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

blog.mandrill.com

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

#151

Post by akor »

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. :)

FWIW We left SendGrid because it was impossible to troubleshoot sends. When asked SendGrid's response was email subjects are coming but for now you can tag your emails with tags/categories. I know it's probably not simple to implement but it might be worth something to you guys in terms of business. It looks like subjects are still not supported unless I'm missing them. I'm looking at the "Activity" screen.

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

#152

Post by etjossem »

HugoDias wrote: post #27
wmboy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think NOW it's the time to build that feature, ASAP. cc @etjossem

We're discussing what it would take to build it right now. It's absolutely one of the things people appreciated about Mandrill, and I know we want to ease the transition as much as possible.

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

#153

Post by elif »

stotro wrote: post #143
losvedir wrote: post #89

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 mor…

I just contacted the mailchimp service twice and they confirmed it to me. you have to take the monthly plan that matches your mandrill users. So if you are using mandrill to send mails to 90.000 users, you have to buy a monthly plan of 90.000 users AND the mandrill package prices, which means 450$/month for mailchimp and 4*20$ for mandrill.

based on the comments on the blog post, i don't think that's the case. I think you just need to buy the minimum paid mailchimp account ($9/mo)

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

#154

Post by cnagele »

etjossem wrote: post #35
themagician wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postmark ( https://postmarkapp.com )

Another price comparison. $20 w/Postmark: 13,000 mails $20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails Postmark also doesn't offer the option to upgrade to a dedicated IP later on, which many larger companies find is better for deliverability. Full disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.

Three things to add here:

1. Our pricing reflects the quality of delivery due to being transactional only. With much higher engagement rates, our speed and delivery is superior. Customers never have to wait behind a bulk campaign.

2. Dedicated IPs are a way for ESPs to pawn responsibility onto customers instead of themselves (and get a few more bucks in the process). They only make sense if you are sending a huge volume, but we do offer dedicated IPs for free for higher volume accounts. Instead, most people use our shared IPs and benefit from the volume of great engagement to get their emails delivered to the inbox faster.

More details: https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...

3. We're the only ones to offer an extended full content history of every message for 45 days. You can search and see the exact email sent at no cost, which comes in handy when sending so many unique messages.

Full disclosure: I'm the founder of Postmark. Any questions, just email me: chris@wildbit.com.

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

#155

Post by etjossem »

gderebecki wrote: post #122
etjossem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another price comparison. $20 w/Postmark: 13,000 mails $20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails Postmark also doesn't offer the option to upgrade to a dedicated IP later on, which many larger companies find is better for deliverability. Full disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.

Problem with SendGrid is if you want send more that 100k emails. $95 w/SendGrid: 200,000 mails $95 w/mailgun: 200,000 mails

At the high end, we throw in a dedicated IP for free (a deliverability feature most high volume users need). Mailgun charges $59 extra per month for that, even as they level out their base price to be comparable to ours.

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

#156

Post by etjossem »

losvedir wrote: post #130
thebenedict wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind sharing, include the number of responses you got in your email. I'm curious. Thank you for organizing.

I've got 60 so far. Unfortunately came to this thread late, so I'm not how much longer it will have traffic. Haven't heard from any ESPs yet, but will reach out to them tomorrow.

Hi - Eric from SendGrid here. Our CEO Sameer just greenlit a 10% discount for former Mandrill customers. We're working on a set of tools for automatic migration - but we wanted to get a prompt response out too:

https://sendgrid.com/blog/hey-mandrill-customers-wed-love-th...

Straight to the discount: https://go.sendgrid.com/switch.html

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

#157

Post by tacobepo »

eugenoprea wrote: post #111

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…

That's a good point. As a longtime Mandrill customer who sends 750,000 + emails per month through their system, I have no problem with their decision to implement a new strategy.

What disappoints me is the way they've chosen to go about this -- specifically the fact that they've left us 3 weeks before these changes take effect.

That shows a lack of respect for their customers -- not just the "bad" ones and those looking for a free service, but all of us.

In making a change of this magnitude, they needed to allow more time between announcement and implementation and they needed to be much more clear up front about what the updated pricing structure will be (which they still have not done for high volumes).

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

#158

Post by jordanthoms »

mrmch wrote: post #76
techdragon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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'd be very surprised if running the database to store that information is the major cost for running the service, and at any rate I'd say your pricing should be a good match for the value you provide to customers, not your costs for providing that value.

I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.

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

#159

Post by spronkey »

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.

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

#160

Post by spronkey »

manidoraisamy wrote: post #114
spronkey wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

"your Subscribers' email address, credit card information, purchase history" - These are super sensitive! It takes more than 3 months of legal process and convincing to get our customers to share these under strict data privacy clause. And here comes mailchimp and want to sniff it under the hood in the name of migration. They will literally land us in jail, if we don't migrate.

Yeah, this is a very big change in policy, and I suspect it might catch out Mandrill customers who don't read the fine print. The privacy policies for a couple of web applications I work with, for example, are incompatible with this new policy.
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