I'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs:

> The parts that were extra hard

> Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong.

The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.

Fair enough... though if I were to push my point: one could also say that dumbing down your mechanisms of email sending (i.e. ditching templates, or pulling the templates to your own codebase) would give the same advantage I talked about earlier of vendor-independance