I hope you like paying per mailbox. That's a non-starter for someone like me who handles mail for 10-20 of my friends on my own domain.

That's $500-$1000 a year on Fastmail's Standard plan, the lowest tier plan that allows you to use your own domain.

Do you know of an email provider that doesn't work this way? Asking because I'm currently using gmail for a little project and make use of aliases and catch alls and then make and remove additional accounts as I need those accounts to be able to send mail in addition to receiving it.

Im not really interested in managing everything that I perceive goes into managing my own email server (ip reputation management and having to keep a box online 24/7)

https://www.migadu.com Lets you use unlimited domains, addresses and has regex based catchalls. The only difference between their plans is the amount of outgoing email you can send. I've been using them for a couple of domains for nearly a year with no issues.

WOW! This is perfect and much cheaper than i thought it would be. Thanks for the recommendation!

MXroute is fantastic.

https://mxroute.com/

I fail to see your point here, we're looking at the situation of someone stuck on Gmail. Nobody is suggesting that people should give up their homebrew domain system in favor of fastmail.

Another +1 for Fastmail.