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?