Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.mandrill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 213 posts

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

#82

Post by techdragon »

dancablam wrote: post #39
techdragon wrote: post #20

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…

FWIW We're switching to Sparkpost (I'm not affiliated with Sparkpost). They do the transactional email for the big dogs like Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc and have a pretty simple UI. Just throwing that out there for all the fellow Mandrill refugees.

I just checked out Sparkpost, and unfortunately, they seem to have a crippling price discrepancy. Their new "express" plan is sort of comparable to what Mandrill charged, but as soon as I grow to the point where I need more, they are x3 the price. Not sure what they were thinking with that sort of thing, are they trying to discourage customers from growing their email volume on the platform?

I find this sort of "nonsensical pricing" very off putting. If your pricing page is so obviously 'wtf' like this, how can I take them seriously, even if they do the emails for Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, they could be the secret real host for Gmail for all it matters to me... Their pricing page tells me they have a screw loose.

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

#83

Post by kintamanimatt »

codinghorror wrote: post #81
kintamanimatt wrote: post #60

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?

It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally buried.

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.

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

#84

Post by spronkey »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #83
codinghorror wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally buried.

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.

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.

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

#85

Post by spronkey »

codinghorror wrote: post #80

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…

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.

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

#87

Post by spronkey »

manidoraisamy wrote: post #74

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…

Can confirm. Privacy policy Item 5.1 - Previous: http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.co... vs new: 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.

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

#88

Post by spronkey »

wmboy wrote: post #9
etjossem wrote: post #7

$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. :)

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).

CSS inlining as well - last time we looked SendGrid did not have this functionality.

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

#89

Post by losvedir »

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.

Post reply on HN