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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

#181

Post by stotro »

techdragon wrote: post #180
stotro wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This confirms my worst fears. We just added a large wave of new email addresses to one of our routine emails, taking it from 2k per day to 17k per day. We currently expect to pay approximately $75 to $100 USD per month with this volume of email. With the new "MailChimp pricing", this will cost us $150 for a MailChimp account with enough subscribers, then between $270 and $400 USD per month in data packs. So from abou…

ok, i just received a mail from mailchimp that the information provided to me by two of their service agents is indeed wrong. You really "just" need a monthly paid account, which still is pointless.

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

#182

Post by stotro »

losvedir wrote: post #179
verelo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cant be right (but if it is, they're morons). In this scenario, we'll need a package for millions of members. With the rough math I just did, this would make our monthly Mailchimp bill a larger cost for us than our AWS accounts monthly cost. That would be insane... Mailchimp, PLEASE CLEAR THIS UP ASAP. YOU'RE FUCKING WITH MY LIFE AND I DON'T LIKE IT OR NEED IT!

I don't think it's right. I contacted Mandrill about it, and they pointed me to this support article[0]. > Is this cost included in my MailChimp plan? > No. Mandrill is becoming a paid add-on for monthly MailChimp accounts. Any paid monthly MailChimp plan will satisfy the new requirements. Monthly MailChimp plans start at $10/month, and you can find more information on MailChimp’s Pricing Page. Purchasing Mandrill bl…

correct, the information provided to me seems indeed to be wrong, since a third(!) support person contacted me, stating that you indeed "just" need a monthly account, no matter how big it is.

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

#183

Post by petercooper »

verelo wrote: post #176
petercooper wrote: post #145

BTW, a fun new latest development.. they've banned mass mailing from Mandrill with immediate effect.

do you have reference to this? No one has spoken to us and we do mass mailing in Mandrill.

Mailchimp sent a further email yesterday saying they had updated their TOS and AUP with immediate effect. So I decided to re-read the AUP: http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/

.. and it now says, under Prohibited Actions: "Send bulk emails, meaning emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content, through Mandrill."

I don't think it became news because not many people are as crazy as me and read pages full of legalese when they change :-D

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

#184

Post by meirelles »

losvedir wrote: post #112

I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this: 1. Any HN user trying to figure out wh…

Apparently after Mandrill announcement, the SparkPost raised the free tier to 100K/month (from 10K). Pretty generous limit. They have a very good reputation.

https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing

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

#185

Post by philfrasty »

jrperina wrote: post #164
losvedir wrote: post #112

I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this: 1. Any HN user trying to figure out wh…

Hi this is Joshua Perina, CEO of Elastic Email. http://elasticemail.com has a very simliar pricing structure to Mandrill (their old pricing) including 25000 emails per month free. We've been around since 2010, are growing fast and have sent billions of emails. Plus, we love our customers. Mandrill refugees are welcome!

wasn't able to figure out where your company is based anywhere on your site or linked social-profiles.

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

#186

Post by ac3522 »

verelo wrote: post #177
ac3522 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postmark engineer here! We are at the high end on pricing, but we constantly hear from customers about how great our deliverability and support is. Also if you purchase in bulk, our pricing becomes very competitive very fast. Since it’s a straight pay for what you use model with no monthly plans required, we think it’s a lot simpler to use.

Thats really nice, but when you're me, who sends around 30 million emails / month, that pricing gets insane (as in, more than my AWS bill). So yeah...i'd love to entertain the idea but its just not possible.

Our lowest advertised rate is $.25 per 1000 for 5MM emails. After that you need to talk to us, but obviously we work with companies all the time.

(Sendgrid's lowest advertised rate is $.45/1000)

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

meirelles wrote: post #184
losvedir wrote: post #112

I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this: 1. Any HN user trying to figure out wh…

Apparently after Mandrill announcement, the SparkPost raised the free tier to 100K/month (from 10K). Pretty generous limit. They have a very good reputation. https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by wcossick »

cristoirmac wrote: post #167
techdragon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We tweaked our pricing today so 100k free and fixed the confusing plans - check it out https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing We have been doing transactional email for 15 years for the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, Zillow smaller developers and startups and are not going anywhere - we are very developer friendly. Also check out https://developers.sparkpost.com

Which pricing is correct? https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing or http://pages.sparkpost.com/sparkpost-vs-mandrill

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

#189

Post by codeyf »

losvedir wrote: post #112

I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this: 1. Any HN user trying to figure out wh…

Hey folks! I'm actually one of our support engineers for our on-prem biz unit, however I came across this post and wanted to post a quick ack on it. Our SP team is working hard on a focused response to the ticket you sent in. In the mean time, we have a blog post that touches specifically on Sparkpost as an alternative to Mandrill, following their announcement:

https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/mandrill-alternative-sparkpos...

In addition, as mentioned by meirelles a few hours ago, the free tier has been raised from 10k/month to 100k as part of a pricing adjustment which was planned prior to yesterday's events.

So stay tuned for more info!

-Codey

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

#190

Post by cnagele »

hvenk wrote: post #168
cnagele wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking of "email delivery as a commodity" is the first mistake people make - all ESPs are not created equal. If this were the case, there would not be such a huge variance in not only getting to the Inbox, but how fast you get to the Inbox. This is why we've focused on transactional only, knowing fully well we will grow slower as a business (and why we are more expensive), but have superior delivery since transacti…

SparkPost/MessageSystems claims to have the highest inbox rate in the space, and their customer list backs this up. It's much more impressive than Asana, Desk, and Minecraft (think LinkedIn, Facebook, Zillow, Pinterest, etc). They absolutely recognize that ESPs are a commodity, even reselling delivery to ExactTarget, Responsys, etc, as the "pipe". It's hard to believe your reasoning when the industry leader is saying…

SparkPost's claims are misleading here.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc do not use Sparkpost, they use their on-premise installable software that many ESPs use and pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, which indeed is a dumb pipe MTA. Those big companies still have a full-time staff managing delivery and infrastructure. It's basically a replacement to Postfix, not a full fledge, multi-datacenter, multi-tenant hosted application to support many thousands of concurrent customers.

A hosted "product" is a different animal. Sure, it needs to have great delivery, but the work that goes into making it easy to troubleshoot when you have issues, minimize developer work, and bring useful data back into your application is something else. This only becomes painfully obvious when you deeply rely on email for your business.

There is a reason why Sparkpost left Postmark out of their comparison. We have the same data sources (eData), and we came out on top.

[1] http://pages.sparkpost.com/Big-Rewards-WP-Download-Landing-P...

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