As someone who has a noncommercial side project and has been using SendGrid's free 100/day plan, I'm actually thinking of switching to this. I've always been a bit concerned with what would happen if my app got a sudden burst of signups (since email verification is required to sign up), and have been looking for an uncapped plan, but don't want to spend $10 a month or more just for that possibility.

The key here is that with the $0.80/1000 emails PAYG rate, you can still do like 2000-3000 a month for less than $5, which no one except SES will provide. Everyone else has a gulf between "free tier 100/day" (or even 100/month with Postmark) and their first actual paid tier ($10/month for Postmark, $15/month for SendGrid). No one else except SES has this PAYG for low rates as far as I'm aware. I think if your hobby project needs more than 625 emails a month, it's reasonable to spend a dollar or two on a month to handle that.

I run a gitlab for around 30 users and that’s around what I use on AWS to send my emails. It’s a bunch. Rarely do I send emails on weekends so it’s like 20 days a month I send emails just for merge requests and stuff.

Hobbyist to me means that you are doing it for fun and aren't engaging more than 5-10 people. So given that, I'm having a hard time understanding how 10 people could handle 625 emails a month.

I communicate with family and very few close friends only (less than 10 people) and my Mailgun stats show about 1k emails per month.

That’s 3 emails a day for 10 people... what have you built that requires that level of communication with family and close friends?

My account is still grandfathered in with 30k free per month.

This takes place in March.

I was trying to reason how they hit that number this morning. I'm guessing probably average or mean is much lower.