Important Changes to Mandrill

Newsletters and transactional emails are not the same service. I signed up a client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now I need to explain to them why they need a second monthly newsletter vendor subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was totally free until recently.

Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.

I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.

I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.

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.

We've been referring clients to mandrill for a long time on many different project and although a few have had enough success to hit the level where they start paying, for the most part it's been just a giveaway. It doesn't make it any less painful for those clients that we now need to switch (especially the few that are using the inbound features - ugh) but I can see where they're coming from in this change.

$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. :)

Time to explore other options.