Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects.
The volume of spam (for me) doesn't seem to be decreasing from them, so there's a lot of moles to whack.
[1] Just a guess from looking at the last weeks [2] I know it's automated, but often there's 2 that come with the 2nd one stating it's acted upon, so i'm hopeful.
You can very reasonably and reliably expect spam amount to correlate with the cost of sending said spam or expected return. At any service. There used to be a time where you HAD to check your mailbox several times a week or it would (literally) overflow with spam.
With a pricing structure like that it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam. Unfortunately I don't blame them.
The part where sendgrid has to keep figuring out how to make new and improved validation is expensive.
Barrier to entry for (12 * $20) is much higher than $10/year and they figure that was worth the tradeoff of losing small fish customers.
The lowest plan $40/year for 1k emails/month isn’t on the Pricing page, but you can select it when signing up.
Has been a 10/10 experience -- rock solid and extremely good deliverability.
Wish the pricing increased non-linearly though at higher volumes.