Both MailChimp and Mandrill look great, but I have a pricing question. Is it possible to use Mandrill to send out newsletters since your Mandrill pricing is WAY cheaper than your pay as you go newsletter pricing?
I've been looking for a newsletter service that charges me reasonable rates for pay as you go sending of a monthly/semi-monthly email newsletter, using the pay as you go product, it would cost me $30 per 1,000 emails, whereas Mandrill's per email rates start around $0.90 per 1,000. You say that both are using the same infrastructure, so why is sending email newsletters with MailChimp 33x more expensive?
First of all congratulations! I was hoping you would be developing such a product after I saw last year's announcement on STS. One question, is there a ruby gem to work with the API coming up, or is it left up to the internet to develop that?
I've tried to sign up but you wouldn't take my password ("the input must contain at least one number or symbol"). Although a minimum length make sense, requiring a symbol doesn't. Would be great if you could remove it!
So how does this compare to something like SendGrid? More or less a direct competitor? I noticed you can only send mail via the API (no SMTP relay). Any other notable differences?
Just gave it a quick spin here and we got the SMTP relay working and tracking e-mails within 2 minutes. Very impressive. We'll play around with the API soon, it looks promising :)
After looking at ten other transactional email service providers, I picked Mandrill for the Rails Prelaunch Signup example app built for the RailsApps project. The benefits are the generous free plan, the easy integration with Rails, and the integration with MailChimp. So far, so good, though a few users were confused when they tried to use the same API keys for MailChimp and Mandrill. If you want to see how to set up Rails with Mandrill (and MailChimp), see the Rails Prelaunch Signup example app: http://railsapps.github.com/rails-prelaunch-signup/.
Looks awesome! I'm curious, there seem to be quite a few transactional mail services on the come-up these days, each with their own little bit of special sauce (SendGrid, Amazon SES, PostMark, et al).
If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other providers?
There are a few things that we think set Mandrill apart from the pack. Our application is designed with responsiveness in mind, and we have mobile application on both of the major platforms so you can get access to your email stats and reputation wherever you are. We have search and analytics deeply ingrained in the application in a way that is fairly unique - letting you see your emails in context and trying to derive the context for you when we can. We also integrate deeply with the main MailChimp product. They use the same underlying delivery engine, the same templating and content personalization systems, and we have a heavy discount for users of both products.
Mandrill's still a rapidly iterating product for us, but we think we can take the same sense of usability and power that we have in MailChimp and extend it to email more broadly.
Looks great. Currently in the process of building a new application using Postmark, will certainly evaluate a switch. The pricing certainly blows Postmark out of the water.
We built on top of our own internal job scheduling systems that we use for email to handle retries, batching, and concurrency handling so we don't overwhelm your servers. It's all custom stuff, though.
That's one of the reasons we chose that name for the brand. Since Mandrill is an infrastructure service, we wanted it to feel more serious and aggressive than MailChimp.
[+] [-] cmorrisrsg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programminggeek|13 years ago|reply
I've been looking for a newsletter service that charges me reasonable rates for pay as you go sending of a monthly/semi-monthly email newsletter, using the pay as you go product, it would cost me $30 per 1,000 emails, whereas Mandrill's per email rates start around $0.90 per 1,000. You say that both are using the same infrastructure, so why is sending email newsletters with MailChimp 33x more expensive?
[+] [-] megaman821|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlib|13 years ago|reply
edit: Missed it, seems it is being worked on: http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/464808-api...
[+] [-] sandstrom|13 years ago|reply
See this for discussions on the subject: http://tech.dropbox.com/?p=165 http://xkcd.com/936/
[+] [-] rberdeen|13 years ago|reply
http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/search?q=i... doesn't look very promising.
[+] [-] brittohalloran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikGelderblom|13 years ago|reply
Just gave it a quick spin here and we got the SMTP relay working and tracking e-mails within 2 minutes. Very impressive. We'll play around with the API soon, it looks promising :)
[+] [-] smcguinness|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tszming|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielKehoe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ark15|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippich|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agotterer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agotterer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zbailey|13 years ago|reply
If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other providers?
[+] [-] cmorrisrsg|13 years ago|reply
Mandrill's still a rapidly iterating product for us, but we think we can take the same sense of usability and power that we have in MailChimp and extend it to email more broadly.
[+] [-] vailripper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bittersweet|13 years ago|reply
I'll be integrating webhooks in my own app soon so I'm quite interested how others have 'solved' that so to speak.
[+] [-] cmorrisrsg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] klbarry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmorrisrsg|13 years ago|reply