Bottom line: Is Discourse now $12/month minimum on DigitalOcean? šŸ˜” [Not yet! šŸ™‚]

As I had hoped, adding both my domain and subdomain to Sender Domains was enough to get around the issue of not being able to create email addresses.

As long as your Sender Domains are verified, you can send transactional emails from any ā€œfakeā€ address you want—noreply@forum.whatever.com, wordpress@whatever.com, etc.