Good and free alternative to Mandrill?

There are a few out there:

• Mailgun offer 10,000 free emails per month.
• SendGrid offer 12,000 free emails per month.
• Postmark offer 25,000 free on signup.

There are more out there too. I've personally gone with Postmark. I don't mind paying if/when I get past that 25,000 free credits. I generally send 300-500 emails per month.

Just to add how serious of a problem this is for bigger companies, we paid for sending a million emails something around 200 dollars, now it will be 1000 dollars with those "25k" blocks per 20$.

Ben Chestnut (Mandrill's CEO) really downplayed in his blog how significant of a change this is and how disruptive it truly could be for many companies. I posted the details in depth of the Mandrill Policy Changes along with snippets from the original blog posts by Mandrill and Ben Chestnut. This is certainly a bold move by the company that is leaving a lot of people unhappy and perhaps creating a ton of unnecessary work for software engineers over the next 3 weeks.

@upshotmediagroup did you really join the site just to post a link to your blog? :-/

@ohffs Then liking their own reply :D

@LucasFecko Surely it's not going to be $20 for every 25k emails? The wording of the email i saw suggested the blocks would start at that price. I would imagine the blocks get cheaper or bigger as you scale up. If they've got any sense at all.

SendinBlue is also free for 9,000 emails / month, here are more details : http://www.codeinwp.com/blog/mandrill-alternatives/.

If your site is hosted on Amazon AWS, then I'd also give SES a look.

62,000 emails free per month as long as you send through an EC2 instance. Plus they're by far the cheapest beyond that point too.

I'm on Digital Ocean myself, so I think I'll go with Mailgun. Looks to be the next cheapest once you start scaling up beyond the free tiers.

@Sachin That register to post the link smell :D

@Rjs37 I wrote them an email, they basically referred me here: here.

As you wrote, the price of block is going down but anyway, I did some calculations:

The company I work for had sent 7 million emails in January, and plans are more emails will be sent in future. We paid around 1100$ for that. Pretty good price if you ask me. Now with their new policy, the same amount will cost us 2800$ (their cheapest blocks, 280 blocks for 10$).

How the frack should I explain that to management, that the prices for our email raised almost by 250%? Nope, I already wrote an email about explaining this and that we will be switching to different service, I picked MailGun, I calculated that it will cost us around 1500$ (with dedicated IPs) per month, but it's still better than Mandrill in future.

And yes, I need to rewrite our Mailer architecture, I wrote it that you need to swap only core class, bud MailGun doesn't support adding Google Analytics params to URL, so I need to somehow make that. Also new webhooks.

I'dont worry about the rewrite, the problem is how the ESPs will react if we start changing IPs of our emails, if they will be marked as spam we are delivering bad service to our customers, so that's what's bothering me. I need to buy some dedicated IPs by MailGun and begin slow transition of emails, type-by-type of email will be migrated, and at last our biggest type of email, newsletter, will be migrated.

I am pissed about this situation, but what can one do.

@LucasFecko Yeah they sent me the same link. Though actually I think it would work out even more expensive than what you just worked out.

I think they're working it that the first 20 blocks are $20 each then the next 20 are $18 each, meaning 40 blocks would be $760. i.e. only the last 120 of your blocks would cost $10 each, the others would be scaled through the other price levels accordingly.

Absolutely crazy pricing!

We're probably just within the 10k free tier for Mailgun but even when we start paying it'll be so much cheaper. Just a shame that this has happened as we'd earned a free quota at Mandrill of 62k!

Saw this Tweet last night.

Mandrill users, we heard you loud and clear and that's why we're offering 100K Free emails/mo #WeLoveDevelopers

https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing

Haven't look at it myself just yet, but thought it would be worth positing.