Wow, and on top of everything else, sparkpost just upgraded their free tier from 10k/mo to 100k/mo sends. That's pretty huge, as 100k/month gets you a lot of runway before you need to really start paying for things. Plus, the CEO promises to keep honoring the 100k threshold for anybody who signs up under that plan, even if they have to lower it again in the future. [0]. I'll have to check them out.
Of course my real problem at this moment is Mandrill just plain works already, and I'm not sure if it is worth spending engineering time shifting to a different provider instead of just paying the premium. TBH, the biggest issue is the feeling of Impending Doom I get from the mandrill discussion. [1] seems to indicate that the transactional email of mandrill really just doesn't fit in the corporate culture of mailchimp. So it's not just the change in pricing that worries me, I'm concerned about a future where there's a lack of innovation and support in the product itself, and I'm still locked in to paying more for less because I don't want to spend the time moving providers. Sunk costs and all that.
I agree, Sparkpost is the best option I've seen so far. I've moved most stuff to it.
I wish Mailchimp had given more notice. Even services which have went into complete shutdown (ie: not merged into another product) have often given more notice than this.
I've built SO many systems that use the Mandrill API in one way or another (forgot password mails, for example). A lot only send out a couple of mails a month but having to change them all over really sucks. Especially when I was always raving about Mandrill in the past to clients.
Moved from Mandrill to Sendgrid for SMTP... had delivery issues, likely my fault. Moved to Sparkpost, NO problems. Much easier interface and onboarding for SMTP.
