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Mandrill’s Betrayal

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Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#41

Post by ceejayoz »

fweespeech wrote: post #7
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mailchimp doesn't exactly do "bulk emails", they do newsletters. There are lots of things that fall in between say a weekly email to 5k people (typical newsletter email) and a password reset (typical transactional email) that people used Mandrill for and now are rightly pissed. I have a friend with a service that sends out 10k-ish customized mealplans each week to their paying customers (each email is fairly unique g…

> Or imagine something like a system that alerts people when X band announces a concert date in Y town. Lots of people subscribe to get an email notification about that so it's 1 email to 500 people in Duluth. Not exactly a newsletter, not exactly transactional. That is bulk email, fyi. > I have a friend with a service that sends out 10k-ish customized mealplans each week to their paying customers (each email is fair…

> They told you it was for transactional email. I'm not sure how you concluded that meant "bulk mail" was okay.

It's explicitly stated to be OK in their own FAQ:

https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206251597-Wha...

> you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too

and on http://mandrill.com/about/

> Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#42

Post by mangeletti »

adenner wrote: post #8

As a replacement consider mailgun ( http://www.mailgun.com ). I have used their free tier before when I had to send mail for a side project.

+ 1

We use Mailgun at work, and I can attest to its consistency and performance in inbound mail processing. Our webhook is consistently hit within about 1 second when I send a test email to our app's email.

I will say that Mailgun's UI could use a little bit of help. There are a number of things that make it feel half baked, but in terms of functionality, as aforementioned, it's not lacking.

We were, hitherto, considering the possibility of using Mandrill for outbound mail, only because they seemed to offer more spam folder avoidance knowledge and analytical data, while Mailgun was (and is) surely preferable for inbound... that switch will never happen now.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#44

Post by jqueryin »

Big win for Mailgun, huge loss for MailChimp. They just stabbed developers in the back.

Take note kids: this is a shining example of how not to market such a large product/service change.

What a fiasco. Directly going against their About Page, failing to update their pricing page to indicate the change.. it's all bad.

I'm in the camp of everyone else where the TOS change is forcing my startup leave.

The net negative effect is that I'll likely start moving off of MailChimp for marketing emails as well. They've already broken my trust.

Their pricing model is a sham anyways: paying for list maintenance is utter BS. It's a small multi-kilobyte file if you're not actually using it.

I've taken to exporting and clearing certain lists at intervals to keep costs down. In reality, I should simply never have done user data collection with MailChimp to begin with.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#45

Post by mangeletti »

Mailchimp has a made a terrible mistake.

Firstly:

Before, you could get "up to 12k emails per month" for free.

Now, you get 2k free sends once (for dev), and then have to pay $9.95/mo.

This all sounds actually great, so far (although, I think $4.95/mo would have been a better bottom-tier plan - the goal is to get rid of users that don't pay anything but send 12k emails per month). $9.95/mo is affordable to any startup, and it's sustainable (vs paying accounts having to cover the cost for the hundreds of thousands of users sending millions of emails for free).

The mistake they made was in doing anything else besides this. If they had simply changed the pricing like this, but left everything else alone, they would double their profit in 5 minutes while only pissing off the customers that aren't ever going to pay anyway.

Instead, they did what they did, and now they're no better than TWTR.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#46

Post by [deleted] »

jessaustin wrote: post #2

This indignation seems a bit oversold. Part of that is quoting the bulk prohibition on Mandrill without quoting the explanation that immediately follows: Mandrill is designed for transactional email. Please use MailChimp for your bulk sending needs. Anyone who was using Mandrill for bulk mailing will now need to use MailChimp, which should have been the case anyway. Maybe someone misunderstood the different purposes…

[deleted]

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#47

Post by nhangen »

jqueryin wrote: post #44

Big win for Mailgun, huge loss for MailChimp. They just stabbed developers in the back. Take note kids: this is a shining example of how not to market such a large product/service change. What a fiasco. Directly going against their About Page, failing to update their pricing page to indicate the change.. it's all bad. I'm in the camp of everyone else where the TOS change is forcing my startup leave. The net negative…

This is where we're at too. We've long been evangelizing Mailchimp and Mandrill in our product, and as a result have sent plenty of customers their way. In fact, our product almost relies on them as a pair.

Now, because of the ToS, we have to remove it from our product and port our users somewhere else...and fast.

We also have to port our own servers to another service, and fast.

I remember the day we finally had enough subscribers to actually start paying Mailchimp money, and now all I can think about is how much disdain I have for them. Unless they reverse course on this issue, we will be shouting "down with Mailchimp" from the rooftops to all of our customers.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#49

Post by mijoharas »

jqueryin wrote: post #44

Big win for Mailgun, huge loss for MailChimp. They just stabbed developers in the back. Take note kids: this is a shining example of how not to market such a large product/service change. What a fiasco. Directly going against their About Page, failing to update their pricing page to indicate the change.. it's all bad. I'm in the camp of everyone else where the TOS change is forcing my startup leave. The net negative…

Thanks, after reading this I was just looking for a service to migrate to from Mandrill, and Mailgun looks great!
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