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Comment by 1_800_UNICORN | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is a big deal! Great move by Twilio, bringing together the premier SaaS SMS provider and the premier SaaS transactional email provider under one roof.

It's only too bad that SendGrid has struggled to get its marketing email solution off the ground in a meaningful way. If anyone was going to eat MailChimp's lunch, SendGrid would be my choice as top contender. And yet despite SendGrid releasing many iterations of their marketing email solution over the past 5 years they've never seemed to get a lot of success outside of their bread-and-butter transactional email vertical. Their marketing solution brings in less than 20% of total revenue last I heard.

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Because the marketing platform is terrible. Frequent need for a full page reload to fix a caching issue. Test emails don't support email template tags without a default value. Searching for an email address is terrible slow, the upload is glitchy. Email activity is also slow and limited, sometimes I don't even know if I hit enter because I have to wait so long with no UI indicators. The pricing is also horrible with no way to purge bounce or unsubscribed emails, so they just collect and drive up your "Contact Storage" fees. The recent Sender Authentication change created unreadable sub-domains until they started to offer an advanced option again.

Yes, I emailed support about a few issues but received the blanket "What browser are you using?" when I provided full details. So I built a marketing system on top of their API and fixed those issues for our users.

What's next snail mail, LOB?

Next is Dialpad.com.

I don't know if MailChimp is on its way down or what. I recently reset my phone before realizing that 2FA would be affected. Now, I was encouraged to enable 2FA, but I can't get back into my account and MailChimp isn't getting back to me about what I can do if I don't have any backup codes. I know it's a tough situation, security-wise, but I can send my passport if they need it!

From my experience, mailchimp's transactional email story is a bit of a convoluted mess with mandrill.

I remember MailChimp/Mandrill removed their free tier, making me move to Sendgrid.

Only because of that I hope they go under sooner than later.

Ouch, that forced transition was certainly developer-hostile, but I don't want to see Mailchimp go bankrupt just because they pulled the plug on me (and switching to Sendgrid was basically an improvement for me, anyhow).

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