I've been developing a website using React as the frontend and Firebase as the backend. It's been great so far. The thing is, I now want to be able to make API requests to an email server, and since I need to keep the API key private, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this in React alone (How do I hide API key in create-react-app?).
Is there a way to do this on the Firebase side (it's a big hassle to setup an API just for emailing)?
Note: cloud functions seem like they might do the trick, but I don't have the blaze plan (https://firebase.google.com/pricing).