Sending to 10,000 contacts twice a week costs $8 a month in raw Amazon SES fees, at the à la carte rate of $0.10 per 1,000 emails. The cheapest subscription email tool at that list size, other than one exception below, is $44.50. At 50,000 contacts the same sending pattern costs $40 on SES; the subscription field starts at $120. That gap holds across every tool in the tables below, and it is not close.
It is also not the whole comparison. SES sells sending, not a marketing tool: no list, no campaign editor, no unsubscribe page. Something has to supply those, and that costs money too. The honest comparison is SES plus a front end against a subscription price, not SES alone against everything else.
Key Takeaways
- At 10,000 contacts sent twice a week (80,000 emails), raw SES costs $8.00 à la carte or $12.80 on the Essentials plan new accounts default to. At 50,000 contacts, the same cadence costs $40.00 or $64.00.
- Every subscription tool in the tables costs at least three times raw SES at both sizes.
- Twilio SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns Basic plan undercuts EmailFig’s managed fee at 10,000 and 50,000 contacts on the monthly bill alone, but includes three sends per contact against EmailFig’s ten.
- BigMailer and MailBluster both need your own sending account, so their plan fees leave out the sending bill. EmailFig’s BYOS fee leaves it out too. Putting the same assumed Amazon SES bill on all three is the fair comparison.
What 10,000 contacts costs
Every subscription price below is the vendor’s cheapest self-serve plan at 10,000 contacts, billed monthly (not the discounted annual rate), in USD, read in September and October 2026. The SES rows assume two campaigns a week, roughly eight sends a month: 10,000 contacts times 8 is 80,000 emails.
| Option | Monthly price at 10,000 contacts |
|---|---|
| Amazon SES alone, à la carte | $8.00 |
| Amazon SES alone, Essentials plan | $12.80 |
| EmailFig, BYOS (platform fee only) | $16 |
| Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns (Basic) | $25 |
| EmailFig, managed | $27 |
| EmailOctopus (Pro) | $44.50 |
| Brevo (Starter) | $46 |
| Sender (Standard) | $69 |
| SendPulse (Standard) | $78 |
| GetResponse (Starter) | $79 |
| Moosend (Pro) | $88 |
| MailerLite (Comfort) | $89 |
| Benchmark Email (Pro) | $93 |
| beehiiv (Scale, now called Lite)¹ | $109 |
| Mailchimp (Essentials) | $110 |
| Constant Contact (Lite) | $120 |
| Kit (Creator) | $139 |
| ActiveCampaign (Starter) | $189 |
Raw SES at à la carte pricing is $8.00. EmailOctopus, the cheapest subscription tool other than SendGrid, is 5.6 times that. ActiveCampaign, the most expensive tool here, is 23.6 times that. Redo the arithmetic at your own send frequency: contacts times sends a month times $0.10 per 1,000.
¹ beehiiv renamed its plans on October 1, 2026. Its figure here is from the September read of the old Scale plan and may have moved.
What 50,000 contacts costs
The same method at 50,000 contacts, 8 sends a month, 400,000 emails:
| Option | Monthly price at 50,000 contacts |
|---|---|
| Amazon SES alone, à la carte | $40.00 |
| Amazon SES alone, Essentials plan | $64.00 |
| EmailFig, BYOS (platform fee only) | $65 |
| Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns (Basic) | $120 |
| EmailFig, managed | $125 |
| EmailOctopus (Pro) | $178 |
| beehiiv (Scale, now called Lite)¹ | $249 |
| Sender (Standard) | $259 |
| SendPulse (Standard) | $281 |
| Benchmark Email (Pro) | $299 |
| GetResponse (Starter) | $299 |
| Moosend (Pro) | $315 |
| MailerLite (Comfort) | $319 |
| Kit (Creator) | $379 |
| Mailchimp (Essentials) | $385 |
| Constant Contact (Lite) | $430 |
| ActiveCampaign (Plus, cheapest at this size) | $759 |
The order shifts a little at 50,000, but the size of the gap doesn’t. Raw à la carte SES is $40.00. EmailOctopus, the cheapest subscription tool other than SendGrid, is 4.5 times that. ActiveCampaign, the most expensive tool here, is 19 times that.
SES is not a product
Neither table above compares like for like. Every subscription tool in those rows is a finished product: a list, a drag-and-drop editor, an unsubscribe flow, some kind of reporting. Amazon SES sells one thing, handing a message to AWS for delivery, and what that rate does and doesn’t include stops at the send itself.
Nothing about a contact list, a template, a segment or a suppression list comes with it. You build or buy that layer separately, and the four common ways to put a front end on SES range from a hosted BYOS platform to Sendy’s one-time license to building it yourself. Connecting an AWS account safely covers the access setup that comes before any of them.
So the $8 and $40 figures above aren’t what it costs to run email marketing on SES. They’re what it costs to move the mail. The rest of the bill is the front end, and it’s real money.
SES plus a front end
A BYOS platform is SES with a front end attached, priced as a platform fee on top of your own AWS bill. That’s a fair thing to set against a subscription price, as long as both sides include the sending cost.
BigMailer and MailBluster both send through an account you bring: Amazon SES, or on MailBluster also Postmark, Mailgun or SMTP2GO. Their plan fees leave the sending bill out, and so does EmailFig’s BYOS price. Each of those figures is missing its sending cost, so the table adds Amazon SES at the same two campaigns a week to all three. BigMailer’s Business Lite is $7.50 per 5,000 contacts with a $30 floor, and MailBluster’s Pro is $5 a month billed yearly plus $0.60 per 1,000 emails sent.
| BYOS option (plan fee + assumed AWS at two campaigns a week) | 10,000 contacts | 50,000 contacts |
|---|---|---|
| EmailFig BYOS + AWS | $16 + $8 = $24 | $65 + $40 = $105 |
| BigMailer (Business Lite) | $30 + $8 = $38 | $75 + $40 = $115 |
| MailBluster (Pro) | $5 + $48 + $8 = $61 | $5 + $240 + $40 = $285 |
EmailFig is cheaper than both at both sizes on this basis. The send rate is our assumption, not a number either vendor publishes, and MailBluster’s fee moves with every email sent. A reader sending far more or less than twice a week should redo the arithmetic at their own rate before trusting the ranking. Contact-based vs send-based pricing shows where MailBluster wins.
SendGrid’s fee against EmailFig’s fee
One line in both tables above breaks the pattern: Twilio SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns Basic plan, $25 at 10,000 contacts and $120 at 50,000, undercuts EmailFig’s managed fee of $27 and $125 at the same sizes. “Cheaper than every tool in this table” is a real claim about the other thirteen subscription tools compared above. It isn’t true of SendGrid Basic.
The fee comparison and the per-email comparison disagree, and both are worth stating. On the monthly bill alone, SendGrid Basic wins by $2 at 10,000 contacts and $5 at 50,000. But that fee buys three emails per contact a month at every tier; EmailFig’s managed plans include ten. At 10,000 contacts, SendGrid’s $25 covers 30,000 emails where EmailFig’s $27 covers 100,000, so per email sent it’s $0.83 per thousand against $0.27. The full breakdown of SendGrid’s two products works through this at all five of EmailFig’s list sizes, including the one where EmailFig wins by half.
Which comparison matters depends on how often you actually mail your list. A newsletter sent once a month never gets near either ceiling, and the cheaper fee is the whole story. A sender who mails weekly is past SendGrid’s allowance before the two-dollar difference is worth discussing.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Amazon SES cost to send to 10,000 contacts?
At two campaigns a week, roughly 80,000 emails a month, raw SES costs $8.00 on the à la carte rate of $0.10 per 1,000 emails. On the Essentials plan that new accounts default to, the same month costs $12.80, both read from AWS’s SES pricing page. That’s the cost of sending alone, with no list, editor or unsubscribe page included.
Is Amazon SES cheaper than every email marketing tool?
Sending through raw SES is cheaper than every subscription tool in the tables above, at both 10,000 and 50,000 contacts. But SES by itself isn’t a marketing tool: it has no list, campaign editor or contact management. A fair comparison adds a front end to the SES side and prices that against a BYOS platform like BigMailer or MailBluster, not against raw sending alone.
Does any subscription tool beat EmailFig’s price?
Yes, on one specific measure. Twilio SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns Basic plan costs less than EmailFig’s managed fee at 10,000 and 50,000 contacts, $25 against $27 and $120 against $125. It also includes three sends per contact a month against EmailFig’s ten, so the fee and the per-email price disagree. The full comparison covers both readings.
Do BigMailer’s and MailBluster’s prices include Amazon SES?
No. Both need a sending account of your own, and Amazon SES bills that separately at $0.10 per 1,000 emails. The BigMailer and MailBluster totals in the table add an assumed two campaigns a week, so they are our estimates built from BigMailer’s and MailBluster’s published fees. Comparing a plan fee to a BYOS price without adding the sending bill understates every one of them.
What does Amazon SES not include that a subscription tool does?
A contact list, a campaign editor, automations, signup forms, an unsubscribe page and suppression handling. What Amazon SES actually costs covers the send-side add-ons like dedicated IPs and Virtual Deliverability Manager; Amazon SES for email marketing covers the front-end options that supply everything else.