Zipbooks Switched From Mandrill To Mailgun Using Laravel

This post was written and contributed by Tim Chavez, Founder and CEO of Zipbooks

ZipBooks, a happy customer of Mailgun, is free accounting and invoicing software with every feature you might expect from a paid application. Users can record expenses, balance books, and send invoices in seconds. More importantly, users can get paid before invoices are even sent through our financial partners which is also how we’re able to offer service for free. There’s also a free iPhone app available for anyone on-the-go.

Transactional emails are the lifeline of our business as notifications always go out when our users send invoices or when their customers send payments. Mailgun also lets users bcc themselves on sent invoices, which is perfect for ZipBooks. We end up sending thousands of emails each day through Mailgun.

Switching from Mandrill to Mailgun

Before Mailgun we used Mandrill. We decided to switch because Mandrill began forcing customers to start using and paying for MailChimp, its marketing email service. We had a definite need for transactional emails, but not to send marketing emails on a large scale. Like many tech startups, we don’t have a huge budget for IT, and so we didn’t like the idea of paying for a bundled service like Mandrill + MailChimp.

In contrast to that bundle, Mailgun allowed us to pay for just what we needed.

We chose Mailgun after extensive research online. We explored many different options, and at the end of our research, Mailgun was the obvious choice. It offered the full range of features we needed, it was easy to use, and it came at a great value. Being able to send the first 10K emails free was also a nice plus.

We use a PHP framework called Laravel. Mailgun already has a convenient integration with it, so the transition was smooth and painless. We actually did our whole migration over a single weekend.

To use the Mailgun driver, first install Guzzle, then set the driver option in your config/mail.phpconfiguration file to mailgun. Next, verify that your config/services.php configuration file contains the following options:

'mailgun' => [
 'domain' => 'your-mailgun-domain', 
 'secret' => 'your-mailgun-key',
],

Why Mailgun

The biggest benefit we’ve seen after switching to Mailgun is how bug-free Mailgun actually is. With the number of emails we send, we would know right away if there was a problem. Since we’ve switched to Mailgun, we haven’t had a single complaint from our team about anything breaking.

We’ve been impressed with Mailgun’s email experts. When we finished our integration, we sent out an email to support to let them know, and they responded in minutes. Frankly, their support team’s responsiveness and helpfulness is another big win over Mandrill.

Another benefit was being able to cut down on costs without compromising on quality. We have saved a significant sum by switching from Mandrill, but are using a great piece of software with powerful capabilities.

Thanks, Mailgun!