Sparkpost is missing which "has offered to take on any departing Mandrill users and to honor Mandrill’s pricing for those users".
Of course my real problem at this moment is Mandrill just plain works already, and I'm not sure if it is worth spending engineering time shifting to a different provider instead of just paying the premium. TBH, the biggest issue is the feeling of Impending Doom I get from the mandrill discussion. [1] seems to indicate that the transactional email of mandrill really just doesn't fit in the corporate culture of mailchimp. So it's not just the change in pricing that worries me, I'm concerned about a future where there's a lack of innovation and support in the product itself, and I'm still locked in to paying more for less because I don't want to spend the time moving providers. Sunk costs and all that.
0: https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-spar... 1: http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/
I wish Mailchimp had given more notice. Even services which have went into complete shutdown (ie: not merged into another product) have often given more notice than this.
I've built SO many systems that use the Mandrill API in one way or another (forgot password mails, for example). A lot only send out a couple of mails a month but having to change them all over really sucks. Especially when I was always raving about Mandrill in the past to clients.