Running this site requires that I be able to send automatic emails. Email notification is done for just about everything. Your registration, password resets, digests, topic notifications, etc. You can’t even install Discourse software without configuring an email server.
I don’t want to run an email server myself. It’s too much of a pain. Luckily, there are companies out there that offer email as a service. I use one such service for this site. it’s called Mandrill. It has worked great and I don’t come anywhere close to the amount of traffic that would require me to pay for their service.
That is, until now…
It appears that Mandrill has decided to go to a more restrictive pay model sometime in late March or early April. I looked into it and it would cost me about $20 a month. That’s not too bad but it’s $20 more per month than I want to spend.
What that means is that over the next few weeks I will be exploring other email service options. Assuming I find something that works, I’ll be switching the email over at some point within the next two months.
I don’t expect this will be too disruptive, but I will keep updates on my progress as replies on this topic. If anyone has any advice on this, please respond here as well.