I deal with small business owners regularly. While this seems crazy, it's not even close to the worst we've seen. Entire businesses based on free email, entire businesses based on a social media following from one network, entire businesses based on an undocumented "black box" server that everyone is afraid to touch ... the list goes on.

I routinely think about by my business model and the repercussions of losing access to an online service. I backup incessantly as a result. BRB, going to backup my MailChimp lists.

> It will be your responsibility to keep it safe and you'd have to do it every fucking time if you want to update your data.

You might want to consider removing "fucking" from your front page. I'm really not one to bat an eye at any form of cursing but seeing it on a company's webpage like that doesn't sit well. You have a good idea, let the tech speak for itself, no profanity needed.

Agreed. Every time I want to "get casual" with a client or business associate and consider using profanity, I almost always step back and remove it from the email. In person it's a little easier, but I cringe when I think back to a meeting where I used a curse word - even if the client was using those same terms.

Yes, gonna remove that! Thanks for the feedback :D

Different commenter, but I think in your pricing section, you may have enterprise spelled incorrectly. "Enterprice" -> "Enterprise"

Because not everyone using a mailing list service is technically capable of doing this, or understands why it's even necessary? I never used MailChimp but if I did then I would assume that the mailing lists I built with their service would be 99.999% secure, and that I'd always be able to access it even if they went out of business. Reading this thread with many users claiming similar experiences is quite frankly shocking.

What drives the assumption that their mailing lists would always be available to you even if they went out of business or that they are almost perfectly secure? Is it due to standards set by large companies or just an idealized desire?

Because I assume they use Google/Amazon cloud services which are designed for 99.99999999% durability, just as I assume they often make backups (it's not like it would be expensive for them to backup mailing lists every hour or so).

If they went out of business then I would also assume they would give customers at least several months to export their mailing lists.

Edit: for some reason I'm not allowed to post new comments (presumably because of the downvotes to my other comments), so I'll just reply here: Would it be naive/fraudulent to promise the same durability as the storage service you're using? After all you're just feeding the data to their service through their API. I of course wouldn't promise this kind of up-time, but once the data is successfully saved then I fail to see why it would be wrong to make such claims. Assuming you also made regular backups of the data you feed to their services (which I certainly hope MailChimp do) then you can be even more confident that the data won't be lost. If Google/Amazon banned the accounts storing the mailing lists then I'm sure it could be recovered, especially by a company of MailChimps size.

In response to your edit -

I think it's okay to extend your durability promise to your clients, but durability isn't the same metric as availability as you've eluded to in your edit. I typically tell customers our product's durability is an extension of AWS's via a BAA. If I had to shut down a product and needed to provide the data for export, it would be simple to throw them in AWS s3 by client ID and let them sit there, but you're going to have to budget a big chunk of money for it. The only way you get a green light to have that budget is if you are contractually bound to do it. I believe a lot of companies (mine included) do have those contractual obligations in place already, but I honestly don't think what I have in mind to meet the contract, and the user's expectations are aligned. Is it the raw data they passed via API that I return or the enriched data we produced that I return? If it's the latter, we're going to need more money as that will be exponentially more information to store for export.

This is a reasonable assumption. 95% of companies have backups (just don't ask about restore!) and 90% of companies will take reasonable measures to give you your data if they are going out of business.

Those numbers are not the 99.999% you quoted and you really shouldn't think they are. If you promised your customers five nines reliability based on the one-two nines of your free suppliers, that's somewhere between disingenuous naivete and fraud.

Sure.. FAANG has insane 9 uptimes. Good for them.

What about when accounts are locked for users due to $reasons? What do those downtimes look like? I've heard enough horror stories to be wary of any one provider.

Thanks for answering! I think your perspective is becoming more common. It's not like MailChimp is a start-up, so these assumptions aren't inherently crazy.

At some point people started expecting unreasonable things from random free services on the internet. I still think it's ridiculous.

I hope that in the future, schools will also teach some basics of computer hygiene in IT classes, and how to behave on the internet.

Things like what internet services are, why backups are important, and how to practically do them, how to evaluate risks when communicating on the internet, how people are harmed on the internet (typical scams, phishing, running untrusted programs, ransomware,...), what privacy is on the internet, how to choose passwords, etc.

Yes, it's fair to say that the expectation presented by the FAANGs are polluting the general expectations of users. You have to live up to a higher standard which often requires you to leverage their cloud offerings. This higher expectation isn't necessarily a bad thing on its face as a better user experience often helps your business succeed.

It would be wonderful if we taught people how to navigate the digital age. It would be similar to a driving course or personal finance. I know I had none of the above when I went through school, so I won't hold my breath, but I would support an initiative to provide more practical skills in school.

> I never used MailChimp but if I did then I would assume that the mailing lists I built with their service would be 99.999% secure, and that I'd always be able to access it even if they went out of business.

You're saying you never used service X, yet you would absolutely trust service X and assume that even when service X is out-of-businness, you can access data related to you.

That's very surprising to read, I'm exactly the opposite - own your data, don't trust any service, they always can go away, at any random moment.

This makes me wonder, what is more popular? Absolute trust or -ENOTRUST?

Yes, because their entire business model is built around email marketing, and despite not using MailChimp then they're as far as I know the biggest player. Give me a couple of hours and then I can guarantee 99.999999% durability for almost no cost through Google/Amazon services. I would be very sad if MailChimp can't gaurantee the same.

Edit since I can't reply: We're talking about durability of their mailing lists, not uptime. At least that's my intention. That Google/Amazon or MailChimp might experience downtime doesn't have any impact on the durability promises. I would also expect MailChimp (rather than all their customers) to do regular backups.

Uptime for themselves != Uptime for customers

You absolutely have to consider TOS, account disablement, and other service provider-caused downtime.

And from what I've seen, no uptime calculation adds in account issues like this. And I'd really like to see how fast their resolution is.

OP here. It never crossed my mind that MC would cut me off like this with no warning and no possibility of recovery.

Lesson learned.

Any company is liable to data loss or even sudden company collapse. You don’t need to fear them deciding to cut you off in order to be backing up.

I had enough faith in MC's ability to keep their own backups that accidental data loss was a risk I was willing to accept. It never occurred to me that they would intentionally do something so counterproductive as shut off my account with no warning and no possibility of recovery (or so they said -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717279).

There's an app for this - https://stompapp.xyz/

But Mailchimp really should be making it easy for you to make your own mail backups!