Amazon SES

Overview

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is fundamentally different from every other tool on this list. It's not an email platform — it's email infrastructure. Think of it as the difference between renting a mail truck and hiring a full-service courier. SES gives you the ability to send emails at massive scale for almost nothing, but everything else — template management, subscriber lists, analytics, bounce handling, complaint processing, unsubscribe management — is your responsibility to build and maintain.

The cost advantage is staggering. At one million emails per month, SES costs roughly $100. The same volume on SendGrid would run $400 or more, and on Mailchimp you'd be looking at over $1,000. At ten million emails per month, the gap widens further. For organizations that send at genuine scale, SES can save tens of thousands of dollars per year compared to managed platforms.

SES also integrates deeply with the broader AWS ecosystem. You can trigger emails from Lambda functions, store email logs in S3, route bounce and complaint notifications through SNS, and use CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting. If your application already runs on AWS, SES fits naturally into your existing infrastructure.

Who It's For

Amazon SES is for engineering teams at companies that treat email as infrastructure rather than a marketing channel. The ideal SES user has dedicated backend engineers who can build and maintain email sending systems, sends millions of emails per month where cost savings justify the engineering investment, needs maximum control over every aspect of the sending process, and is already running on AWS. This typically means mid-to-large SaaS companies, marketplaces, and platforms that send high volumes of transactional email — order confirmations, shipping notifications, password resets, activity digests — where the content is generated programmatically.

Our Take

SES is unbeatable on cost-per-email, and the raw sending infrastructure is rock-solid — it's AWS, after all. But the sticker price is misleading. The true cost of SES includes the engineering time to build everything a managed platform gives you for free: template management, subscriber segmentation, campaign scheduling, analytics dashboards, bounce and complaint handling, deliverability monitoring, and unsubscribe compliance.

Before committing to SES, do honest math on engineering hours. If a senior engineer spends two weeks building and one week per month maintaining your email infrastructure, that's easily $15,000-$25,000 in engineering cost per year — which might exceed what you'd pay for a managed platform. SES makes financial sense when your volume is high enough that the per-email savings outweigh the engineering overhead, or when you need the kind of fine-grained control that managed platforms simply don't offer.

Choose SES when you have the engineering resources, the sending volume, and the need for control. Choose a managed platform when you'd rather spend engineering time on your core product. There's no shame in paying for convenience — that's literally what managed email platforms sell.