Important Changes to Mandrill

$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. :)

Wow. Death to Mandrill. That sucks so much...

MailChimp's pricing is best suited for companies that send a lot of bulk messages to a relatively constant number of users (subscribers). This includes weekly newsletters, catalogues, etc. In order to justify the cost, you need to send at least a couple of bulk emails to your entire userbase every month.

Mandrill was best suited for companies that usually don't send anything to their entire userbase, only random notifications and verifications for individual users. This probably includes most non-annoying web services. The only time they need to notify everyone at once is if they'd had a security breach or if they're shutting down.

I'm not sure whether there's a large enough intersection between these two sets to justify treating the latter as an "add-on" to the former.

Of course it's MailChimp's decision to make, and they might have found that the first set of customers actually make them the most money. But given that people around here seem to be increasingly wary of bulk email of any kind, I wonder if that will continue to be true in the future.

That's correct - you also need to have a paid MailChimp account. With SendGrid, use of the marketing product is the add-on (not the other way around).