In reply to Peter Cralen.

Problem is that Mandrill's new tier is not affordable. The new lowest tier is $20/month for 25,000 emails. If they switched to something like $1/month with 1,000 emails, I probably would stay on and pay the $1 because it's not worth my time to migrate to a different service.

I run a small plugin business and sent 600 emails last year. For the entire year! I'm not going to pay 40¢ per email for the privilege to send from Mandrill. They obviously don't think I'm part of their target audience so I'm going to go somewhere else. There are a lot of other people out there in the same boat I am and now we're all going away.

It's not that Mandrill is a bad service, but rather it can't be highly recommended now because it doesn't provide the same amount of value to a certain audience. Just because that audience doesn't see value in the switch doesn't mean that products/services with a free tier are 100% a bad idea overall. Mailchimp/Mandrill made a decision as a company and now they are seeing the effects. Nothing wrong with that on either side.