Is Mandrill all? As I searched for a replacement and found 2 great alternatives to Mandrill

    TL; DR: Mandrill wanted to raise prices 4 times. They found a way through integration with MailChimp.

    In February this year, like a bolt from the blue, a letter arrived from Mandrill saying that it would cease to exist as an independent service from April 27th and now to use it, you would need to integrate your Mandrill account into a paid MailChimp account. It is paid, even the cheapest. Here's what the MailChimp price tag looks like:



    Let me remind you that before Mandrill was free for small projects up to 12,000 letters per month (about 400 per day). Now at least $ 20 + how many letters you send.

    “Here are the rascals!” - I thought to myself and went to Google and test the alternatives, because as a user, this attitude from the service is unacceptable to me.



    Alternatives considered in detail in the article:


    Both options have their advantages.




    Alternative # 1: MailGun - The Email Service For Developers


    • 10,000 free emails per month
    • Next 500,000 - $ 0,00050 apiece
    • Next 1,000,000 - $ 0,00035
    • Next 5,000,000 - $ 0.00015
    • Everyone else will be at $ 0.00010

    Priceing is quite simple and without pitfalls.

    Now for the integration process. Here and further in the article I will look at the world through the eyes of a PHP developer, forgive me the rest of the community :)

    MailGun loves and often integrates support into frameworks (for example, in Laravel ) for an excellent API. In order to try it, just register and curl to contact endpoint-y with its API key:
    curl -s --user 'api:key-3ax6xnjp29jd6fds4gc373sgvjxteol0' \
        https://api.mailgun.net/v3/samples.mailgun.org/messages \
        -F from='Excited User ' \
        -F to='devs@mailgun.net' \
        -F subject='Hello' \
        -F text='Testing some Mailgun awesomeness!'
    

    For PHP, the github has the official mailgun-php library .

    The control panel contains a convenient dashboard and logs of all letters:



    There are webhooks for responding to various events:



    For some of my projects, I settled on Mailgan. 10,000 free letters per month are enough for the eyes. In the case of Laravel, integration takes half an hour, of which 5 minutes you spend on specifying the API key and 25 minutes on testing :)




    Alternative # 2: SparkPost - Better Email Delivery for Better Customer Engagement


    100,000 free emails per month (10 times more than MailGun). For reasons unknown to me, this service is not so popular and I found out about it quite by accident - from comments to some post. In addition to 100 thousand free letters, he has another killer feature - subaccounts, which they washed down two weeks in advance . Subaccounts is when you give each of your users a sub-account with an independent reputation. This has many benefits. Firstly, you can see the logs for each sub-account separately. Secondly, the independent reputation of sub-accounts allows you to apply certain measures to users of your project, depending on their "karma" :)









    For my project of massive email cards and invitations, the Subaccounts API is a vital functionality for detecting and blocking spammers in advance.

    They have the same API as MailGun, and you can use it as you like , at least from the command line:

    curl -XPOST \
      https://api.sparkpost.com/api/v1/transmissions \
      -H "Authorization: " \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{"content": {"from": "testing@sparkpostbox.com", "subject": "Oh hey", "text":"Testing SparkPost - the most awesomest email service in the world"}, "recipients": [{"address": "developers+curl@sparkpost.com"}]}' 
    

    Integration with PHP takes place using the official open source php-sparkpost library and does not cause any difficulties:

    use SparkPost\SparkPost;
    use GuzzleHttp\Client;
    use Ivory\HttpAdapter\Guzzle6HttpAdapter;
    $httpAdapter = new Guzzle6HttpAdapter(new Client());
    $sparky = new SparkPost($httpAdapter, ['key'=>'']);
    $results = $sparky->transmission->send([
        'from'=>'testing@sparkpostbox.com',
        'html'=>'

    Testing SparkPost - the world\'s most awesomest email service!

    ', 'subject'=> 'Oh hey!', 'recipients'=>[ ['address'=>['email'=>'developers+php@sparkpost.com']] ] ]);


    In addition, the SparkPost slogan and eDataSource data indicate good deliverability :



    UPDATE: SparkPost is officially unavailable from Russia and Ukraine. The problem is solved by registering through a gateway, for example, “from Germany” (thx Softer ).



    In the end, I note that we considered other services such as:


    For one reason or another, these services did not suit us and I do not consider them in detail in the article, but maybe someone will find what he needs in just one of them.

    Less than a month is left until the end of the life of the good old Mandril, I hope that with this post I helped a little to determine the alternatives for the transition.



    Well, the last poll. If you are not a Mandrill user, please click “Refrain”.

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    I am a Mandrill user and I ...

    • 55.5% are just looking for alternatives for the transition, thanks for the article! 149
    • 29.8% have already switched to80
    • 5.5% will stay with Mandrill, because there is no time to change anything in the project code 15
    • 8.9% will stay with Mandrill because I don't mind paying an extra $ 20 for a good service 24

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