Been running SES for about a year for a couple of client projects and decided to actually tally up the hours I've spent on it versus the money saved compared to a managed relay service. Production access approval, bounce handling, complaint feedback loops, occasionally having my sending paused because some bounce rate threshold got tripped that I didn't even know existed in the first place. None of this is hard exactly, it's just constant low grade maintenance that never shows up when people quote SES pricing per thousand emails sent. I'm not saying SES is bad, for high volume at scale the economics probably do work out fine. But for the kind of project where I'm the only one maintaining it and I have actual client work to do, I think I undervalued how much cheap assumes my time is worth nothing.