Goodbye, Mailchimp

A mini-momentous occasion: after 15 years (!), I am no longer a Mailchimp customer. (In its place, email capa­bility is provided, in var­ious contexts, by Shopify and Buttondown.) I got a lot out of sending all those “campaigns” over all those years, but/and, when I wrote about home-cooked apps, con­trasting them to slippery, ever-changing cor­po­rate plat­forms … 

There will be no sudden redesign [ … ] no pivot to chase a user­base inscrutable to us.

 … Mailchimp was on my mind.

It’s been strange to watch this par­tic­ular plat­form change beneath my fingertips. “Inscrutable” is really the right word, because Mailchimp has grown and mutated to serve a set of needs and cus­tomers that I truly don’t understand. Not that it shouldn’t! Well — I mean, I wish it wouldn’t. But it did, and the feeling grew, over the years, of hacking through dense brush to reach the simple capa­bil­i­ties I needed — the ones I remembered.

Goodbye, Mailchimp! — and it’s a real goodbye, almost human: the melan­choly of parting, the sudden light­ness of release.