What you are actually buying
Postage is the cheap part, and we do not sell it anyway -- the relay you connect prices that, in fractions of a penny a message, and bills you for it directly. What this is for is that six months from now the domain you have spent years building is still one that inboxes let through. That is why the product is allowed to be inconvenient in exactly the places where convenience costs reputation.
Bring your own relay
Paste your own relay credentials, or use the sending infrastructure that comes with the account. Credentials are encrypted at rest, masked on every read path, and never returned by the API -- not even truncated. The account you build the reputation on is your account, and it leaves with you.
Every major transactional relay, plus any host that speaks SMTP.
The warm-up ramp is enforced, not advised
A new IP has no reputation, and a sudden fifty-thousand-message day from an address nobody has seen looks exactly like what it looks like. While a connector is warming up, its effective daily limit is the smaller of its own quota and the ramp: 50 messages on day one, roughly doubling each week, 100,000 by day 28.
The ramp counts calendar days since the first send, not days you happened to send on. A fortnight of silence cools the IP off again, because that is a reputation signal too.
Pre-flight blocks the send and names the fix
An empty audience, no from-address at all, an empty subject, a template that fails to render, a merge tag nobody filled in that would go out as a literal: each one stops the send rather than warning about it. A stale-looking list, a from-domain the relay is not configured to sign, a message with no visible unsubscribe link: each warns loudly and does not block, because those are your call to make.
Every finding carries one line saying what to do about it.
Authentication is checked, never asserted
SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reverse DNS each show a tick only once the app has looked them up and agreed. You will be told that your SPF ends in +all and authorises the whole internet, that it needs about eleven DNS lookups when the limit is ten, that there are two records where there must be exactly one, or that it does not authorise the relay you are about to send through.
"Unknown" looks different from "failed". We have not looked yet is not the same claim as we looked and it is wrong.