In reply to Peter Cralen.

"It just shows that offering and supporting a free service is not the best way to do business"

A lot of people are getting hung up on the 'free' service and making assumptions. First of all, Mandrill isn't a free service, it has a free tier.

And it's free tier was great business for them. They roped in developers and webmasters, who in turn rope in small and large business users. The latter, are the customers they have been really after, with the former, webmasters and developers being quite expendable.

For many years developers familiar with Mailchimp and its good reputation, will have had a natural affinity for Mandrill. And that affection means recommending people to both the services.

Mandrill was very developer oriented so it drew a lot of developers. But their core userbase remains the small and large business users, so they are aligning back to that.

They report that they didn't cut the free tier for cost reasons. So the 'oh it was free' so it was unsustainable implication is false.

Mailchimp, the core business, has gotten huge with their free tier and it's still there. They've posted interesting things about their strategy on that in previous years. It works.

And in order to differentiate Mailchimp further they've been tieing in more transactional features, because those are more engaging. That is where email marketing is heading.

Since a lot of users are using Mandrill for simple systems emails, they had the 'aha' moment to just boot these people out because they identify it as 'not their core business'.

The mistake, I feel, is that they alienate webmasters and developers who helped their platform grow, through recommendations and otherwise. They lose out on a lot of goodwill in the manner in which they carry this out. The short notice means a lot of people will have to spend a lot of time plumbing in an alternative service in a short time frame. It's a slap in the face.

And so it starts to look a lot like this repeating pattern that has nothing to do with 'oh the poor sods couldn't sustain a free model' and a lot to do with 'we love using this free(mium) strategy as a growth hack, leveraging developers, webmasters and regular users and their networks. Once we have a large userbase and plenty of momentum and we've got a handle on the service our users helped test for us, we simply shift gears to maximize our operations, dumping the now unnecessary excess weight.'

And this playbook has been done by countless companies, over and over and over again. They welcome people in en masse, to grow, then make the expendable users when they have outlasted their usefulness leave or pay ridiculous prices.

I just didn't expect this from a company that I had such high regard for.