Today I found email from Mandrill in my inbox starting "Important Changes to Mandrill". I was very suprised, that this useful service is shutting down being merged into Mailchimp. On the other hand development in last months signalized that something is in the air. But there are many other services that you can use for transactional emails. Which I will choose?
Why is Mandrill dead?
Mandrill was startup inside Mailchimp service. They choose very aggressive pricing model with 12 000 / emails per month for free. In 2012 that was tempting for smaller sites. It was enough and there was no potential to eventually transform them to paying customers.
That was changed quietly in summer 2015. New customers have to pay $10 / month for same amount of emails. But Mandrill had already 800 000 active users. It was matter of time that something will change for them too. In todays blogpost was announced that Mandrill will be merged into Maichimp. It will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account and pay additional $20 / 25 000 emails for service called MailChimp Transactional. This conditions are not acceptable for many of us. Don't forget to make a change until 27.4.2016. There are plenty of options.
What's your options?
There are plenty of direct competitors but not many of them has free tier. I think many of us give a try to Mailgun which offers 10 000 emails per month for free. Drupal module is avaiable for seamless integration. But don't forget this free tier could change anytime so be prepared to same situation.
Don't forget that you can use any email service with Drupal. Just use SwiftMailer and set proper SMTP server. You don't need to use email service API (and need a Drupal integration module) to send emails. It's better only for big sites with lot of emails. In this scenarios I will choose services like Amazon SES ($0.10 per 1 000 emails).
Mandrill alternatives
After I post this article I received several tips to other email services via twitter, comment or direct email :-) I will update this post and add other transactional email providers which I added to my personal shortlist.
- SendGrid - Free Plan (12 000 emails per month) and Drupal module is avaiable