Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam filtering.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
I know someone else already mentioned about user != email address. But in the situation you mentioned I tend to use cloudflare and have that do a catchall on the domain for side projects and forward it over to my main account. I have a generic name I launch all my sideprojects under to cover this.
Hey is another good paid option.
I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there than I do with gMail.
Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99 euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month). Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.