I personally have no experience with Mailerlite but I met several happy users.

Amazon SES is super cheap, but indeed hard to configure. If you have your own server with linux/php/mysql there is a self-hosted app that interacts with it and makes it easier to manage: sendy.co

I shifted everything from Ghost and Mailchimp to Postmark & am happy. Was easy to migrate / integrate.

I've used mailersend for a few client projects. It's great, easy to set up, and not expensive.

35k emails doesn't mean much in terms of cost estimation, because you can send emails every hour/day/week.

It's only matter how many total emails are you sending.

If we would assume that all of your 35k emails are subscribed and you will send 2 emails per week it will be about 300k emails per month.

With Postmark it will be $245/mo to send 300k emails.

You can check here: postmarkapp.com/pricing

P.S. I'm using Postmark myself.

If you are going to go with Amazon SES then is worth checking mailbluster.com free for up to 62k emails p/m and $0.2 for every 1000 emails after.

So if you send 100k emails p/m it will cost you $3.8 on your Amazon SES account and $20 on MailBluster.

PS: I didn't try myself (yet) but another founder I know is using it and told me

If you code you can try the solution of Shayan github.com/Sh4yy/cloudflare-e…
It's free

Otherwise i did discover this :
www.useplunk.com/
from a maker not so long ago it's super cheap

If you are not looking for some fancy features and just need a simple usage try sendinblue or even sendfox with ltd on appsumo!

I use both Convert Kit and Active Campaign for clients, but those might not be cost effective for what you need.

FloDesk would be a great solution since it's a flat rate, regardless of list size.
flodesk.com/pricing (It's $64/month or $59/month for an annual plan.)

Are you new to email marketing?

If so, I can sign up for a free trial of FloDesk and show you the ropes through short Loom videos.

(Experience so you know what I'm talking about: I've been running clients' email marketing for nearly 8 years, and I now create an email strategy for them, including automation mapping and segmentation.)

Also, congratulations on growing your Gumroad audience that large! 👏 Now it's time to collect data, segment them, and send super targeted campaigns to strengthen brand loyalty and encourage them to return!

Also:

• Are you just planning on sending a weekly or monthly newsletter to keep your subscribers/customers active? If so, choose something like Substack because it's free and is more like a community so you can leverage conversations. Plus, there's the opportunity for collaboration with similar creators if you'd like + the option to create a paid newsletter (or paid podcast).

• Do you want to build out an email automation that nurtures subscribers and leads them to a sale? If so, choose something like FloDesk because it's a flat rate (independent of subscribers + emails sent), and you can choose what content you send based on subscriber data so everything is relevant and nobody gets content/offers they don't want.

It's important to be really clear on your intention going into a decision so you don't waste money (or worse, time).

(There's a way to combine both of these, which is what I do in my business, and I'm happy to share my BTS.)

Update:

Currently, using Convertkit for email newsletter with 3K subscribers

And for annoucement-
I also discovered that Gumroad offers a free newsletter service for product announcements. It can be triggered upon a purchase or used for broadcasting updates. A funny incident occurred while I was testing it – I accidentally sent a test message to all 35K users, and now I'm receiving messages from them asking what they purchased! 😛
Total opening rate in 1 hours was 20% of 31K delivered messages.