[eugenoprea]

I've been reading conversations here on Hacker News 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.

[manidoraisamy]

I don't think it's as simple as that. This is a data mining exercise - to read our customer's subscribers data and to move from a "dumb pipe" to a "personalization engine". From mailchimp CEO's blog: "We came to a fork in the road, and choosing the “personalized transactional” path with Mandrill suits us and our customers better than the “utility” path."

http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/

[eugenoprea]

I agree with you. They are essentially saying "bye" to those that used Mandrill only for the "utility" path.

[tacobepo]

That's a good point. As a longtime Mandrill customer who sends 750,000 + emails per month through their system, I have no problem with their decision to implement a new strategy.

What disappoints me is the way they've chosen to go about this -- specifically the fact that they've left us 3 weeks before these changes take effect.

That shows a lack of respect for their customers -- not just the "bad" ones and those looking for a free service, but all of us.

In making a change of this magnitude, they needed to allow more time between announcement and implementation and they needed to be much more clear up front about what the updated pricing structure will be (which they still have not done for high volumes).