As with all things email, they probably really wanted to make sure that the mails were delivered and thus were using a commercial MTA to ensure that.

I’d wager, even at 20 or 30 or 40k a year, that’s way less than it’d cost to host infra and have at least two if not three engineers available 24/7 to maintain critical infra.

Looking at my mail, over the years I’ve gotten a couple hundred email from them around certificates and expirations (and other things), and if you assume there’s a couple million sites using these certs, I could easily see how you’d end up in a situation where this could scale in cost very very slowly, until it’s suddenly a major drain.

Because I don’t sit down at my Linux destop and feel like the product. There’s no ads or suggestions or popups or apps installing themselves or shit copying my files around in ways I didn’t really want or AI bullshit or anything even remotely suggesting I buy more shit, just… whatever the fuck it is I was intending to do.

The value in not having my computer act like a damn slot machine trying to get me to insert more quarters is, frankly, immense.