• by Jess Nelson , March 7, 2016

Several email companies have made overtures to departing Mandrill developers a week after MailChimp pulled the plug on its transactional email service. 

MailChimp announced last week that its free Mandrill developer service would be folded into a paid-for MailChimp email marketing subscription service. To add further fuel to the fire, MailChimp announced that it would no longer offer Mandrill as a stand-alone solution. Effectively, a once-free service now requires developers to pay twice, once for MailChimp’s subscription service and again for Mandrill’s add-on service.

Developers now have less than two months to either pay up or search for an alternative vendor -- a potentially dreaded and arduous process.

Luckily for mobile app developers, several email-focused companies have taken up the call to recruit Mandrill mobile app developers looking for alternative solutions.

Cloud-based email service SparkPost unveiled SparkPost Free on Friday in a press statement, promising to honor Mandrill’s pricing with the additional benefit of 100,000 free transactional or triggered email messages a month. The company’s client roster currently includes Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter.

“Those customers who will be moving off the platform need a quick resolution, and they deserve a high-performing solution at a price that is as good -- or better -- than what they currently have,” says Josh Aberant, vice president of growth at SparkPost. “We love developers, and we already had a planned pricing change targeted specifically to meet their needs in the works. That's why we were able to turn it around so fast.”

Steve Dille, chief marketing officer at SparkPost, discussed the company’s planned business move in a conversation last week with --Email Marketing Daily.

Additional solutions for ex-Mandrill users include Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and SendGrid.

SendGrid, an email marketing service used by Uber and Spotify, is offering ex-Mandrill developers a 10% discount to join SendGrid by April 30. The company offers a series of tiered solutions with a variety of analytics and customizations, but its free service only pertains to 12,000 free email messages a month.

Amazon SES offers a transactional email and marketing message service as a part of Amazon’s Web Services solution. A free tier of Amazon SES offers 62,000 free email messages a month.

MailChimp named Amazon SES as a worthwhile -- and even better -- competitor to Mandrill in the company’s original blog post announcing the Mandrill change. MailChimp has since updated its blog post to include information on SparkPost’s new service as well.