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Comment by jqueryin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I imagine there was some kind of crisis happening behind-the-scenes... That's the only explanation I see for the overnight policy change and lagging updates on the site. Either that or total incompetence.

Interestingly, their (former) competitors are taking full advantage of the outrage by running ads on Twitter and LinkedIn aimed at Mandrill customers who've been screwed.

I wonder if they found certain types of Mandrill users were destroying their deliverability metrics and were starting to cause issues with major email providers and their spam factors. These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability, so they have to put protecting that ahead of a lot of other things that might get them more customers.

"These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability"

I think you meant deliverability. But maybe we should all switch to calling it desirability.

That may have been an autocorrect or may have been my mind not functioning correctly, but yes.

Considering how good Mandrill's delivery was, I'd be surprised if this were the case. Even still, there are better solutions - cut the free tier off, for example!

"Screwed over by monkey business?" Please tell me someone in some advertising department thought of this.

Almost! I got a twitter ad for "Monkey throw a wrench in your email system?"

This is my theory too. There must be something very broken in mailchimp's management. I can't believe that something this knuckle headed would come out of our well functioning management team.

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.

Even if they reverse course (or just delay it for a bit longer to give their users more time to switch), I think people are going to be shouting "down with Mailchimp" for quite some time. It's really hard to trust someone after they've screwed you thoroughly.

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

Once you've done that you should look at what other services you rely significantly upon and see about mitigating the risk there by having an alternative ready to go (or even sharing the load).

At a previous startup we realised we relied wholly upon Mandrill and so reimplemented the sending code so that half of the emails went out via Mandrill and the other half by SendGrid. A stunt like the above just requires a quick reconfigure to make all emails go via the alternative provider whilst we (with less panic) add another new alternative provider to share the load. It also helps build up a positive reputation before cutting over straight away.

(This wasn't about splitting the emails amongst free tiers to keep it free, we were far away from moving up to a paid tier even with all emails going through one provider.)

Great minds, we did the same thing though, we always sent 100% through mandrill just to be able to investigate delivery issues more simply, quick change and send grid is up and elasticmail.com is looking good

We're doing the same. I re-wrote our code over the weekend from sending solely through Mandrill, to splitting our traffic 50/50 between SendGrid and SparkPost. I'm going to implement a similar strategy for some other external services we rely on and I've open sourced the Go code [1].

This also has the benefit that if one service goes down, we can automatically fallback to the other with (hopefully) no downtime. Most email providers have a limit to what you can send until you're established with them, so using another provider as a standard backup isn't feasible, as suddenly sending 1,000's of emails a day will see the account get suspended pretty quickly.

Plus, if one of them goes out of business or changes their terms with little notice, like Mandrill, we should have a bit more time to work around it as at least one service will work.

[1]: https://github.com/dchesterton/go-service

Same problem, same sentiment I now have about Mailchimp/mandrill.

Just spent the morning migrating our mailing services to SES.

Now I'm going to have to rewrite our incoming mail parser, since I hooked into their API's for all that. What a mistake that decision was.

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

fyi, i use sendgrid, it has a pretty good free tier.

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