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Fuck mandrill here's how you move to Amazon SES and pay 1/8 of the price

39 points by robertaoliu ↗ HN
Mandrill/Mailchimp are fuckwits.

They just raised their pricing by 8x and they didn't give their users any notice. All the said was oh we're merging mailchimp and mandrill accounts in an email, not telling users that their also going to get fucked over because the price is now 8x higher.

I prepurchased several thousand dollars with mandrill in credits at the previous price, and they won't provide me with the service at the previous price even for my prepaid credits. wtf?

let's all move to amazon SES, most startups have free AWS credits, else it $0.10c per thousand, an eight of the price of mandrill,

here's how you multithread to send bulk campaigns on Amazon SES:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16834279/amazon-ses-php-sdk-2-how-to-achieve-high-send-rate

15 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] thread
tn13
The problem with SES is its poor deliverability. It might be useful to send 10K mails with SES but after that it is mostly useless.
Torgo
I have been finding this out after a product launch. Worked great in testing, lots of bounces in production.
robertaoliu
SES works fine for me. I smell a sock pupet, you sure you don't work for Mailchimp?
mitoyarzun
I'm amazed, they even said that the first million e-mails were on them, and then totally ignored their promise and the blocks that we purchased previously were useless.

They could have perfectly increased their price (even 2x would've been fine) and we would have paid for it. The only thing that is holding us are the dedicated IP addresses, which will be a pain in the ass to whitelist with our clients again.

It is really sad.

palidanx
Also note with SES, you have to write some code to handle bounces and complaints programmatically. Unlike Mandrill and Sendgrid, there is no UI dashboard to manage any e-mails.
rajacombinator
Cheers, wasted the past 2 hours moving off of Mandrill.
meric
We use vero & mailgun.
funkdified
I switched to sparkpost. Took about an hour. 100k emails / month are free.
kull
We moved all our clients and our projects to sendgrid
alexgaribay
I recommend moving to SendGrid. You can get 12k emails a month for free and do transactional and newsletter emails from the same platform.
tmaly
I am dropping them like a brick. I wrote a very detailed post on how to add the dkim to your DNS on digital ocean for mandrill that everyone likes. I got it all setup for my domain, but I just do not have the volume to justify a paid plan at this point.
vhiremath4
What I really don't understand is why it seems like I must pay for MailChimp in order to pay for Mandrill. Wtf?
saluki
Double True, previously all emails have said:

Current users will have until 4/27 to merge their accounts.

Now it's 4/27 at noon and they are disabling sending through mandrill only accounts.

Just icing on the cake.

I love(d) MailChimp and love(d) Mandrill.

Signed up clients for both of them, always recommended them.

Never again will I recommend MailChimp for anything.

Can't believe they won't honor your pre-purchase. I would demand a refund.

Sounds like they don't want to be in the email business.