In what can be described as a complete U-turn by Mailchimp team, I received an email from them today announcing that they will make Mandrillapp a Mailchimp add on, which essentially means their PAYG (Pay as you go) transactional email service of mandrill being buried by them. The CEO of Mailchimp has put a blog post on Mandrill blog which is here if you would like to read more.
Mandrillapp was launched in 2012 and had quickly garnered a big chunk of the transactional email service and it started with about 12k free email credits each month and then you could purchase credits based on your requirement. This service was great for email marketeers and users who wanted a transactional email system without having to build one themselves. In fact, we have ourselves used their service extensively since we started our email marketing service but we switched to our own bulk email sending infrastructure last year once we found that their customer support was unworkable, their delivery were not that great and the pricing was working to our disadvantage.
However, we had recommend friends and other small businesses to use their service as it was easy to start with and had no minimum monthly commitments. While all can read Ben’s post and sympathize why they have decided to shutdown Mandrillapp, I can add the following reasons:
- Their customer support were unable to handle the abuse of their IPs by spammers.
- Since they are using AWS at their backend and AWS itself has a transactional email service called SES, they must have had a customer attrition to AWS.
- They wanted to earn bigger margins and provide Mailchimp users with an exclusive service like Mandrill which they could use, rather then making it available to all users.
Whatever the reason, I believe that they have done a disservice to their existing clients who were using their transactional service for sending emails and with their new pricing plans of $20 pm for 2k emails (6 paise/email) they are much more expensive then the earlier solution. Fortunately for us and our clients, it will be business as usual as we had setup our own mandrillapp alternative as we host and own our own email sending infrastructure, IP blocks and network infrastructure to enable our clients to deliver over 4 million email marketing messages monthly through our infrastructure. If you need to know more fill up the form below and our team will be happy to provide you an online demo.
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