SES sounds like a good option, will look into that. when you say alot more work, could you elaborate on that longer term vs getting the same alternative on a paid provider? Also are there any providers that offer this level of control?
I am running my own SMTP for my SaaS. I used managed SMTP services, including SES, before. It took be roughly 2 months to get it all set up: research the SMTP server options, trial a few of them, pick one, learn it thoroughly, write deployment scripts, deploy it, switch email traffic over to it gradually to warm up the sending IP, and monitor it. Blogged about it here: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...
If you are starting from zero, and are not running in production yet, I suppose it's easier as you can afford to make mistakes and lose some email. I had to measure everything 7 times, and still had one major oh-no event :-)
reply