Amazon SES pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Amazon SES (aws.amazon.com) is a email API. Pay per email; optional bundled plans since July 2026. No free plan.
What Amazon SES costs
- 10k emails / month: $1/mo
- 50k emails / month: $5/mo
- 100k emails / month: $10/mo
- 500k emails / month: $50/mo
- 1M emails / month: $100/mo
Plan compared: À la carte, $0.10 per 1k (any account can switch to it). Cheapest paid plan (plus overage when that's cheaper) covering the monthly volume, billed monthly. Contact-based pricing assumes 4 emails per contact.
Amazon SES price hikes
- Amazon SES ended its free tier for new accounts and defaults them to a pricier plan · Jul 21, 2026
SES launched Essentials, Pro and Enterprise plans. New accounts now start on Essentials at $0.16 per 1,000 emails instead of à la carte at $0.10, and the SES free tier is gone for new customers. - Amazon SES cut its free tier · Aug 1, 2023
The permanent free tier for email sent from EC2 became a 12-month allowance.
Alternatives to Amazon SES
Amazon SES is the cheapest email API we track at 100k emails/mo. The others:
- SendGrid: $34.95/mo
- Resend: $35/mo
- MailerSend: $68/mo
- Mailgun: $75/mo
- Brevo: $82/mo
- Plunk: $100/mo
- Postmark: $115/mo
- Loops: $199/mo
Amazon SES alternatives: 8 email APIs compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Jul 21, 2026 · Free tier cut: The SES free tier is gone for new customers, and new accounts now start on the $0.16 Essentials plan instead of $0.10 à la carte (they can switch back to à la carte at any time).
- Aug 1, 2023 · Free tier cut: The permanent free tier for email sent from EC2 became a 12-month allowance.
Sources
Pricing page: aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices exclude attachments ($0.12/GB) and data transfer. New accounts start on Essentials at $0.16 per 1k, but AWS's pricing page says any account can switch to à la carte at any time (an account that was put on Essentials by default switches immediately), so we list $0.10.