MTA-STS
A policy that tells mail servers to require TLS for inbound delivery.
Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security lets a domain publish a policy requiring encrypted SMTP connections from supporting senders. It helps prevent downgrade attacks where delivery falls back to unencrypted 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 mta-sts, 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.