Amazon SES

Amazon SES — The cheapest way to send email at scale, and the least finished product. SES is email as an AWS primitive: $0.10 per thousand messages, available in most AWS regions including Sydney, with IAM, VPC endpoints and CloudWatch already wired in. It gives you almost nothing above the send call — no searchable message log, no template editor worth using, and event delivery only via SNS, Kinesis Firehose or EventBridge. New accounts start in a sandbox that can only mail verified addresses, and leaving it means a support ticket. Built by Amazon Web Services. Founded 2011. Subsidiary (Amazon).

We track it in 1 comparison — Email APIs — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Event webhooks — delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, deferred, unsubscribed, inbound, tied for best across 5 of 13 tools.
• Price / 1k emails — $0.1 /1k, the best figure of the 11 here.
• Data residency — us, eu, au, apac, sa, ca, the best figure of the 12 here.
• Throughput ceiling — 50,400 emails/hr, tied for best across 2 of 3 tools.
• Pricing model — pay-as-you-go, tied for best across 4 of 13 tools.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Time to first send — 2880 min, 12th of 13. Resend records 10 min.
• DKIM/DMARC friction — 4, the weakest of the 13 here. Resend records 1.
• Log retention — 0 ms, the weakest of the 9 here. Postmark records 64800 min.
• Hosted templates — api-only, 11th of 13. Postmark records visual-editor.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 25 of 25 tracked fields carry a value for Amazon SES, and 8 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-05-10. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is AhaSend. Amazon SES is ahead on Funding (subsidiary against bootstrapped) and Event webhooks (delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, deferred, unsubscribed, inbound against delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained). AhaSend takes Time to first send (15 min against 2880 min) and llms.txt docs (Yes against No). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Amazon SES alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Amazon Web Services

Founded

2011

Funding

Subsidiary (Amazon)

Fields we track

25 of 25

Last verified

2026-05-10

An order of magnitude cheaper than everything else and roughly half a product. Correct above a couple of million messages a month, or when Sydney data residency is non-negotiable; a poor trade below that once you cost the dashboard you will end up building.

Time to first send

2880 min12th of 13

Community-reported

Event webhooks

deliveredopenedclickedbounced+41st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-05-10source

DKIM/DMARC friction

413th of 13

Inferred

Price / 1k emails

$0.1 /1k1st of 11

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-05-10source

Log retention

0 ms9th of 9

Inferred

Data residency

useuauapac+21st of 12

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-05-10source

Throughput ceiling

50,400 emails/hr1st of 3

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-05-10source

Pricing model

pay-as-you-go1st of 13

Inferred

Amazon SES is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• High volume where $0.10 per thousand actually moves the P&L.
• Workloads that must stay in ap-southeast-2.
• Teams already deep in IAM, EventBridge and CloudWatch.
• Event webhooks is your binding constraint. Amazon SES records delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, deferred, unsubscribed, inbound, the best figure in the Email APIs roster. We define that field as which message events the provider will POST to your endpoint.
• Price / 1k emails is your binding constraint. Amazon SES records $0.1 /1k, the best figure in the Email APIs roster. We define that field as cheapest paid self-serve tier, divided out to USD per 1,000 emails, monthly billing, no annual discount.
• Data residency is your binding constraint. Amazon SES records us, eu, au, apac, sa, ca, the best figure in the Email APIs roster.
• Throughput ceiling is your binding constraint. Amazon SES records 50,400 emails/hr, the best figure in the Email APIs roster.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Time to first send. Amazon SES records 2880 min, 12th of 13 in the Email APIs roster. Resend records 10 min on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• DKIM/DMARC friction. Amazon SES records 4, the weakest of the 13 tools in the Email APIs roster. Resend records 1 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Log retention. Amazon SES records 0 ms, the weakest of the 9 tools in the Email APIs roster. Postmark records 64800 min on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Hosted templates. Amazon SES records api-only, 11th of 13 in the Email APIs roster. Postmark records visual-editor on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. Nothing, on the fields we track: all 25 of them carry a value for Amazon SES. That is unusual and it will decay — vendors add dimensions faster than we add columns — so the verification dates beside each figure matter more than the completeness does.