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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?