I have a $5/year MXRoute account that I still use even though I self-host my emails. I use MXRoute as an outbound SMTP relay since they've got all the IP reputation stuff figured out.
I know you said to exclude VPS, but I've got some of VPSes around the $15-$50 per year range, since it's nice having my sites hosted on higher-end enterprise-grade hardware than what I'm using at home.
I'm considering paying for Kagi (a paid search engine) because it's ad-free and the results are legitimately better than Google.