If you're sending out a few hundred emails a month? Or even a couple thousand? Absolutely go your own way. But if you need to send out six or seven figures worth of email a month, the time cost of IP reputation management goes up very quickly.
In that Reddit comment linked in that article the person says they were spending $325k on self-managed infrastructure and the same thing would cost them nearly $4 million on SES.
It's unlikely they're ignoring reputation management with their self-managed stuff, so that's included in the cost, right? What kind of value added reputation management would something like SES be providing that's worth +$3.65 million per year?
What's the real threshold where the costs makes the system unattractive to bad actors? It's definitely nowhere close to millions of dollars in my opinion. I would say the entrenched players like the status quo because it gives them astronomical margins, so they act in an anti-competitive manner that ensures we never get anything better.
Overpaying by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per year for email reputation management seems like a terrible deal to me. Maybe someone can break it down for me and explain what kind of value you're getting for the 10-100x increase in costs. Is it anything beyond a pay-to-play scheme that's the result of tacit collusion?
$325k in hardware also needs people with expertise to run it, those aren’t cheap.
Maintaining reputation also means keeping your IP of blacklists and continuously monitoring the major ones . Spending time debugging delivery issues all of which needs people who costs a lot of money.
Also 4 million is list price , at that scale most providers like Mailgun, sendgrid , postmark will give you pretty steep discounts and dedicated account managers and high priority support .
In any company every bit of effort spent should be on developing your product, not wasted in trying to do someone else job just as good as them then not selling that skill.
AWS exists because Amazon figured they were spending a time and effort managing large scale infra and should be monetized.
Even at Amazon.com scale it makes sense to externalize it to a shared service like AWS.
I guess it's the luck of the draw with the IP you get for hosting but the only real requirement is that the IP you're using is portable within the cloud/compute provider you're using (for long term viability between host upgrades). Beyond that I haven't found it hard to send mail reliably, even when bootstrapping a domain. Especially if you start from a place of decent email hygiene (e.g. DMARC/SPIF/DKIM/DNSSEC). I've even got a few lookalike domains that don't get caught up in filters because they've been maintained properly from the beginning.
Okay, if you're spending $300k+/yr, then sure it's not surprising you've got an economy of scale there.
But how far can you get on a budget of $15k/yr? SES is competitive.