Mandrill Price Increases : How We Can Help

02/25/2016 Company News, Editorial

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...

How We Can Help

We're still supporting Mandrill (of course!)

  1. If you want to stay with Mandrill and would like to talk, we're happy to discuss the implications for you. 
  2. If you want to move, we will be happy to help you switch to any supported ESP (see below).
  3. 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: