The pricing changed just last month so it’s no longer effectively free for small users but it’s relatively cheap (for now).
Well it was only free for 1 year. After that, you’d be paying for the EC2 instance. It’s roughly the same now. You can get cheaper hosting than EC2 but you’re paying a bit more for SES.
I looked at the prices you quoted for other services and they seem ridiculously high
Yeah it’s nuts. I think people with zero technical knowledge who want something fast are the ones paying for those services. It’s surprising there’s so many of them, but there is the fact that all the search results are dominated by their SEO blogs so it’s very hard to learn about other options.
But even if you’re not technically knowledgeable you can pay someone a month’s worth of what those other services charge, and they can setup a self-hosted server for you.
For example, even using SES, if you attempt to originate too many emails to one provider in a single call, they may start rejecting everything - I had to put counters into the code to limit how many gmail addresses would be sent with each iteration. SES also rate limits so you need to manage that somehow.
I haven’t had any issues with this. The starting rates are pretty generous and I’ve been approved for the increases I requested.
You’ll also need to be mindful of the bounce rate and complaints