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Comment by scosman | Hacker News Reader

It's way worse than just the TOS change. Mandrill has a lot of advanced features (webhooks, reporting, AB testing, templates, etc). Some companies may be able to switch to SES or mailgun in a day, but more advanced integrations could take weeks. We're stuck with either pulling people off critical project in order to meet their ridiculously short deadline, or pay insane bills (the new price is over 4x the price we signed up for).

I emailed their founders and never received a reply.

Lesson learned: do not take a dependancy on MailChimp for any reason.

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Agreed, I'm surprised the 4x price increase is not mentioned more often. Personally I can understand moving away from a free offering, especially if they're having trouble with spammers, but to quadruple pricing out of the blue? For sites, like mine, built around a huge amount of transactional email (scheduling group gaming sessions and notifying your group by email), a 4x increase is essentially no different than just shutting down. They have their reasons, and now I have mine, to never use a mailchimp product again.

This is where I am at. This is insanity.

Other mail services can do the same. It's funny we have not fixed the problem of free mail, i.e. any one should be able to run a mail server anywhere and expect delivery of their mail. We should just do a better job of filtering spam and bad users, but mail should still be able to leave any server and be delivered to any other address.

Just to be clear: I'm happy paying a premium for all the great features services like SendGrid/Mandrill offer. We knew about cheaper services like SES, or the ability to roll our own, but we didn't want to re-invent the wheel.

I'm not happy about them quadrupling their prices, with a ridiculously short deadline to avoid it.

The real kicker: will Mailchimp drop support completely later on... next month? I've no confidence in them anymore. We're moving asap.

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