We signed up with them 2 months ago. As a small but rapidly growing company, we have to keep a close eye on our costs. We'll be cancelling our service with them today because of the price hike.
You'll be canceling over a $5 price increase? Seems a little excessive. Paying $15/mo isn't unreasonable, imo, for sending up to 100,000 emails. Mailgun charges $79/mo for the same, if I'm not mistaken.
Seems excessive on the surface but over the course of a year, that's $60. Still pedantic? Sure, but $60 in adspend for us generates $1200 in revenue. As a bootstrapped company, every dime matters to us.
Why sacrifice that when there are alternative options for cheaper, especially when we're only sending out a handful of emails/mo?
1) We're services/project oriented. So for each $1 we spend, we receive ~$20 back on revenue. That unfortunately doesn't compound and isn't recurring in the normal SaaS sense.
2) That's $20:$1 on revenue but not profit. We average between 15-25% net profit. Not great and we're trying to focus heavily on increasing this but it's quite tricky. Incrasing this usually means very expensive equipment purchases for automation.
3) I wish we could pour more money into advertising but we have to save up for additional equipment to purchase to expand services or pay for future software projects that could help us generate recurring revenue. We don't have deep pockets to leverage since it's bootstrapped. Otherwise, we'd have gone in guns blazing on advertising!
We also switched from MailChimp to SendGrid, but it appears MailChimp will still be more expensive as they bill based on the number of "subscribers" instead of number of emails sent.
On MailChimp our cost is $210/month on SendGrid it is $100.
However, looking at their updated pricing, they also now have "Marketing" as a separate pricing tier, so I can't say exactly how that will affect us.