Stop Paying $20/Month for Email You Could Run for $1.50
Most teams handle programmatic email one of two ways.
The first: sign up for SendGrid or Mailgun, grab an API key, and start sending. It works great — until you hit 50K emails and the bill jumps to $20/month, then you add inbound parsing and it's another plan tier, then you need bounce webhooks and suddenly you're deep in a third-party dashboard you barely understand, paying for features you don't use.
The second: use Google Workspace's catch-all rule to funnel everything into one inbox. Free-ish, but completely dumb — no processing, no routing, no automation. Every contact form submission and support@ email lands in the same pile for a human to sort manually.
There's a better way that most AWS developers walk right past. Amazon SES catches the mail, S3 stores it, Lambda processes it. The logic lives in your codebase, the infrastructure is fully in your AWS account, and the bill last month was $1.48.
