How supportly Cut Ticket Notification Email Costs by 70%
supportly was paying $800/month on Mailchimp Transactional for ticket opened, replied, and resolved emails. After switching to Sendbound, their bill dropped to $39. Real numbers inside.
supportly is a lightweight customer support platform for small and medium businesses. When a support ticket is opened, replied to, or resolved, supportly sends an email notification to the customer. At 40,000 tickets a month with an average of three email touchpoints per ticket, that's 120,000 transactional emails every month.
The cost problem
On Mailchimp Transactional (formerly Mandrill), supportly was paying $9.95 per 25,000 emails — roughly $48 at their current volume. But Mailchimp Transactional requires a Mailchimp subscription to access the API, adding another $200/month to the bill for a plan they used only for API access. Additional fees for dedicated IPs, custom domains, and premium support pushed the total to $800/month.
The migration
The supportly CTO migrated in two hours on a Sunday afternoon. The Sendbound SDK is a drop-in replacement for Mailchimp Transactional in Node.js — the API shape is nearly identical for basic sends, and Sendbound provides a compatibility layer that maps Mandrill-style template variables to Sendbound's template engine. The migration required changing one import and one environment variable.
"I was bracing for a weekend of pain. It took two hours. We're now on Sendbound's $39 Growth plan and the deliverability is better than what we had at $800."
Deliverability improvement
An unexpected benefit of the migration: inbox placement improved from 93% to 98.7%. Mailchimp Transactional's shared IP pools carry reputation risk from all the other senders on the pool. Sendbound's Growth plan includes a dedicated IP with warmup handled automatically — supportly's support emails go out on a pool that's never shared with marketing sends or unknown third parties.
