Right. There are too many reasons that email can’t be free, I’m afraid. I always thought that 10K free per month seemed too good to be true.
As someone who sets up several self-hosted sites per month, I’m going to keep recommending Mailgun. I’ve been happy with their service and they are easy to set up (plus it’s what I’ve scripted 
). While it is $8/month if you send 10,000 emails per month, most small sites will send much less mail than that. 1000 emails (100 users getting 2.5 emails per week) will cost you 80 cents, which still seems like a pretty good deal to me.