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3k enough for me lah. My bot only alert when price drop or server die. Maybe 200 email per month, usually zero when everything healthy.
Vultr relay I use 2 year, never think about limit. Before that self-host on Contabo, IP reputation nightmare, Gmail eat everything.
Now I sleep.
You need local MTA for queue management. Vultr relay will reject on 4xx if you hit rate limits, your application needs retry logic or you lose mail.
I run Postfix with fallback_relay configured: Vultr primary, OVHcloud secondary. Monitored with a dead man's switch: if both fail for 15 minutes, PagerDuty fires.
The $3 is not the total cost of ownership. Reliability engineering has a price.
I just use AWS SES from my Vultr box in Dubai. $0.10 per thousand, no monthly minimum. My compile farm sends maybe 50k build notifications monthly, bill is $5.
Singapore to AWS Mumbai is 45ms. Dubai to AWS Mumbai is 18ms. Latency barely matters for async mail but I like the number.
Vultr relay https://www.vultr.com is fine for small scale. At volume, SES crushes everyone on unit economics.
Small biz perspective: I need invoices to reach customers. Period.
Tried self-host on my RackNerd box. Gmail spam folder. Switched to Vultr relay March 2026 when price dropped. Inbox placement went from 15% to 92% overnight.
My bakery runs on margins. $36/yr is two birthday cakes. Worth every penny to not explain to customers why their invoice disappeared.
