FUCK YOU MANDRILL. FUCK YOU MAILCHIMP
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Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
131–140 of 213 posts
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#132As 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.
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#133$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. :)
I need to send around 180k emails. Is that 2 x 100k for $19.95 ?
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#134For 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
Wow this is really interesting. Poooor showing from Mailgun!!!
As a Mailgun customer, I can unfortunately confirm this. A lot of our clients are having problems getting mails delivered in hotmail mailboxes. This started some weeks ago, and we haven't seen any improvement since. It is getting to a point that we're working on migrating to something else right now.
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#135I'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.
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#136I 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-...
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "nons…
I'm trying to figure out if you can just stay on the Express plan and pay the overages, given that the overages are 1/3 that of the higher plans. Very odd pricing, for sure.
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#138As 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…
I'm not a user of it, so please excuse the question, but what is the worst part of this?
The worst part is their decision to make this change in the first place, combined with the big hike in pricing. They're lumping two completely different types of customers into one: transactional emails and newsletter/marketing. They are not even close to the same thing, and the vast majority of people using only Mandrill (transactional emails) will probably never use the MailChimp product. If they wanted to, they would have already signed up for MailChimp.
Mandrill used to be pretty cheap and it was free small services that didn't need to send more than 12k emails per month. Now they're forcing everyone to pay in blocks of 25,000 sent emails for $20. That means if I have a very small website and only send out 500 emails per month, I'm paying the same amount as someone who sends 25,000 emails in a month. That amounts to $0.04 and $0.0008 cents per-email respectively, so sending my 500 emails costs 50x more per-email than someone sending 25,000 emails. The pricing system just doesn't make sense and the lack of a free tier is unfortunate.
Another bad part is simply migrating to a new service. Most users can probably migrate in under an hour if they're only using Mandrill as a relay, but there are obviously users who use all of Mandrill's services (i.e. templates) and the migration will take a lot longer.
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a user of it, so please excuse the question, but what is the worst part of this?
The worst part is their decision to make this change in the first place, combined with the big hike in pricing. They're lumping two completely different types of customers into one: transactional emails and newsletter/marketing. They are not even close to the same thing, and the vast majority of people using only Mandrill (transactional emails) will probably never use the MailChimp product. If they wanted to, they wo…
I currently use Mandrill on about 6 projects, a few of them use templates, so I've got the added complexity of dealing with that, which sucks
But, I'm not going to give Mailchimp my business ever again after this stunt. I'm going to bite the bullet and port the templates over to Sendgrid.
As it is, Mandrill basically wants us to create new Mailchimp accounts, then manually copy and paste our templates (as if that's an appropriate solution to ask a paying customer to do). If I'm going to do that, I'm just going to leave and take my business elsewhere.
It will take longer, but I'm optimistic it won't be that bad. I'm sure there are blog posts on template migration from Mandrill to Sendgrid. If not, I'll write one when I do it
Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but i'd need smtp, maybe a plugin for ssmtp?
I don't use SES, but a quick search led me to this page[0] which suggests they do have an SMTP gateway. What I'm more curious about is things like deliverability stats (in aggregate and for individual emails), which is the biggest value-add Mandrill provides us right now. [0] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-em...
They have Bounces, Complaints and Delivery notifications[0]. Is it what you need?
or are you talking about open/read email notifications?
[0] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...