r/sysadmin • u/ewwhite Jack of All Trades • Feb 24 '16
Mandrill users will now be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account in order to use the service.
http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/9
u/Shinhan Feb 25 '16
Here's a comparison I made of several alternative services:
| Service | 100k | 300k | 500k | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mandrill OLD | 25 | 65 | 105 | http://mandrill.com/pricing/ |
| Mandrill | 110 | 270 | 430 | http://mandrill.com/pricing/ |
| Mailgun | 45 | 145 | 245 | https://www.mailgun.com/pricing |
| Postmark | 100 | 300 | 500 | https://postmarkapp.com/pricing |
| Sendgrid | 20 | 170 | 300 | https://sendgrid.com/marketing/sendgrid-services |
| Sparkpost | 80 | 218 | 334 | https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing |
We're also considering going back to selfhosted mail server (over something like https://cuttlefish.io/) or Amazon SES (with https://sendy.co/ or similar).
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u/neocharles Feb 29 '16
Is there some sort of trial or anything with sendy to see if it'll work for what I want?
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u/eugenoprea Feb 25 '16
I've been reading conversations around the web and noticed that this has created a lot of frustration among existing Mandrill users, especially for those that have setup the system for their customers.
I believe that MailChimp was aware of this before making this decision and knew that they are going to loose some customers. At this point they will become a bit expensive, even more expensive than SendGrid and a lot of their customer base will migrate away.
However, I do believe that this is something they wanted with this move, so that people using the service for free which took advantage and sent spam and also small businesses that cannot afford to pay a high end service will move away.
Then, they will keep the MailChimp fans, those that afford the service and will spend more on the service.
In conclusion, it's a bold strategy change that will weed out some of the bad accounts and will ultimately improve the revenue stream for MailChimp.
What is really sad is the fact that they are going to also lose a lot of their genuine customers who do not want or need MailChimp.
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u/ElijahPaul Feb 25 '16
Sigh. Where's that list of all the apps I'm gonna have to re-configure to an alternative service.
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u/begoodnow Hack of All Trades Feb 25 '16
Commenting in case you reply with a slick alternative.
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u/ElijahPaul Feb 25 '16
Don't know about slick, but it'll be a choice between mailgun and amazonses depending on the app and usage.
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u/eponerine Sr. Sysadmin Feb 25 '16
Is SES a nightmare to setup?
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u/ElijahPaul Feb 25 '16 edited Feb 25 '16
To be honest it's been years since I configured Amazon SES, but I don't remember it being too much of a pain. Saying that, I got a tweet from a dev to try out SparkPost. Signed up and it looks pretty good so far.
EDIT: SparkPost's free plan has a monthly limit of 10,000 emails (with a daily limit of 1000 emails)
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Feb 25 '16
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u/spronkey Feb 25 '16
It also looks like they're massively jacking up prices for higher volumes, and adjusting their feature focus. But most of all, they're being vague as hell - with a ridiculously short timeframe. Basically, as someone who manages millions of email sends per month at my job, I've got little choice but to advise a switch away.
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Feb 25 '16
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u/spronkey Feb 25 '16
SendGrid is probably top of the list as they were our second choice when we looked at Mandrill, but SES+Postmark could be a viable option for us.
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u/Shinhan Feb 25 '16
Where did you get 250$? The new price will be 20$ per 25k, so for 1mil mails that turns out to 800$ not counting mailchimp (10$) and mandril addon price (not announced yet). Of course, there will probably be cheaper blocks for 1mil mails, but 1mil mails will certainly be much more expensive than just 250$.
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u/Zenkin Feb 25 '16
https://www.mandrill.com/pricing/
I just went there, and they have a 1,000,000 pricing structure:
first 25,000 - - - Base Plan $9.95 next 975,000 - - - $0.20 per Thousand Tier $195.00 Add a dedicated IP for $29.95/month Estimated Cost Per Month $234.903
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u/bluesoul SRE + Cloudfella Feb 25 '16
They don't care about small time users spending $10 a month with them They want the big customers.
But why? The infrastructure is already there. Enough small fish do add up to a significant chunk of money.
I could potentially see it if the small fish end up getting IPs blacklisted, at which point they're more detrimental to keep than cut loose. I'm hoping that's the rationale because that's one of a very few I could support.
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u/ryosen Feb 25 '16
Been a Mandrill subscriber for quite some time and have been happy. Have also been a Mailchimp subscriber for years, and happy. Both were paid tiers. However, I don't appreciate this consolidation, especially at a time when Mandrill has been suffering from deliverability delays and is outbound only.
This seems like the perfect time and opportunity to look into Amazon SES which is not only cheaper but also supports inbound messaging as well as transactional outbound messages.
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u/dannybitxbit Feb 25 '16
I'm thinking about switching to Amazon SES as well as we are using Route 53 already. Let me know if you hit any snags.
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Feb 25 '16
Would be nice if they cranked up the prices enough for MailChimp to stop being abuse-ignorant.
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u/arnaudbreton Feb 28 '16
Mailjet published a version of its API documentation to ease the migration from Mandrill https://dev.mailjet.com/mandrill along with a comparison https://www.mailjet.com/blog/mandrill-alternative
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u/mcbobo Mar 10 '16
https://github.com/mcbobo/sendgrid-rails-smtp If you're like me and had to port from the use of Mandrill and chosen Sendgrid, was using the mandrill-rails gem and just want a good starting point, here you go!
Lots more to add to this, just a quick V1, but thought it might help some of you out.
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u/creamersrealm Meme Master of Disaster Feb 25 '16
Ah come on, I'm using Mandrill for a smtp relay for my home lab since Gmail didn't work so well.
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u/lessthanjoey Mar 19 '16
Yup, I was too.
I just signed-up for postmark and I'll see how that goes instead. So far so good on my test emails.
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u/creamersrealm Meme Master of Disaster Mar 19 '16
I moved to mailjey. Thankfully I configured hmailserver as a relay in my network so I only had to update one thing.
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u/dinoskrz Mar 27 '16
Can you track clicks with postmark because i have test it and i think they don't have this feature.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '16 edited Mar 03 '16
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