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Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

As 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 they will backflip on this, who should I migrate to, I've honestly been using mandrill for years and have no idea who offers comparable services because I was so fucking happy with mandrill I didn't need to look elsewhere... I hope a mandrill employee is on HN because if this actually happens they're going to lose 10 paying customer accounts when I find someone else hope your shitty management plan is accounting for loss of goodwill and loss of customers.

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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.

Signed up for a couple services to check them out... sparkpost is looking like a top candidate so far.

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 "nonsensical pricing" very off putting. If your pricing page is so obviously 'wtf' like this, how can I take them seriously, even if they do the emails for Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, they could be the secret real host for Gmail for all it matters to me... Their pricing page tells me they have a screw loose.

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.

SparkPost just updated their pricing - now the free tier is 100k a month, and there are two other plans that are way simpler and more cost effective. Seems like they heard feedback about their pricing.

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

See that's the sort of pricing I expect when I hear "The guys that send all of Twitter's email". Promptly letting me know that you cleaned up your pricing is a nice touch.

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

We were midway through our pricing update at the time - but both pages should now have the latest prices, including our 100K free tier. Please try it out and if you have questions you can find us at developers.sparkpost.com and slack.sparkpost.com

they have changed their pricing plans, you can check it here https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing

To save you some time, we have a blog post covering the criteria to use: http://blog.sendwithus.com/which-email-service-provider-shou...

I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.

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 transactional email has a much higher engagement rate and reputation with ISPs.

The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.

Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.

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 something different.

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...

I haven't used Mandrill extensively so I don't exactly know how it compares, but I've had a lot of success with Mailgun. That said, I've heard great things about SendGrid as well.

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.

Just to add:

$20 w/Mailgun: 50,000 mails

For comparison before this shitty move by MailChimp, Mandrill used to be $14 for 50000 emails.

For comparison after this shitty move by MailChimp, Mandrill will be $60 for 50,000 emails (2 x 25k blocks @ $20 + $20 minimum plan on mailchimp).

50,001 will then cost you $80 (another block)

also interesting that their pricing page[0] still doesn't reflect the new pricing...

[0] http://mandrill.com/pricing/

Can you talk about why SendGrid over MailGun?

SendGrid is competitively priced - as @jamestanderson mentioned, $20 goes twice as far. Mailgun doesn't offer a marketing product at all, and I am not sure if they provide the 24/7 support we do.

At the 40k+ volume levels, you're also going to get a complimentary dedicated IP, which means better deliverability. You can get that at Mailgun too, but it's a $59 surcharge every month.

Finally, the InboxTrail comparison posted elsewhere in this thread shows Mailgun getting flagged as spam 37.5% of the time.

There are many factors that impact deliverability that aren't reflected in the type of simple test InboxTrail conducts. Like most ESPs, your reputation builds on Mailgun as you send with us. If for whatever reason you are experiencing a deliverability problem, you can always reach out to us and we'll help you with any issues you have. We support many large and fast growing customers who are all seeing a >99% delivery rate.

Our support team is here to help 24/7. We have a great team here that is proud of the work we do for our customers.

Disclosure: I lead product development at Mailgun.

> If for whatever reason you are experiencing a deliverability problem, you can always reach out to us and we'll help you with any issues you have.

As a Mailgun user, I can confirm that first hand.

Yup, me too. I had problems when I started using the service (some providers didn't accept the mail). Everything was immediately resolved.

To respond to the Mailgun developer above slash below - the InboxTrail result might not be reflective of all your service, but you're selling a premium service - 37.5% spam flagging on any of your active IPs is seriously offputting.

We're looking into how that test is being run, but it's not at all reflective of what actual users experience on the platform. There are many factors that could impact what is being sent to spam that aren't disclosed in these kind of tests.

It's true we offer a premium product, but we do so at a competitive price. At scale, our pricing model compares favorably with Sendgrid. Our pricing strategy is all about simplicity and providing lower prices as you grow with us. We don't have any kind of feature gating pushing you into higher tiers nor do we have punitive overages.

As others have mentioned, dedicated IPs are anything but a panacea for deliverability. There is an incredible amount of care and planning that must be taken when using a dedicated IP. Shared IPs that are well managed (ie no spammers) are often better for low-volume senders because they don't require warm-ups, constant deliverability monitoring, etc.

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)

I'm sure that is likely the case, but you can understand why hiding your price is horribly frustrating. Amazon do a great job showing their price to the public and explaining how they can lower it further without talking to sales people...i wish more people would follow their lead.

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.

200,000 emails at Elastic Email = $33.25/month, a private IP would cost you an extra $17.70.

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.

I'm not a user of it, so please excuse the question, but what is the worst part of this?

Can't see any good part of it, the worst for me is probably the massive price hike. Then there's the blatant disregard for customers...

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.

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

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