MailChimp now free up to 2000 subscribers | Hacker News Reader

MailChimp now free up to 2000 subscribers

mailchimp.com

165 pointsbjonathan44 comments

Probably worth relinking their excellent blog post "Going Freemium: One Year Later" http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

Their 'reverse freemium' approach is really interesting -- rather than de-emphasising the free and focusing on the [pre]mium side of their biz, they've been slowly expanding their free options and growing rapidly -- in terms of profit -- because of it.

I think the major difference here is that it's easy to have to migrate from free to paid. If your site/newsletter starts doing well, you hit a point where you HAVE to start paying them.

Yeah, and you're usually glad to as well :-) I have 8500 subscribers on my account so far and it's $75/mo well spent.

(But boy, do they ratchet the tiers up fast. Once I tip over 10k subscribers, it leaps up to $150/mo! A few more intermediate tiers please, MailChimp.. otherwise my 10,000th subscriber will cost me $75/mo alone ;-))

"No Credit Card Required. No Contracts." Thanks. A lot. - a teenager

I wonder, can't you buy a anonymous credit card from a department store?

That's not terribly common in the US. It's possible to buy VISA or AMEX gift cards in some stores, but the markup tends to be significant (10%+).

In the US at least, you can -- and should -- set up a bank account with a debit card. Sometimes it requires a parent to cosign, but it is quite worth it.

Extensive list of e-mail marketing services, free and paid: http://techblog.willshouse.com/?p=522

(Constant Contact, iContact, Vertical Response, StreamSend, and many more)

wish it distinguished free from paid.

I think most feature a "free trial" at least. I'll see about adding more info to pricing, but was more concerned with coming up with maintaining a list I could share with clients.

Thanks Marcus - I've added a couple of others in a comment.

Anyone with experience on Direct Mail(http://ethreesoftware.com/directmail/)? I'd like to use it with SendGrid and later move to SES.

I'm the developer of Direct Mail, if you have any questions. We have several customers using Direct Mail with SendGrid and they seem to be very happy with the setup.

Thanks for the reply, jhammer. I'll get the Pro version before the 50% off ends and I'll try by myself.

I've actually found Wufoo + Gmail to be the simplest way to handle e-mails. Use a Wufoo form to collect user info, then export the data to csv and import the file into a Gmail group. I haven't done anything terribly advanced (I just notify a list when a new article is posted) -- but it works for me.

I love MailChimp. They're branding is so friendly, their people are so friendly, and overall they just love their customers.

I'm a fan of their model. If you have more than 2,000 subscribers, you can most likely afford to pay without issue.

Well said! I'm pretty excited to use these guys again. My last job used them and I instituted the template and stuff but it'll be nice to set everything up from start to finish. Its a great product.

MailChimp seems bound and determined to never let me pay for the service. I guess I'm okay with that. :)

Awesome! Any chance you can get the site to load more quickly?

Great for free users - my concern is that it won't scale or that they're not as profitable as they'd like to be.

I dont worry for Mailchimp, when I see the pricing difference between Amazon SES* and them (even if it's not the same product I know and agree)

* http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

I work at MailChimp. I don't worry about that.

I've often wondered why MailChimp doesn't offer more support for transactional mails. I know there is some stuff in the API but it seems bolted on (am I wrong?). I would really like to use the standard templating for email campaigns that MailChimp has, and use it for transactional mails. An API call to MailChimp with some some arguments would then send a template, the variables (dynamically) filled in, to the user.

Email campaigns are so easy in MailChimp and I'd like to maintain the look of those mails in my transactional mails. Nonetheless, you guys provide a great service!

We do have transactional support via Amazon SES now:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-launches-transactional-e...

It rolled out this very week.

Was doing some reading on the company and came across this: http://www.quora.com/How-much-revenue-is-MailChimp-doing-the...

If that's really true, I don't imagine they will have to worry for a while.

Just curious: when they write "Unlimited", what exactly do they mean? Wouldn't this be a spammer's good investement?

I work at MailChimp. The answer is nope.

Thanks for your answer. I imagined so. But I could also think of some legitimate heavy-duty users who could threaten your profitability. Is there any fine print for those cases?

I don't think so. The cost of running something like Mailchimp isn't in having a couple of servers and some bandwidth, I imagine; the cost is in dealing with spammers, overzealous spam-fighters and people who'd rather hit "report as spam" than unsubscribe. Number of subscribers is not a bad metric.

ETA: Also see bjonathan's comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170619: Amazon, which probably offers something closer to "server and bandwidth", is much cheaper.

No fine-print. Our high volume plans for large email lists are not unlimited, but smaller lists are completely free to send as much as they want. In practice, you'll hit our anti-spam limits long before you hurt our profitability if you try to send lots of email to a smaller list.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm glad you stopped lurking, and to have tripled your karma!

As someone who doesn't know much about MailChimp, the original question seems valid. A little more detailed answer (like the one by qeorge) would have helped me understand this better.

As you work at MailChimp, it would have helped if you would have given that detail.

Ben from MailChimp here. We invested a lot in abuse prevention, well before introducing any freemium plans. The problem ESPs like us face isn't so much the "evil" spam, but the "fuzzy" spam (from clueless marketers).

Our approach to dealing with fuzzy spam is here: http://blog.mailchimp.com/project-omnivore-declassified/

an update was posted here: http://blog.mailchimp.com/update-on-omnivore-new-3-strikes-r...

Probably shoulda brought that up in my blog post (it's usually the first question techies ask), but it's something our customers are pretty familiar with, so I left it out.

MailChimp are very diligent about spam. If your emails get reported as spam more than %0.5 of the time you'll be banned.

So "Unlimited" has a built in limit.

(We use/love MailChimp, definitely recommended.)

0.1% actually. I kid you not. (This causes me a minor issue once a year. One of my autoresponders caught a flag in January for having 6 / 4000 = 0.15% spam complaints. They were quite clear in their mail: I'm on probation.)

Have I mentioned I love MailChimp? They take deliverability seriously.

(Also, they do have actual human beings who you can talk to if you get flagged unnecessarily. For example, within 24 hours of opening my account and funding it, it was closed because I used the word "bingo" in a draft email. Their filter smacked me down for promoting gambling. I mailed them and the CS department got back with "Thanks for your explanation of what your business actually does. OK, we reinstated you. Be careful.")

I ran into an issue with Constant Contact that basically banned one of my mailing segments of around 500 emails. The rest of the list was okay to send to, just one segment was blocked. The issue was a false positive spam test by Constant Contact and they refused to unlock that segment. Even had they unblocked it, the CS experience was still bad enough to raise a warning flag.

I've since moved on to MailChimp and have been much happier with it than I was CC.

I'm glad to see them improving on an already highly functional free-tier.

They HATE HATE HATE spam. I got flagged one time because I used the word craigslist in a blog post I sent out automatically through an RSS to Email feed. Luckily customer service threw a banana at the spam team and they got me back up and running.

You have to avoid using the word "craigslist" when using mailchimp??

Apparently. Immediately got flagged when it went out. It was a blog post about how I bought & fixed up a bike for $150. I mentioned I got it off of craigslist and it set their filters off.

Does anyone know of an easy way to migrate to MailChimp from Aweber?

You can just do a bulk import.

So download your aweber list csv and then just upload it to mailchimp.

The only problem is that autoresponders don't seem to work for old users unless you do a dirty hack

Does the bulk import send everyone a resubscribe message? I've got a very small list (sub 100 people) of customers and prospects that I meet with IRL, and I don't want to annoy them by asking them to subscribe again to a list they've already subscribed to.

No, bulk importing does not send a resubscribe message. MailChimp assumes that if you have access to the address list, then you have permission to send.

I wish they gave better campaign-like reporting for autoresponders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com