• by Jess Nelson , August 4, 2016

New data released this week points to where Mandrill developers fled after MailChimp’s closure of the free email development platform. 

Email marketing service MailChimp made headlines earlier this year when it announced the end of its stand-alone service Mandrill, transitioning the free service to a premium add-on for paid MailChimp accounts. 

More than 800,000 Mandrill users were given 60 days to either find a new outbound email service or sign-up for a paid MailChimp account.

The Mandrill transition occurred on April 27, and now new data from Notablist reveals what platforms received a boost of new users after the closure of Mandrill.

More than 80% of Mandrill developers chose to find a new service instead of subscribing for MailChimp’s paid service, according to Notablist, but the 19.1% who chose to stay with MailChimp all have paid accounts.

“While many MailChimp users probably stayed because they’re happy with the service and saw no reason to leave, others may have chosen to remain simply because it was easier than undertaking a switch on relatively short notice,” says Michael Johnston, founder of Notablist. “Whether they choose to stay for the long run, however, remains to be seen.”

Notablist provides a business intelligence platform for email marketers with a searchable database of email newsletters. Notablist tracks more than 500,000 brands’ marketing campaigns, as well as the marketing technologies used by each brand.

Although Notablist asserts its data is not definitive, it illustrates a large mass migration of users away from MailChimp.

SparkPost, an email deliverability platform, received the largest share of Mandrill developers, with more than a 21% share in the market according to the study. Notablist itself used Mandrill’s services before switching to SparkPost, according to a blog post online.

“I think SparkPost won the battle because they’re a known quantity and they offered generous terms to switchers,” says Johnston. “It undoubtedly helped a great deal when MailChimp themselves publicized SparkPost’s offering.  The market share windfall reaped by SparkPost and others, however, may not end up being a financial windfall, at least not in the short term; many of those new accounts may not have been paid Mandrill users to begin with.”

SparkPost competitively recruited email developers with a free tier of its SparkPost Express product, with 100,000 sent emails a month for free.

SendGrid also picked up some of the users, gaining 16.4% of Mandrill developers according to Notablist.

In addition, Mailgun gained 11.3% of users while Amazon SES gained just under 10% of Mandrill users.