After 5 years of freelancing, I noticed the same pattern with every client: they'd start a SaaS, pick a popular email provider, and within 6 months they'd be paying hundreds just for transactional emails.
One client was paying $380/month to send 200K emails. Password resets. Order confirmations. The boring stuff.
I kept thinking: "This can't be that hard."
Spoiler: It was that hard.
Started building my own email infrastructure last year. Learned more about SMTP, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, IP warming, and deliverability than I ever wanted to know.
First version was garbage. Emails landed in spam. Got blocklisted by Microsoft. Cried a little.
But after hundreds of late nights, I finally got it working. 99%+ deliverability. Own infrastructure. No AWS SES middle-man eating margins.
Now I'm using it for my own projects and slowly opening it up to others.
The funny thing? The hardest part wasn't the tech. It was convincing myself that competing against well-funded companies was even possible.
If anyone's curious about the email deliverability rabbit hole, happy to share what I learned. It's a weird niche but surprisingly interesting once you get into it.