Event stream
Per-message lifecycle events (delivered, bounced, opened, clicked).
Most providers expose lifecycle events for each message: accepted, delivered, bounced, complained, opened, clicked. Event streams power dashboards, downstream automation, and forensic debugging. Webhook delivery is the standard transport.
reading this as early-stage startups
At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.
Applied to event stream, that means weighing free tier, best published rate per 1,000, entry price, and developer experience ahead of the rest, against a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends.