Dear Mailchimp,

We love your service! You focused on UX and UI while your competitors focused on the enterprise. Building a user base with jokes and beauty before it was cool. You won us, and we’ve since referred all of customers to your service. You deserved it.

Then you gave us Mandrill! Finally, allowing us to manage our client’s transactional emails without a lot of headaches. It took very little overhead and provided a balance between services we offered. When a client would ask, we’d say “it’s built by Mailchimp!” and they wouldn’t flinch at all. In most cases it only handled a handful of emails a month, but it was perfect. It simply, quietly, supported a small part of a bigger monster.

That’s why your February announcement has us reeling. Being developers ourselves, we understood the overhead needed to run a service and desire to focus on a single product. However, we also knew that many of our clients wouldn’t understand why this was awesome, leaving the cost to outweigh the benefit. Either way, we shared the details with them and presented solutions. Pay for the service indefinitely or move to something else that’s less expensive or free.

Being a great big company that builds great big things, you know how projects and web development cycles generally work. You diligently toil to get your gizmo off the ground and when satisfied, shift onto something else. Hopefully, only needing to return for enhancements and minor repairs. That’s what our company does for our clients. We build awesome things that don’t need a lot of maintenance.

When you decided to make this shift, you forced our company to halt and double-back on living breathing work. Requiring us to reconnect and update clients on systems that didn’t need to be touched. Leaving us to either shoulder the cost, or justify the expense for the client. All the while, being generally cold in your communication and not offering grandfather or alternatives to your pro account. It put us in a frustrating position and seemed an odd and dramatic change from the company we knew and loved.

So instead of sticking with you for the long haul and crossing our fingers, we‘ve decided to spend our time reconnecting with our clients and moving them elsewhere. We don’t dislike you, we just feel slighted and given the increasingly aggressive tone of your emails, I imagine we’re not alone.

These are scenarios that build competitors. We really enjoyed your service, but you chose to take an aggressive stance simply to onboard people into your pro service. While it may seem finicky, this modern world runs on relationships and you fumbled it.