Comment by romanhn

It's a mix. I use my registrar's (Porkbun) email service for human communication (name@, support@, etc). Added those accounts to my personal Gmail inbox so I can send/receive using Gmail instead of logging into the registrar's webmail. Eventually will move to something like Google Workspace most likely, which is a bit more expensive.

I use AWS SES for transactional emails (mostly send, but making use of the receive capability as well). Nice and cheap. And finally using MailerLite for marketing emails. Just surpassed their free tier so may look again, but not too bad pricing-wise.

One advice I've seen is not to mix transactional and marketing providers (and ideally domains). If you get a high incidence of unsubscribes or "this is spam" responses, don't want your app to be dead in the water for transactional stuff if the marketing provider suspends your account temporarily (can happen even if you're legit).