I haven't used SES, but I'm guessing it is complex, and "bare bones".
I got the vibe Mandrill didn't want to send any business to their _actual_ competitors.
The time period to make this change sucks. I accept they want to change, and they can do that. But I have paid them money for a service, and the rug is being pulled from under my feet with such a short period of time to work out what to do, and do it.
SES is pretty bare bones, and has had recurring issues with IP reputation management. It's well suited for integration but there are no straightforward simple APIs or dashboards as with Mandrill/SendGrid etc.
Time to fire up HN search for that product where you host your own Mandrill clone that relies on SES on the backend and is like 5 times cheaper. Anyone remember what it was?
Hmm: I guess I was thinking of https://sendy.co which is a replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.
Compared to Sendy, I would suggest to use EasySendy Pro, I myself shifted to this service, having previously used Sendy.
Pro gives many independence of connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES, which include SendGrid, Sparkpost, Leadersend, Elasticemail and MailGun. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very shortly. This cross channel communication will help us connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.
This is too bad. Mandrill was a great product I've put several clients and my own apps on. None of these have any use for Mailchimp integration.
In December, they began to require the more strict DNS configs for new accounts... that was fine, but this latest change is horrendous in that it's giving business' who've used this service for years, an ultimatum... one that favors finding a new service.
It's going to be work one way or another so I guess I'll be moving mine and client apps over to a more stable provider.
Just quickly tried out Mailgun and SendGrid today as alternatives. SendGrid looks more stable, but Mailgun has the advantage of at least being able to see subject lines in emails sent (which can be a great help when troubleshooting for clients).
Yeah, I saw your other post... same boat. It was so nice to confirm emails were sent/received while testing.
There's one project we integrated a private messaging system deeply into their APIs. There's not gonna be a choice on moving that one, but all others will move.
Not sure if it's more greed or incompetence behind the flippant decision.
One advantage that Mandrill has over SendGrid is the ability to see the content of emails (run a web agency so it helps a lot with troubleshooting for our clients).
That makes a lot of sense! On the backend, we've already built a way to view content samples (for compliance reasons, e.g. if something looks spammy and we need a human to confirm). It would certainly be possible to expose that functionality to users. I'll run that by the PM on the relevant team - you're not alone in wanting that feature.
You can look in the Email Activity tab to see a history of events, along with their category (you might use this for "receipt", "forgot password", etc.).
Yeah absolutely if SendGrid builds this functionality and creates a 'Welcome Mandrill customers' page, then you guys will get a whole heap of new signups right away!
We're discussing what it would take to build it right now. It's absolutely one of the things people appreciated about Mandrill, and I know we want to ease the transition as much as possible.
We do this (Sendwithus.com) -- not only see email with all personalization, but see it on the device a customer used (was the link really broken on an iPhone?)
There are lots of existing resources out there for automatically inlining CSS after writing your template, so we recommend you use whichever one you like best.
Any good examples on using templating with variables in SendGrid? The docs are not very clear on that (you call them tags is that it?). I think you can get a lot of users if you show one to one mapping of API and common processes between Mandrill and SendGrid.
A few years ago I went with Mandrill over SendGrid because of the lack of templates. I wanted designers/marketers to be able to edit the templates and with sendgrid that was really difficult. A couple years later and you guys caught up and then some. Excited to come back after this Mandrill change!
Is it possible to have more than 300 templates per account? We're offering custom transactional email templates to our clients and might exceed this limit. Definitely looking at moving to SendGrid after this announcement.
Previewing content of the last 7 days of sent emails would also be a bonus.
Thanks, but your pricing model is all wrong when it comes to transactional emails. We're looking for something which is more usage based instead of based on number of subscribers. Nice templating though.
FWIW We left SendGrid because it was impossible to troubleshoot sends. When asked SendGrid's response was email subjects are coming but for now you can tag your emails with tags/categories. I know it's probably not simple to implement but it might be worth something to you guys in terms of business. It looks like subjects are still not supported unless I'm missing them. I'm looking at the "Activity" screen.
Oh Man-drill . . . I wish they would have went with a lower limit on their free plan or even low cost plan that replaces current free plan. I use them on lots of client sites with low volume emails. This is going to take some time to sort out.
SendGrid's interface and dashboard are horrible.
Plus they don't store the message text for recent messages like Mandrill where it's viewable from the dashboard.
Any other options out there for free or low cost or with a decent dashboard.
If you want to enjoy SendGrid deliverability but a different interface, check us out: sendwithus.com
We're designed as a higher level on top of email deliverability, offering some pretty rich features (email storing, great A/B testing, drip campaigns...)
I guess this means I will be looking for a new transactional email service. Those of you that have experience with MailGun and SendGrid, which do you prefer and why?
As a long time user... What the hell are they smoking over there.
Edit...
Just read the full thing. I'm now a very fucking angry customer. They are destroying basically all of the value their product had for me. I was raging and ready to comment on their blog post, but oh look they have comments turned off, how convenient, let's ignore our customers further.
Dear Mailchimp... Fuck you.
Since there is fuck all chance they will backflip on this, who should I migrate to, I've honestly been using mandrill for years and have no idea who offers comparable services because I was so fucking happy with mandrill I didn't need to look elsewhere... I hope a mandrill employee is on HN because if this actually happens they're going to lose 10 paying customer accounts when I find someone else hope your shitty management plan is accounting for loss of goodwill and loss of customers.
SendGrid is competitively priced - as @jamestanderson mentioned, $20 goes twice as far. Mailgun doesn't offer a marketing product at all, and I am not sure if they provide the 24/7 support we do.
At the 40k+ volume levels, you're also going to get a complimentary dedicated IP, which means better deliverability. You can get that at Mailgun too, but it's a $59 surcharge every month.
Finally, the InboxTrail comparison posted elsewhere in this thread shows Mailgun getting flagged as spam 37.5% of the time.
There are many factors that impact deliverability that aren't reflected in the type of simple test InboxTrail conducts. Like most ESPs, your reputation builds on Mailgun as you send with us. If for whatever reason you are experiencing a deliverability problem, you can always reach out to us and we'll help you with any issues you have. We support many large and fast growing customers who are all seeing a >99% delivery rate.
Our support team is here to help 24/7. We have a great team here that is proud of the work we do for our customers.
Disclosure: I lead product development at Mailgun.
To respond to the Mailgun developer above slash below - the InboxTrail result might not be reflective of all your service, but you're selling a premium service - 37.5% spam flagging on any of your active IPs is seriously offputting.
We're looking into how that test is being run, but it's not at all reflective of what actual users experience on the platform. There are many factors that could impact what is being sent to spam that aren't disclosed in these kind of tests.
It's true we offer a premium product, but we do so at a competitive price. At scale, our pricing model compares favorably with Sendgrid. Our pricing strategy is all about simplicity and providing lower prices as you grow with us. We don't have any kind of feature gating pushing you into higher tiers nor do we have punitive overages.
As others have mentioned, dedicated IPs are anything but a panacea for deliverability. There is an incredible amount of care and planning that must be taken when using a dedicated IP. Shared IPs that are well managed (ie no spammers) are often better for low-volume senders because they don't require warm-ups, constant deliverability monitoring, etc.
We are at the high end on pricing, but we constantly hear from customers about how great our deliverability and support is. Also if you purchase in bulk, our pricing becomes very competitive very fast. Since it’s a straight pay for what you use model with no monthly plans required, we think it’s a lot simpler to use.
I'm sure that is likely the case, but you can understand why hiding your price is horribly frustrating. Amazon do a great job showing their price to the public and explaining how they can lower it further without talking to sales people...i wish more people would follow their lead.
At the high end, we throw in a dedicated IP for free (a deliverability feature most high volume users need). Mailgun charges $59 extra per month for that, even as they level out their base price to be comparable to ours.
1. Our pricing reflects the quality of delivery due to being transactional only. With much higher engagement rates, our speed and delivery is superior. Customers never have to wait behind a bulk campaign.
2. Dedicated IPs are a way for ESPs to pawn responsibility onto customers instead of themselves (and get a few more bucks in the process). They only make sense if you are sending a huge volume, but we do offer dedicated IPs for free for higher volume accounts. Instead, most people use our shared IPs and benefit from the volume of great engagement to get their emails delivered to the inbox faster.
3. We're the only ones to offer an extended full content history of every message for 45 days. You can search and see the exact email sent at no cost, which comes in handy when sending so many unique messages.
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of Postmark. Any questions, just email me: chris@wildbit.com.
I haven't used Mandrill extensively so I don't exactly know how it compares, but I've had a lot of success with Mailgun. That said, I've heard great things about SendGrid as well.
FWIW We're switching to Sparkpost (I'm not affiliated with Sparkpost). They do the transactional email for the big dogs like Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc and have a pretty simple UI. Just throwing that out there for all the fellow Mandrill refugees.
I just checked out Sparkpost, and unfortunately, they seem to have a crippling price discrepancy. Their new "express" plan is sort of comparable to what Mandrill charged, but as soon as I grow to the point where I need more, they are x3 the price. Not sure what they were thinking with that sort of thing, are they trying to discourage customers from growing their email volume on the platform?
I find this sort of "nonsensical pricing" very off putting. If your pricing page is so obviously 'wtf' like this, how can I take them seriously, even if they do the emails for Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, they could be the secret real host for Gmail for all it matters to me... Their pricing page tells me they have a screw loose.
I'm trying to figure out if you can just stay on the Express plan and pay the overages, given that the overages are 1/3 that of the higher plans. Very odd pricing, for sure.
SparkPost just updated their pricing - now the free tier is 100k a month, and there are two other plans that are way simpler and more cost effective. Seems like they heard feedback about their pricing.
We tweaked our pricing today so 100k free and fixed the confusing plans - check it out https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing
We have been doing transactional email for 15 years for the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, Zillow smaller developers and startups and are not going anywhere - we are very developer friendly. Also check out https://developers.sparkpost.com
See that's the sort of pricing I expect when I hear "The guys that send all of Twitter's email". Promptly letting me know that you cleaned up your pricing is a nice touch.
We were midway through our pricing update at the time - but both pages should now have the latest prices, including our 100K free tier. Please try it out and if you have questions you can find us at developers.sparkpost.com and slack.sparkpost.com
I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.
Thinking of "email delivery as a commodity" is the first mistake people make - all ESPs are not created equal. If this were the case, there would not be such a huge variance in not only getting to the Inbox, but how fast you get to the Inbox. This is why we've focused on transactional only, knowing fully well we will grow slower as a business (and why we are more expensive), but have superior delivery since transactional email has a much higher engagement rate and reputation with ISPs.
The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.
Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.
SparkPost/MessageSystems claims to have the highest inbox rate in the space, and their customer list backs this up. It's much more impressive than Asana, Desk, and Minecraft (think LinkedIn, Facebook, Zillow, Pinterest, etc).
They absolutely recognize that ESPs are a commodity, even reselling delivery to ExactTarget, Responsys, etc, as the "pipe". It's hard to believe your reasoning when the industry leader is saying something different.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc do not use Sparkpost, they use their on-premise installable software that many ESPs use and pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, which indeed is a dumb pipe MTA. Those big companies still have a full-time staff managing delivery and infrastructure. It's basically a replacement to Postfix, not a full fledge, multi-datacenter, multi-tenant hosted application to support many thousands of concurrent customers.
A hosted "product" is a different animal. Sure, it needs to have great delivery, but the work that goes into making it easy to troubleshoot when you have issues, minimize developer work, and bring useful data back into your application is something else. This only becomes painfully obvious when you deeply rely on email for your business.
There is a reason why Sparkpost left Postmark out of their comparison. We have the same data sources (eData), and we came out on top.
The worst part is their decision to make this change in the first place, combined with the big hike in pricing. They're lumping two completely different types of customers into one: transactional emails and newsletter/marketing. They are not even close to the same thing, and the vast majority of people using only Mandrill (transactional emails) will probably never use the MailChimp product. If they wanted to, they would have already signed up for MailChimp.
Mandrill used to be pretty cheap and it was free small services that didn't need to send more than 12k emails per month. Now they're forcing everyone to pay in blocks of 25,000 sent emails for $20. That means if I have a very small website and only send out 500 emails per month, I'm paying the same amount as someone who sends 25,000 emails in a month. That amounts to $0.04 and $0.0008 cents per-email respectively, so sending my 500 emails costs 50x more per-email than someone sending 25,000 emails. The pricing system just doesn't make sense and the lack of a free tier is unfortunate.
Another bad part is simply migrating to a new service. Most users can probably migrate in under an hour if they're only using Mandrill as a relay, but there are obviously users who use all of Mandrill's services (i.e. templates) and the migration will take a lot longer.
I currently use Mandrill on about 6 projects, a few of them use templates, so I've got the added complexity of dealing with that, which sucks
But, I'm not going to give Mailchimp my business ever again after this stunt. I'm going to bite the bullet and port the templates over to Sendgrid.
As it is, Mandrill basically wants us to create new Mailchimp accounts, then manually copy and paste our templates (as if that's an appropriate solution to ask a paying customer to do). If I'm going to do that, I'm just going to leave and take my business elsewhere.
It will take longer, but I'm optimistic it won't be that bad. I'm sure there are blog posts on template migration from Mandrill to Sendgrid. If not, I'll write one when I do it
This really doesn't make sense. Why not just implement Mandrill into Mailchimp like they wanted and keep Mandrill around also? I don't see it as an either or thing.
This move was probably more about the bottom line than anything else.
At work we have built an email delivery platform on top of Mandrill for marketing/transactional emails. We have many clients that signed up for their own accounts and give us api tokens to send on their behalf.
This is going to suck. Not only are they doing this but now we only have 45 days to migrate those customers to mailchimp accounts they neither want nor need and we don't get to see the headaches there until March 15th. What the actual fuck?!?
Add me to the list of people very shocked by this. We've been exceedingly happy paying customers of Mandrill since its beta, and we use it in all of our services that we offer. This change really makes no sense to me and pretty much ensures we'll be looking elsewhere. Pretty frustrating having to move aside actually important user-facing projects to completely re-do our e-mail systems.
Oh great. Now we'll have to go and touch a system that has been working flawlessly for years. That'll end well won't it? So as a big thank you I'll migrate it to another provider while I'm there.
There is something off in the tone of the announcement.
This is such a shame.. I have no idea need for any of mailchimps services, yet now I'm forced to pay for it? Why? From what I can figure out from the pricing page, this nearly 10x's our monthly cost. NOPE
Later Mandrill.
I'm more sad than angry.. it was an incredible product.
I wonder in what Venn diagram do the sections of "People who need newsletters" and "People who do transactional emails" overlap that much that this really makes sense?
There's also a blogpost about this by the founder:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/ (side note: comments seem to be open there but when posting there, first I got a "you are posting too quickly", then trying again it went into moderation)
Hey folks, cofounder of Sendwithus.com here -- we're a layer on top of Mandrill, SendGrid, Sparkpost, etc. You can hot swap backends with us, making a change trivial. We're also experts on all these platforms so can advice cost vs support.
Hit our support team (support@sendwithus.com) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.
Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me: matt@sendwithus.com
I opened your features page, everything looks good...
I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer.
Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill.
I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS, but that's a different tool for a different job) effectively charging me per email. I want usage pricing. If you don't offer that, you aren't really serving the same market as Mandrill was. (I'm going to refer to them in past tense since Mandrill is dead to me.)
> Every Mandrill account comes with 2,000 free trial sends.
> Once you’ve finished your free trial, it’s $9.95/month for 25,000 emails.
> After that, we charge on a per-thousand-email basis.
> Since we build discounts into our payment structure,
> your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email.
>
> $9.95 up to 25k emails per month
> $0.20/thousand next 1m emails per month
> $0.15/thousand next 5m emails per month
> $0.10/thousand remaining emails
> Add a dedicated IP for $29.95 / month.
Old Mandrill pricing: $10 + $X per email (with volume discounts)
New Mandrill pricing: $X per Y emails
MailChimp pricing: $X per Y emails per Z recipients per month
Sendwithus (You) pricing: $X per Y email recipients per month
Sorry, you look nice and all, but your pricing model is just more of the same.
That's fair feedback (pricing is per recipient), but it reflects the cost of running our service (we store data about your customers long term, which adds up more than the cost of each individual send).
I'd be very surprised if running the database to store that information is the major cost for running the service, and at any rate I'd say your pricing should be a good match for the value you provide to customers, not your costs for providing that value.
I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.
I'm interested in your experience with AWS SES. Do you see this as a viable alternative? It is just more complex than Mandrill and other competitors are?
Bye Bye Mandrill. I have been a very happy customer for several years, but your actions will now leave me with many hours of unwanted work. This is unacceptable, so I'm moving to SendGrid (probably).
As a Mailgun customer, I can unfortunately confirm this. A lot of our clients are having problems getting mails delivered in hotmail mailboxes. This started some weeks ago, and we haven't seen any improvement since. It is getting to a point that we're working on migrating to something else right now.
I'm sorry we let you down. If it's not too late, I'd love to get to the bottom of this today. Can you share details with me? josh [at] mailgun [dot] com
I can't believe this. I use their free plan because I send a minimal amount of email per month. Absolutely no way I'll consider going to $20 per month for my basic needs. I'll probably go ahead and switch newsletter services over to something else too. Who knows when they may get a wild hair and do away with their free account there too.
Bye Mandrill. I've converted some of my clients' free accounts to paid once they started needing more features or sending more email, but going forward I'll be using someone else.
Amazon SES or alternatives might be a pain but at least they are an option for people who need good deliverability for transactional email but don't have the budget for a paid MailChimp account.
now I'm happy that we used SMTP plus tags in mail headers and not their API. at least we can hot swap their service.
any recommendations on transnational email provider without initial sender domain verification?
There is something more serious than migration and price increase. By migrating to mailchimp you are agreeing to mailchimp's terms and service. If I understand it correctly, now they can read all your customers' email address and content (presumably for machine learning & send optimization). This is in direct conflict with the agreement we signed with our customers on data sharing. Unless I am mistaken, this seems to be deliberately omitted in mandrill communication to mislead and collect data to create "network effect" from our customer data.
That information may include your IP address, name,
physical address, email address, phone number, credit
card information, and other details like gender,
occupation, and other demographic information.
to
That information may include your and your Subscribers’
IP address, name, physical address, email address,
phone number, credit card information, operating
system, as well as details like gender, occupation,
location, birth date, purchase history, and other
demographic information.
"your Subscribers' email address, credit card information, purchase history" - These are super sensitive! It takes more than 3 months of legal process and convincing to get our customers to share these under strict data privacy clause. And here comes mailchimp and want to sniff it under the hood in the name of migration. They will literally land us in jail, if we don't migrate.
Yeah, this is a very big change in policy, and I suspect it might catch out Mandrill customers who don't read the fine print. The privacy policies for a couple of web applications I work with, for example, are incompatible with this new policy.
Guys, are you sure about this? Mailchimp subscribers and Mandrill users are not the same thing... Otherwise the Mailchimp cost would skyrocket, as they charge users in terms of subscribers amount
This is appalling. Transactional data and marketing data are very different.
The fact that they're willfully playing with merging customers' sensitive transaction info like financial statements, personal messages and treating it for demographic harvesting like a marketing mailing list is incredibly disturbing. Especially since that's not what we signed up for. That's not what we signed our clients and customers up for.
The ignorance and shameless nonchalance about data security that surrounds us in everyday life, in all corners or the internet and enterprise, is absolutely frightening. If you leverage a cloud vendor for anything, you're eventually putting your customers' data at risk. There's no safety net.
The tech industry can no longer self-police in this regard. I don't want regulation complicating my work any more than the next guy but I'm starting to feel there needs to be someone with authority enforcing some rules here. It's getting out of hand.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadI got the vibe Mandrill didn't want to send any business to their _actual_ competitors.
The time period to make this change sucks. I accept they want to change, and they can do that. But I have paid them money for a service, and the rug is being pulled from under my feet with such a short period of time to work out what to do, and do it.
Hmm: I guess I was thinking of https://sendy.co which is a replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.
Pro gives many independence of connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES, which include SendGrid, Sparkpost, Leadersend, Elasticemail and MailGun. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very shortly. This cross channel communication will help us connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.
In December, they began to require the more strict DNS configs for new accounts... that was fine, but this latest change is horrendous in that it's giving business' who've used this service for years, an ultimatum... one that favors finding a new service.
It's going to be work one way or another so I guess I'll be moving mine and client apps over to a more stable provider.
Just quickly tried out Mailgun and SendGrid today as alternatives. SendGrid looks more stable, but Mailgun has the advantage of at least being able to see subject lines in emails sent (which can be a great help when troubleshooting for clients).
There's one project we integrated a private messaging system deeply into their APIs. There's not gonna be a choice on moving that one, but all others will move.
Not sure if it's more greed or incompetence behind the flippant decision.
$20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails
So let me know if you're thinking about switching. I'd be happy to intro you to someone on our team.
Disclosure: I'm with SendGrid. :)
https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html
If you're doing one-to-many campaigns, we also have a marketing email product called Marketing Campaigns that offers a more detailed content history.
(I have had many a batch email with "{{name}" or some other templating error, heh.)
Disclosure: I lead product development @ Mailgun.
I'm currently sending 150k/mo with Mailgun and log everything for 6 months. It's rarely accessed, but invaluable when it is.
Zurb Foundation has one with a web interface: http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/inliner.html
I personally prefer Jon Kemp's open source inliner, which is a good choice if you want to do that step locally: https://github.com/jonkemp/inline-css
If you're using a wrapper like sendgrid-ruby (https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-ruby), check out its documentation page on GitHub. For instance, here's how to use substitution tags in Ruby: https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-ruby#working-with-templ...
Our template engine (Jinja) is the most advanced of any email platform out there.
Previewing content of the last 7 days of sent emails would also be a bonus.
Unlimited templates, and you can swap out backends (SendGrid, SparkPost, others)
SendGrid's interface and dashboard are horrible.
Plus they don't store the message text for recent messages like Mandrill where it's viewable from the dashboard.
Any other options out there for free or low cost or with a decent dashboard.
Feedback would be very welcome. Shoot me an email (it's in my profile) with the details and I'll make sure it gets to the right people.
We're designed as a higher level on top of email deliverability, offering some pretty rich features (email storing, great A/B testing, drip campaigns...)
Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you.
(I'm a lil mad)
Edit...
Just read the full thing. I'm now a very fucking angry customer. They are destroying basically all of the value their product had for me. I was raging and ready to comment on their blog post, but oh look they have comments turned off, how convenient, let's ignore our customers further.
Dear Mailchimp... Fuck you.
Since there is fuck all chance they will backflip on this, who should I migrate to, I've honestly been using mandrill for years and have no idea who offers comparable services because I was so fucking happy with mandrill I didn't need to look elsewhere... I hope a mandrill employee is on HN because if this actually happens they're going to lose 10 paying customer accounts when I find someone else hope your shitty management plan is accounting for loss of goodwill and loss of customers.
$20 w/Postmark: 13,000 mails
$20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails
Postmark also doesn't offer the option to upgrade to a dedicated IP later on, which many larger companies find is better for deliverability.
Full disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.
$20 w/Mailgun: 50,000 mails
50,001 will then cost you $80 (another block)
also interesting that their pricing page[0] still doesn't reflect the new pricing...
[0] http://mandrill.com/pricing/
At the 40k+ volume levels, you're also going to get a complimentary dedicated IP, which means better deliverability. You can get that at Mailgun too, but it's a $59 surcharge every month.
Finally, the InboxTrail comparison posted elsewhere in this thread shows Mailgun getting flagged as spam 37.5% of the time.
Our support team is here to help 24/7. We have a great team here that is proud of the work we do for our customers.
Disclosure: I lead product development at Mailgun.
As a Mailgun user, I can confirm that first hand.
It's true we offer a premium product, but we do so at a competitive price. At scale, our pricing model compares favorably with Sendgrid. Our pricing strategy is all about simplicity and providing lower prices as you grow with us. We don't have any kind of feature gating pushing you into higher tiers nor do we have punitive overages.
We are at the high end on pricing, but we constantly hear from customers about how great our deliverability and support is. Also if you purchase in bulk, our pricing becomes very competitive very fast. Since it’s a straight pay for what you use model with no monthly plans required, we think it’s a lot simpler to use.
So yeah...i'd love to entertain the idea but its just not possible.
(Sendgrid's lowest advertised rate is $.45/1000)
$95 w/SendGrid: 200,000 mails $95 w/mailgun: 200,000 mails
1. Our pricing reflects the quality of delivery due to being transactional only. With much higher engagement rates, our speed and delivery is superior. Customers never have to wait behind a bulk campaign.
2. Dedicated IPs are a way for ESPs to pawn responsibility onto customers instead of themselves (and get a few more bucks in the process). They only make sense if you are sending a huge volume, but we do offer dedicated IPs for free for higher volume accounts. Instead, most people use our shared IPs and benefit from the volume of great engagement to get their emails delivered to the inbox faster.
More details: https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...
3. We're the only ones to offer an extended full content history of every message for 45 days. You can search and see the exact email sent at no cost, which comes in handy when sending so many unique messages.
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of Postmark. Any questions, just email me: chris@wildbit.com.
I find this sort of "nonsensical pricing" very off putting. If your pricing page is so obviously 'wtf' like this, how can I take them seriously, even if they do the emails for Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, they could be the secret real host for Gmail for all it matters to me... Their pricing page tells me they have a screw loose.
I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.
The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.
Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.
They absolutely recognize that ESPs are a commodity, even reselling delivery to ExactTarget, Responsys, etc, as the "pipe". It's hard to believe your reasoning when the industry leader is saying something different.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc do not use Sparkpost, they use their on-premise installable software that many ESPs use and pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, which indeed is a dumb pipe MTA. Those big companies still have a full-time staff managing delivery and infrastructure. It's basically a replacement to Postfix, not a full fledge, multi-datacenter, multi-tenant hosted application to support many thousands of concurrent customers.
A hosted "product" is a different animal. Sure, it needs to have great delivery, but the work that goes into making it easy to troubleshoot when you have issues, minimize developer work, and bring useful data back into your application is something else. This only becomes painfully obvious when you deeply rely on email for your business.
There is a reason why Sparkpost left Postmark out of their comparison. We have the same data sources (eData), and we came out on top.
[1] http://pages.sparkpost.com/Big-Rewards-WP-Download-Landing-P...
Mandrill used to be pretty cheap and it was free small services that didn't need to send more than 12k emails per month. Now they're forcing everyone to pay in blocks of 25,000 sent emails for $20. That means if I have a very small website and only send out 500 emails per month, I'm paying the same amount as someone who sends 25,000 emails in a month. That amounts to $0.04 and $0.0008 cents per-email respectively, so sending my 500 emails costs 50x more per-email than someone sending 25,000 emails. The pricing system just doesn't make sense and the lack of a free tier is unfortunate.
Another bad part is simply migrating to a new service. Most users can probably migrate in under an hour if they're only using Mandrill as a relay, but there are obviously users who use all of Mandrill's services (i.e. templates) and the migration will take a lot longer.
But, I'm not going to give Mailchimp my business ever again after this stunt. I'm going to bite the bullet and port the templates over to Sendgrid.
As it is, Mandrill basically wants us to create new Mailchimp accounts, then manually copy and paste our templates (as if that's an appropriate solution to ask a paying customer to do). If I'm going to do that, I'm just going to leave and take my business elsewhere.
It will take longer, but I'm optimistic it won't be that bad. I'm sure there are blog posts on template migration from Mandrill to Sendgrid. If not, I'll write one when I do it
This move was probably more about the bottom line than anything else.
This is going to suck. Not only are they doing this but now we only have 45 days to migrate those customers to mailchimp accounts they neither want nor need and we don't get to see the headaches there until March 15th. What the actual fuck?!?
There is something off in the tone of the announcement.
Later Mandrill.
I'm more sad than angry.. it was an incredible product.
There's also a blogpost about this by the founder: http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/ (side note: comments seem to be open there but when posting there, first I got a "you are posting too quickly", then trying again it went into moderation)
Hit our support team (support@sendwithus.com) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.
Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me: matt@sendwithus.com
I opened your features page, everything looks good... I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer.
Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill.
I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS, but that's a different tool for a different job) effectively charging me per email. I want usage pricing. If you don't offer that, you aren't really serving the same market as Mandrill was. (I'm going to refer to them in past tense since Mandrill is dead to me.)
Sorry, you look nice and all, but your pricing model is just more of the same.I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.
https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare
There seems to be a lot of backlash against what they're doing and they likely don't want people to see that.
Amazon SES or alternatives might be a pain but at least they are an option for people who need good deliverability for transactional email but don't have the budget for a paid MailChimp account.
Goodbye Mandrill.
Changes from:
toThe fact that they're willfully playing with merging customers' sensitive transaction info like financial statements, personal messages and treating it for demographic harvesting like a marketing mailing list is incredibly disturbing. Especially since that's not what we signed up for. That's not what we signed our clients and customers up for.
The ignorance and shameless nonchalance about data security that surrounds us in everyday life, in all corners or the internet and enterprise, is absolutely frightening. If you leverage a cloud vendor for anything, you're eventually putting your customers' data at risk. There's no safety net.
The tech industry can no longer self-police in this regard. I don't want regulation complicating my work any more than the next guy but I'm starting to feel there needs to be someone with authority enforcing some rules here. It's getting out of hand.