from Hacker News

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

by wmboy on 2/24/16, 10:21 PM with 204 comments

  • by losvedir on 2/25/16, 9:30 AM

    I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this:

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

    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.

  • by techdragon on 2/25/16, 12:14 AM

    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.

  • by olssonm on 2/25/16, 7:36 AM

    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).

  • by manidoraisamy on 2/25/16, 3:24 AM

    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.

  • by mmilano on 2/24/16, 11:34 PM

    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.

  • by rwhitman on 2/25/16, 6:13 AM

    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.

  • by tomschlick on 2/25/16, 12:34 AM

    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?!?

  • by losvedir on 2/25/16, 5:27 AM

    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.

  • by spronkey on 2/25/16, 9:28 PM

    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.

  • by lttlrck on 2/25/16, 12:51 AM

    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.

  • by codinghorror on 2/25/16, 4:32 AM

    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?

  • by mrmch on 2/25/16, 1:43 AM

    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

  • by etjossem on 2/24/16, 11:36 PM

    $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. :)

  • by kintamanimatt on 2/25/16, 2:07 AM

    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?

  • by james33 on 2/25/16, 12:39 AM

    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.

  • by whatismybrowser on 2/25/16, 7:55 AM

    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 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.

  • by ademup on 2/25/16, 1:44 AM

    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).

  • by ceejayoz on 2/25/16, 3:38 AM

    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.

  • by asptimothy on 2/25/16, 1:13 AM

    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.

  • by garrettboatman on 2/25/16, 12:13 AM

    Fuck this. Fuck this so fucking hard.

    Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you.

    (I'm a lil mad)

  • by IgorPartola on 2/24/16, 11:21 PM

    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 which is a replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.

  • by saluki on 2/24/16, 11:43 PM

    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.

  • by imrehg on 2/25/16, 1:32 AM

    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/ (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)

  • by dsizemore on 2/25/16, 2:06 AM

    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.

  • by spronkey on 2/24/16, 11:16 PM

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

  • by upshot on 2/25/16, 2:12 PM

    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-...

  • by garrettdimon on 2/25/16, 1:55 AM

    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

  • by josscrowcroft on 2/25/16, 11:00 AM

    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

  • by danieltillett on 2/25/16, 12:53 PM

    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.

  • by karlshea on 2/25/16, 2:18 AM

    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.

  • by sideproject on 2/25/16, 2:11 PM

    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.

  • by blissofbeing on 2/25/16, 12:21 AM

    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.

  • by marwann on 2/25/16, 10:15 AM

    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.

  • by siquick on 2/24/16, 11:52 PM

    Bye Mandrill, Hi Mailgun

  • by mehdym on 2/25/16, 3:18 AM

    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?

  • by andygambles on 2/25/16, 8:36 AM

    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.

  • by giovanni_lucas on 3/8/16, 3:50 PM

    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/

  • by nbevans on 2/24/16, 10:30 PM

    Bye Mandrill.

  • by mehdym on 2/25/16, 2:42 AM

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

    Goodbye Mandrill.

  • by stephenhamilton on 3/7/16, 4:18 AM

    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...

  • by eugenoprea on 2/25/16, 9:24 AM

    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.

  • by piyushpr134 on 2/25/16, 12:31 PM

    FUCK YOU MANDRILL. FUCK YOU MAILCHIMP

  • by ddutra on 2/25/16, 10:41 AM

    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.

  • by quadrant6 on 3/3/16, 3:43 AM

    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.

  • by emilyfm on 2/25/16, 11:26 PM

    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 ...

  • by paulgtips on 2/25/16, 5:20 PM

    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.

  • by laxk on 2/25/16, 5:10 AM

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

  • by petercooper on 2/25/16, 4:30 PM

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

  • by okholy on 2/25/16, 9:10 AM

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