Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

Re:Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp ac... by techdragon on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @10:19PM (#11172142)

So, realtime feedback...

I opened your features page, everything looks good... I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer.

Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill.

I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS, but that's a different tool for a different job) effectively charging me per email. I want usage pricing. If you don't offer that, you aren't really serving the same market as Mandrill was. (I'm going to refer to them in past tense since Mandrill is dead to me.)

  > Every Mandrill account comes with 2,000 free trial sends.  
  > Once you’ve finished your free trial, it’s $9.95/month for 25,000 emails.
  > After that, we charge on a per-thousand-email basis.
  > Since we build discounts into our payment structure, 
  > your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email.
  > 
  > $9.95             up to 25k emails per month
  > $0.20/thousand    next 1m emails per month
  > $0.15/thousand    next 5m emails per month
  > $0.10/thousand    remaining emails
  > Add a dedicated IP for $29.95 / month.

  Old Mandrill pricing: $10 + $X per email (with volume discounts)
  New Mandrill pricing: $X per Y emails
  MailChimp pricing: $X per Y emails per Z recipients per month
  Sendwithus (You) pricing: $X per Y email recipients per month

Sorry, you look nice and all, but your pricing model is just more of the same.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp ac... by homero on Thursday February 25, 2016 @01:10AM (#11172673)

I will never use a service that isn't usage based. We're in the cloud era. A minimum monthly fee is shit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp ac... by mrmch on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @10:30PM (#11172186)

That's fair feedback (pricing is per recipient), but it reflects the cost of running our service (we store data about your customers long term, which adds up more than the cost of each individual send).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp ac... by jordanthoms on Thursday February 25, 2016 @03:49PM (#11177681)

I'd be very surprised if running the database to store that information is the major cost for running the service, and at any rate I'd say your pricing should be a good match for the value you provide to customers, not your costs for providing that value.

I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.

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Re:Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp ac... by stephenhamilton on Thursday February 25, 2016 @08:35PM (#11179290)

I'm interested in your experience with AWS SES. Do you see this as a viable alternative? It is just more complex than Mandrill and other competitors are?

[ Parent | on HN ]