d for putting me on this).

The best part was they sent this email out on a Wednesday after work hours, might as well been a Friday afternoon or a holiday weekend, cause that's less of a PR nightmare.

The borg assimilation will start March 16th - that's when merging with mailchimp account starts, and the last day of the old Mandrill will be April 27, 2016.

Here are some options I stole from VentureHarbour.com for options to consider:

Cost at 40,000 emails per month:
AmazonSES – $4 / month
Mandrill – $5.60 / month
SendInBlue - $7.37 / month
SendGrid – $9.95 / month
Mailgun – $15 / month
MailJet – $17.49 / month
Postmark – $30 / month

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Another to consider is:
EmailOne - $27 / month for UNLIMITED SENDING (upto 80,000 subscribers - they have more plans)

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I can't complain too much it was a good run - but I'm still pissed cause now I got a ton of work to do to move a TON processes to a new provider.

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Just got their email now.. Mandrill is gone.. and not sure if anyone heard but Kimonolabs is shutting down as well.
 
I am using sendgrid and I have to put a vote in for them. I am on their free plan mind you. Called the phone line (hard to find) the other day with a question. Got a straight, no BS answer that got me on my way from a down to earth dude. good dashboard, good service, would recommend.
 
I've just been learning about alternative email services. Recently I heard about Sendy. How does that stack up to the others in this thread?
 
Isnt sendy just a tool to send the email, like through Amazon SES?
 
Bummed out about this update.

If they had a basic $5/month plan for even 250 emails/month, I'd be okay with that. I've just been using the free plan for quite awhile; I'd gladly pay.

However, with all the complications I'm out.
 
eliquid said:
Isnt sendy just a tool to send the email, like through Amazon SES?
Click to expand...
Yes. I was thinking those options listed above were the same. But it sounds like those are their own services.
 
Now maybe it's just me but putting the pissed off thing aside, it would be funny/interesting to see how many will just convert to the paid plan, simply becourse it is either to much work for their lazy asses to move the hole thing to another provider or becourse they can't be bother with doing research on alternatives.
I honestly belive that a significant ammount of peoplpe will stay on their service just for the convienience and then a 4900% price increase is a dang good business move, although maybe not the wisest to throw it all at once at people but who knows.
 
Looks like there must be a good volume moving from Mandrill over to SendGrid, they are probably having a great day revenue wise:

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This is a bitch for me. I have used laravel for a ton of projects, and that mandril bundling was dope AF. So now I've got a ton of shit to move over, luckily laravel also has mailgun and shit, so it won't be too painful.
 
Soooooo Around 11am or noon yesterday Mandrill shutdown and rendered ALL outbound links in ALL emails ever sent on behalf their clients dead. I got the surprise alert when some customers let me know the links were dead in yesterday's SW newsletter and past ones.

But here is where it gets funny, I looked in my Analytics this morning and I saw clicks from the dead campaigns. All of a sudden all the links work again. I guess they decided to reverse the tomfoolery of killing off all the links cause of the backlash it caused. I've got newsletters people are still clicking links on from a year+ back, so that would have cause traffic drops altogether. It's interesting cause the only reason the links were redirecting through mandrill was to track clicks.

Anyways, Game Over.
 
Jeebus I didn't know sendgrid was so hard to get an account approved
Tried twice (registered with my company email, address, phone) and they couldn't provision the account. Sent an email asking what i need to do they can't give me an answer...Talk about shitty so what's the second recommendation ?
 
Goldorak said:
Jeebus I didn't know sendgrid was so hard to get an account approved
Tried twice (registered with my company email, address, phone) and they couldn't provision the account. Sent an email asking what i need to do they can't give me an answer...Talk about shitty so what's the second recommendation ?
Click to expand...

Mailgun is pretty solid.
 
After bigging up sendgrid, they turned to shit on me. Didn't go too far down the road with MailJet but what I saw I really liked.
 
I've used Mailgun before, was happy. I'm not sure what the problem is with Sendgrid. I registered and was rocking and rolling. Signed up and integrated it within 30 mins to an hour tops. I've had zero issues out of it, with consistent sending dripping out all throughout the day and with large blasts occasionally as well. Solid reporting and all of the whitelist/blacklist features you'd expect, bounce monitoring with parameters to save you from hurting your scores, etc.
 
To clarify, my issues were on the support end. I also ended up trying to use them as an email marketing service and their dashboard is not great. Switched to Active Campaign and couldn't be happier.

Should have clarified earlier
 
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