The 5 best email marketing tools for Amazon SES (2026)

Amazon SES sends email and does nothing else. It hands your message to Amazon for $0.10 per 1,000 emails and that’s the whole job: no contact list, no campaign builder, no template renderer, no bounce handling, no unsubscribe link. Every one of those has to come from something you put in front of it, and which tool you pick changes your bill by a lot more than the sending itself does. The full case for what SES gives you and what it costs before any of these five tools enters the picture is in Amazon SES for email marketing: the complete guide.

Five tools do that job today, priced on three different bases: by contacts stored, by emails sent, or once as a license. This is a ranked list, and it starts with the tool we build. Where one of the other four beats it, that entry says so.

Key Takeaways

• EmailFig is free to 4,000 subscribers with no credit card, and its BYOS plan is the cheapest contact-priced option here at every size the others publish.
• BigMailer is the only tool on this page with real white labelling for agency clients, on Business Pro and Agency Pro.
• Sendy is a one-time $69 license rather than a subscription, and wins on running cost at high volume if you’re willing to host it yourself.
• MailBluster prices by emails sent, not contacts stored, so it wins if you mail a large list rarely: below about one and a half sends a month, it beats every contact-priced plan here.

What to look for in an SES frontend

Six differences decide which tool actually fits, more than any single price point does.

Hosted, or your own server. Five of these are SaaS: sign up, verify a domain, send. Sendy is different. You install PHP and MySQL yourself, and the tradeoff for a one-time license instead of a subscription is that updates, backups and uptime become your job.

Priced by contacts, by emails sent, or once. Most of this page prices by how many contacts you store, so a list you mail often and one you barely touch cost the same. MailBluster inverts that: it prices by emails sent, so storage is free and sending is what shows up on the bill. Sendy is neither: a fixed license, then whatever Amazon’s metered rate and your server cost separately.

A plan you can settle on, or a trial with no clock. Five of these free tiers renew every month. MailBluster’s Starter plan is a one-time 3,000-email allotment: useful for testing, but not something you can run a real list on indefinitely.

Branding on the free or cheapest tier. EmailFig, EmailOctopus Connect and BigMailer’s Startup plan all put the vendor’s name on unsubscribe pages and forms until you upgrade. Sendy has no vendor brand to remove, since you’re the one hosting it.

What happens to bounces and complaints. SES doesn’t manage a suppression list itself; every tool here has to read SES’s bounce and complaint notifications and act on them, or your sender reputation degrades no matter which frontend you picked. All six do this automatically. It’s table stakes, not a differentiator, so the thing worth checking is that it happens without you configuring it by hand.

Agency and multi-brand features. Running one list is different from running several client accounts. BigMailer and Sendy both split contacts into separate brands with their own lists, and EmailFig’s multi-account keeps clients separate the same way. Only BigMailer removes its own branding from a client’s pages, which is the difference between client separation and actual white labelling.

The five tools

1. EmailFig

Best for: a hosted SES frontend that’s free up to 4,000 subscribers and gets cheaper than every contact-priced alternative here once you connect your own AWS account.

EmailFig runs as a normal hosted app: sign up, verify a domain, send. It offers two ways to handle delivery. Managed sending is included in the plan price, so you never touch AWS. BYOS connects your own Amazon SES account, and Amazon bills you directly for what you send, on top of a lower monthly platform fee, since EmailFig isn’t covering that cost for you.

Pricing: Free up to 4,000 subscribers, no credit card. The free tier caps sending at 10,000 emails a month on managed, and does not cap it at all on BYOS, where Amazon bills you for the sends directly. Paid plans start at $6/month. BYOS undercuts managed at every size: at 5,000 contacts the platform fee is $10/month on BYOS against $15 on managed. The BYOS ladder continues to $16 at 10,000, $34 at 25,000, $65 at 50,000 and $120 at 100,000 (full pricing).

Multi-account is live: one login runs a client account per customer, one level deep, which covers separating clients without going as far as a white-label brand. EmailFig doesn’t offer white labelling at any size, which is a real limit against BigMailer below. The free tier carries EmailFig branding on your emails and on the pages your recipients see: unsubscribe links and hosted forms. On a paid plan you can switch it off.

2. EmailOctopus Connect

Best for: a long-running, well-known name in this category, if the pricing difference below is one you’re happy to pay.

Connect is a separate product from hosted EmailOctopus, the one most price comparisons mean by that name. It runs on your own Amazon SES connection on every plan, including the free one, which is the tradeoff behind its cap: Starter allows 2,500 subscribers with unlimited emails a month. EmailFig’s BYOS free tier is uncapped on sends too, at 4,000 subscribers, so on a like-for-like comparison Connect’s free plan is the smaller of the two.

Pricing: Starter is free for 2,500 subscribers, with EmailOctopus branding, 30 days of reporting history, one landing page, one form and one user. Pro starts at $8/month billed yearly, and removes the cap on reports, pages, forms and users along with the branding. Pro’s own ladder, billed yearly: $15 at 2,500 subscribers, $23 at 5,000, $30 at 10,000, $50 at 25,000, $90 at 50,000 and $160 at 100,000.

Connect needs an Amazon SES connection from the first email you send, even to try the free plan, so it isn’t a way to avoid AWS the way EmailFig’s managed plan is. See our EmailOctopus comparison for the hosted product’s numbers alongside Connect’s.

3. BigMailer

Best for: running email for more than one client brand and needing real white labelling, not just client separation.

BigMailer’s pricing page advertises Business Lite at $7.50 per 5,000 contacts. Underneath that number is a $30/month floor that only the page’s CSS renders, not its own text, so it’s easy to miss when comparing sticker prices: below 20,000 contacts, $30 is what you pay, not $7.50. Business Lite and the free Startup plan both require your own Amazon SES connection, billed separately by Amazon.

Pricing: Startup is free, with BigMailer branding and your own SES account required. Business Lite is $30/month up to 20,000 contacts (the $7.50-per-5,000 rate applies above that), still needing SES. Business Pro is $60/month up to the same 20,000-contact floor, at $15 per 5,000 above it, with sending included and BigMailer’s own branding removable. Agency Pro, required above 200,000 contacts, runs $12 per 5,000 contacts and also includes sending.

Every plan, including the free one, splits clients into separate brands with their own lists and unsubscribe pages, which is the feature this list otherwise doesn’t have. White labelling ships on Business Pro and Agency Pro. Sendy uses the words “white label” too, but it does not give you BigMailer’s structurally separate client accounts to go with it. Full price ladder and feature comparison: our BigMailer writeup.

4. Sendy

Best for: running your own server and wanting the lowest possible bill once your list is large.

Sendy is PHP you install yourself: a one-time $69 license, valid for one domain, that buys the software rather than a subscription to it. It needs standard PHP and MySQL hosting, which you either already run or add for a few dollars a month, and it uses Amazon SES for delivery, billed by Amazon directly. Sendy’s own marketing quotes $1.60 per 10,000 emails; that’s Amazon’s default Essentials-plan rate for a new SES account, not a discount Sendy negotiated, and switching to à la carte SES pricing gets the same sending down to $1.00 per 10,000.

Pricing: $69 once, then hosting plus whatever SES bills you. No monthly platform fee, ever.

Because the license is a fixed cost, Sendy’s monthly total doesn’t move with your list the way every other tool here does: it’s hosting plus Amazon’s metered rate, the same rate anyone using SES directly pays. At real volume that beats every subscription on this page. What you’re trading for it is a server: updates, backups and PHP version upgrades are yours, not a support ticket. Sendy also lists “white labeled client accounts” as a feature: since you host it yourself, there’s no vendor brand on it to begin with, and the feature really means grouping clients into permissioned brands, not the structural separation BigMailer builds Agency Pro around.

5. MailBluster

Best for: a list you store but rarely mail, since the price is per email sent rather than per contact stored.

MailBluster prices by emails sent, not contacts stored, and contact storage itself is unlimited on every plan, free included. That inverts the trade the other five tools make: a large list you mail rarely costs MailBluster almost nothing, and a list you mail often costs it more than any contact-priced tool here.

Pricing: Starter is a one-time 3,000-email allotment, not a monthly plan, with MailBluster branding and no card required; once it’s used up you move to Pro. Pro is $60/year, or $5/month, plus $0.60 per 1,000 emails sent, with SMTP billed separately by whichever provider you connect (Amazon SES, Postmark, Mailgun or SMTP2GO). Executive adds dedicated onboarding and longer data retention for $120/year at the same per-email rate.

At two campaigns a week to 5,000 contacts, that’s about $33/month against EmailFig BYOS at $10, so EmailFig is cheaper for anyone sending regularly. The crossover sits at about one and a half sends a month: send less often than that and MailBluster’s per-email pricing gets cheaper than any contact-based plan on this page, EmailFig included. See the full MailBluster breakdown for the math at other sizes.

Five tools, side by side

Prices below are each tool’s own entry point; see the entries above for the full ladder. Checked against each vendor’s pricing page in July 2026.

How to choose

Start with whether you want to touch AWS at all. EmailFig’s managed plan is the only one here with no Amazon SES account required, free up to 4,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, paid from $6/month past that. Every other tool, EmailOctopus Connect included even on its free plan, needs a working SES connection before your first email goes out.

If you already have or want an AWS account, EmailFig’s BYOS plan is the cheapest of the contact-priced tools here at every size the others publish: $10/month at 5,000 contacts against EmailOctopus Connect’s $23, $16 at 10,000 against $30, $65 at 50,000 against $90. That is the whole comparison on those two axes: EmailFig is cheaper at every size, and its free tier is larger on both subscribers and sends.

If you send rarely to a list you mostly just store, none of the contact-priced tools fit well. MailBluster’s per-send pricing is built for that shape, and its 3,000-email Starter plan is enough to try it before your first real campaign.

If you run email for more than one client brand and need actual white labelling, not just separated client accounts, BigMailer is the only tool on this page that has it, on Business Pro and Agency Pro, required past 200,000 contacts. EmailFig’s multi-account feature separates clients into their own accounts from one login, which covers per-client reputation and reporting, but it isn’t white labelling, and we don’t offer that at any size.

If you already run a server, or don’t mind starting to, and expect real volume, Sendy’s $69 license has usually paid for itself against any subscription here within the first couple of months, and its running cost afterward is just hosting plus Amazon’s own metered rate.

None of these is a wrong answer for the situation it fits. BigMailer is the one agency-grade white-label option, Sendy wins at high volume if you run your own server, and MailBluster wins if you send rarely. Match the tool to how you’d actually use it, not to whichever one is listed first. If you’re setting up SES itself for the first time, connecting your own AWS account and requesting SES production access are the two steps that come before any of the five tools above matter at all; what AWS is actually looking for in that request is covered in getting out of the SES sandbox.