When one has a very small site with light traffic within a niche market, a $10/month bill is too expensive to handle <50 emails per month. Therefore it’s goodbye to another corporate-minded move with a PR spin saying this will improve service to its customers.
I wrote to Mandrill/MailChimp in January about ended their free account plan (even offered to negotiate a reduced rate) and was assured via email/Mandrill Support:
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“. . . Looking at your current sending account, it looks like you initially signed up for your account before we made changes to our free plan and therefore you’ll continue to receive the 12,000 free messages per month. So while we made some changes, any users that had signed up before the changes were grandfathered in and won’t see any changes in their current sending plan. . . “
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And now the axe has fallen and they won’t honor this at all. You MUST PAY to use this plugin.