Sparkpost breaks promise to grandfather free accounts, deletes own blog posts

Context: In 2017 Mailchimp decided to let go of its transnational email service, Mandrill. They made an agreement with Sparkpost in which Sparkpost would "take on any departing Mandrill users and to honor Mandrill’s pricing for those users" [0].

Sparkpost CEO wrote personally and very explicitly in the company's blog:

" I want to make a further commitment to you today: should the terms of our free tier of pricing ever change in the future, I promise we will nevertheless honor it for any customer currently enrolled at that tier, for the life of that account.

And for anyone who wonders if it’s really possible for SparkPost to keep this promise, the answer, unequivocally, is yes. In his post last week, Alec explained why. I agree with his analysis one-hundred percent. " [1]

18 months later, Sparkpost changed their pricing model, yet said "

These changes notwithstanding, I would like to reaffirm a promise I made to honor the terms of our former 100K free plan for all existing customers of that plan. In fact, we are grandfathering all current customers, free or paid, into their current plan’s sending volume and price point if they choose to remain on their existing plans. " [2]

Yesterday, the free tier users got an email saying their accounts will be terminated in September. All the relevant blog posts were removed from the company's blog.

A twitter rage ensued.

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[0] https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-spar...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160609035125/https://www.spark...

[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-GvlFr...

since this twitter link does not seem valid, this topic should probably be merged...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20448800

That being said, searching "sparkpost" on twitter today does yield some fun results...