What I think about SparkPost’s revised pricing
Last Friday, email delivery service SparkPost announced they are adjusting their service plans. The 100,000 free emails / month plan is no longer available for new users.
Here’s the SparkPost revised plan.

Sparkpost does a Mandrill?
Many would distinctly remember Mandrill’s move last year to become paid account and raise their prices 4X.
Many termed it as a bizarre developer-hostile move. Customers lost faith in ESP pricing. It seemed that the dialogue with customers has not been honest.
When Mandrill news hit the streets, SparkPost was quick enough to position its offer of ‘low prices for life’ for new customers, and grab the market share. And today, just more than a year later, they too do a Mandrill of sorts — well, at least to the new customers.
New customers no longer get the freebies (of 100k emails free a month). Most importantly, even support is off the hook. New customers only get 30 days of email support. Want technical support? Take paid plan.
What customers have to say..
Not the most developer friendly move, as the comments go by -
“support should be part of your business/product these days
“had plans to send massive mails through your service, so this (new pricing) was a hit in the face…
“Mandrill & other companies often offer these “forever free” plans and they run a few years and then are removed or reduced as companies backpedal on their commitments because they failed to anticipate the costs.
Is this price ‘adjustment’ a good idea?
SparkPost hopes to make solving the complex world of email delivery as easy as making an API call. True that email delivery has become complex and even commercial. (this infographic shows the journey of email channel to what it is today)
But with this latest pricing, SparkPost seems to have added another ‘C’ to the list of challenges users face with email delivery — Confusing.

Let me explain.
Suppose you need to send 50k emails a month, you pay 9 dollars.
That’s simple enough, but here’s where it gets really weird.
Let’s suppose you need to send 70,000 emails. Then, you pay 9 dollars for the 50k emails and an additional fifteen dollars for 20k emails. Didn’t I say it gets weird :P
That’s $24 for 70k emails
Choosing the next slab also doesn’t seem to be an option. The next slab is high jump straight to 150k emails from 50k. Looks like the sweet spot of 100k isn’t no longer sweet.
Meanwhile..
At Pepipost, we’ve always believed pricing must be simple — have no confusing slabs, make it flat pricing. You can buy credits only when you need to send emails, charged at a flat rate of $0.2 for 1000 emails. There’s no monthly fee.
Here’s a quick comparison.

Know more about Pepipost here.
Concluding…
For email senders, the complexity of choosing the right email delivery service only seems to be getting even more confusing than ever. Price adjustments make it inconvenient to users, to say the least. A lot of development is done over ESP’s API to ensure tight seamless integration.
Do we call this move of SparkPost precise targeting (high volume senders) or anti-developer move? Eager to know your replies.
