
What Just Happened?
MailChimp recently changed the business model for Mandrill transactional email, making it somewhat more expensive and less flexible.
Important Changes to Mandrill - MailChimp Blog, 24 Feb 2015:
- Mandrill is becoming a paid add-on for monthly MailChimp accounts. It will only be available for MailChimp customers who have monthly plans.
- The name and design are not changing right now, but we’ll eventually call it MailChimp Transactional and bring the branding under the MailChimp umbrella.
- All Mandrill users will be required to verify their sending domains and add SPF and DKIM records by April 27. (This is already in effect for new Mandrill users.)
- The Privacy Policy and Terms of Use will be consolidated with MailChimp’s.
- The billing and pricing model will also be consolidated with MailChimp’s,
Contact us for more information
As You'd Expect, Developers Reacted Negatively
Typical comment by olossm at Hacker News:
These changes will involve a whole lot of headache for me, and will sadly affect a few of my customers too.
Firstly; from around $40/month as our e-mail costs are today; to more than a total of $240/month. Not the end of the world in itself, but:
Secondly: NOT A SINGLE ONE of my customers, or me, want or have any use of MailChimp. They are two very different services with two very different purposes. Now I will have walk through with my customers on how they set up a Mailchimp account, explain to them why they have to do this and merge the account with their Mandrill one, explain to them "Oh, no – this is just a $10/month service that you don't need, or want, but have to signup to to enable those password reset emails or yours".
Oh man... Of course I will change service in most of these cases, but that's also a pain, have to get in touch with the customers IT-departments to change DNS-settings, verify senders and all that – not a great start to this day...
- Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account - Hacker News
- In hostile move, Mandrill gives all developers 60 days to switch to paid Mailchimp service - TheNextWeb
- Mandrill users will now be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account in order to use the service - Reddit
- MailChimp Forces Mandrill Developers To Pay Up - Email Marketing Daily, MediaPost
How We Can Help
We're still supporting Mandrill (of course!)
- If you want to stay with Mandrill and would like to talk, we're happy to discuss the implications for you.
- If you want to move, we will be happy to help you switch to any supported ESP (see below).
- If you are considering using a different transactional ESP, and want us to support it, we'd be happy to talk about that too.
Contact us for more information
Here's our list of supported ESPs:
- Adobe Campaign
- bubblebox:mailer
- Campaign Monitor
- Communicator
- Display Block
- dotmailer
- FTP ESP
- Instiller
- Lyris HQ
- MailChimp
- Mandrill
- Lyris List Managerl
- Maxemail by Emailcenter
- Oracle Marketing Cloud
- Pure360
- Quickstart ESP
- Real-Time Email Marketing for Adestra
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- SendGrid
- Silverpop
- Teradata DMC