I think the low cost reasonable option right now is to self-host a receiving address and then pick the email provider that looks the least trash and forward your stuff to them to actually handle sending/browsing. It gives you the option to go full self-hosted in the future if your mind changes with minimal headaches but costs practically no effort for the short term.

This is what I do. OpenSMTPD to receive mail, Dovecot to handle IMAP and spamassassin for full spam rules control.

I still configure my clients (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) to send to my mail server, but that just forwards on to the actual email sender (if authenticated). This way I can change email senders without needing to change all my clients. There are still risks though because if you choose the cheaper plan (as I do), then you get grouped onto a sending pool that spammers might use and then you might get periodically affected if that set of IPs take a reputation hit.

My config for sending: With OpenSMTPD, process it with DKIM:

    action "process_dkim" relay host smtp://127.0.0.1:10027
    match from auth for any action "process_dkim"

    listen    127.0.0.1:10027
    relay     127.0.0.1:10028
    [...] DKIM signing config [...]

    listen on lo   port 10028 tag DKIM
    action "process_outbound" relay host smtp+tls://label@... auth <secrets>
    match tag DKIM for any action "process_outbound"

I've been doing this for years, and spam and deliverability issues have been minimal and I've dealt with some big names.