I keep on hearing that hosting your own server is a pain. Email costs were always an issue for me. I manage a few e-commerce website. Initially when they were small I used MailChimp. Then moved to AWS SES. Now I moved to my own self hosted postalserver. My mailing lists are not huge ( 100k recipients) and I send daily and I don't have much of a deliverability issue. Depending on the audience my open rates are between 35 and 55%.
What I learned is:
- Make sure your configuration is perfect. From reverse dns to DKIM. Everything should be aligned.
- Have a clean email list. Validate emails ( MX, etc ), double optin, remove hard bounces, respect unsubscribes to the t ( people don't always unsubscribe using the link, but often just send an email to customer service, provide the option fornthe customer service team to unsubscribe people from marketing).
- Use a email warming service like mailreach. It seems weird but it makes a world of difference. It really works.
I spend less than $50/month all in all with a beefy instance on Hetzner Cloud. For the volume I send it would cost 6x this on SES.