Hacker News Reader

Two landmines:

1. The MC one 2. Relying on any free service as an important part of your business.

The adage "you get what you pay for" really does tend to hold true.

The irony is that if MC had sent me an email saying that I needed to upgrade to a paid account in order to keep it active, I would have sent them a check without hesitation.

That's one of the frustrating things about this. MC has turned this into a lose-lose when it really didn't have to be.

That's the big takeaway here, in my opinion. Regardless of the fault with MailChimp (and I do think they're at fault here), you should never rely on a free service if it's mission critical to your business and there should never be a single point of failure like this. If this really was as critical as OP claims it is, then they should have taken more care to ensure that this wasn't even possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com