SES vs Mailgun vs Postmark for marketing email
Amazon SES prices marketing email by the message. Mailgun and Postmark price it by the plan. What each costs at five volumes, and what Postmark permits.
Amazon SES prices marketing email by the message: $0.10 per 1,000, with no plan and no monthly minimum. Mailgun and Postmark price it by the plan: a flat monthly fee that includes a volume, plus a published rate for whatever you send past it. At 10,000 emails a month that gap is $1.00 versus $15 versus $16.50. It narrows as volume grows, and at 1.5 million emails a month it narrows enough to flip the middle and top spots.
These are three different products sold as if they were one category. SES is a delivery API with a price tag and nothing else. Mailgun is that same API with a support tier, a template builder and an add-on catalog wrapped around it. Postmark is the most opinionated of the three: it built a separate piece of infrastructure specifically to keep your marketing send from damaging your transactional send, and its pricing and its rules both flow from that decision.
Key Takeaways
- SES à la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 emails, no plan required. Mailgun’s cheapest plan that fits 10,000 emails a month is $15. Postmark’s is $16.50.
- Neither Mailgun nor Postmark has a single per-thousand rate. Both sell a plan sized to a volume, with a published overage rate on top, and the overage rate itself changes tier by tier.
- Postmark explicitly permits bulk and marketing email, on a separate “Broadcast” stream with its own subdomain and IPs, and it auto-inserts an unsubscribe link if you don’t add one yourself.
- The three-way price gap is not constant. Above about a million emails a month, Mailgun’s published rate can cost more than Postmark’s, because Mailgun’s overage rate never drops after its highest self-serve plan.
The three prices, compared
The table below prices a plain marketing send: outbound only, no dedicated IP, no validation add-on, no inbound processing. For Mailgun and Postmark it’s the cheapest plan whose included volume covers the month; past that, the plan’s own published overage rate.
| Emails per month | SES (à la carte) | Mailgun | Postmark (Pro) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $1.00 | $15.00 (Basic) | $16.50 |
| 50,000 | $5.00 | $35.00 (Foundation) | $60.50 |
| 125,000 | $12.50 | $117.50 (Scale + overage) | $126.50 |
| 300,000 | $30.00 | $310.00 (Scale + overage) | $269.50 |
| 1,500,000 | $150.00 | $1,630.00 (Scale + overage)* | $852.50 |
Prices as of August 2026, read from each vendor’s own pricing page. SES: $0.10 per 1,000, no monthly fee. Mailgun: Basic $15/mo for 10,000, Foundation $35/mo for 50,000, Scale $90/mo for 100,000 then $1.10 per 1,000 over. Postmark’s plans resize to your volume on their own pricing slider; Pro is $16.50 at 10,000 and scales up as shown, with its overage rate falling from $1.30 to $1.20 per 1,000 as the plan gets bigger.
* Mailgun publishes no cap on Scale overage, so $1,630 is a real number built from their own rate card. In practice, a sender at 1.5 million emails a month is exactly who Mailgun’s “request a quote” Enterprise tier is aimed at, and that quote isn’t published.
SES is cheapest at every volume in the table. What’s worth noticing is the shape of the gap: Mailgun starts closer to Postmark and ends up more expensive than it, because Postmark’s plan literally resizes and its overage rate improves with scale, while Mailgun’s Scale plan has one overage rate that never gets cheaper no matter how far past 100,000 you go.
What $0.10 per 1,000 buys, and what it doesn’t
SES’s rate buys exactly one thing: handing a message to AWS and having AWS attempt delivery. There’s no list management, no unsubscribe handling, no campaign editor, no analytics dashboard beyond delivery, bounce and complaint counts, and no template builder. Everything else is your own code or a tool built on top. New accounts also don’t default to the $0.10 rate anymore; the full breakdown, including the plan AWS puts new accounts on and what the add-ons cost, is in what Amazon SES actually costs. Getting an account out of its initial sandbox is also its own step, covered in requesting SES production access.
Mailgun and Postmark both include a real amount of that missing layer: a dashboard, delivery and bounce tracking, and API-level list handling. Neither includes a campaign builder or an audience the way a marketing platform would. All three are still infrastructure, not a place to write and schedule a newsletter.
Mailgun: a plan with a rate attached
Mailgun sells four self-serve tiers. Free covers 100 emails a day for testing. Basic is $15 a month for 10,000 emails, with overage at $1.80 per 1,000 beyond that. Foundation is $35 a month for 50,000, at $1.30 per 1,000 over. Scale is $90 a month for 100,000, at $1.10 per 1,000 over, and adds SAML SSO, 5,000 free email validations and dedicated IP pools. Past Scale, Mailgun’s page points to a custom Enterprise quote rather than a published rate.
The deliverability tooling most people actually want, inbox placement testing and reputation monitoring, isn’t in any Send plan. It’s a separate product Mailgun calls Optimize, priced and sold on its own. What you get inside Send, on every tier including Free, is authentication support (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI) and suppression management; automated dedicated IP warm-up is there from Foundation up.
Email validation is metered outside the plan on Basic and Foundation, at roughly $1.20 per 100 checks, and becomes a 5,000-check allowance on Scale.
Postmark: the plan resizes, and so does the rate
Postmark’s slider is the more honest version of the same idea: instead of stacking overage onto a fixed tier, the plan itself is priced to whatever volume you select, from 10,000 up to 1.5 million, with a “contact us” for anything past that. Basic, Pro and Platform all start at $15, $16.50 and $18 a month for 10,000 emails; the difference between them is retention length, sending domain limits, inbound processing and the number of Broadcast streams you’re allowed to run, not the base rate.
Pick a bigger volume on the slider and the plan price and its overage rate move together. At 300,000 emails, Pro is $269.50 a month with overage at $1.25 per 1,000 past that; at 1.5 million, it’s $852.50 with overage at $1.20 per 1,000. Dedicated IPs are an add-on starting at $50 a month per IP, available only on Pro and above, and only once you’re sending 300,000 emails a month or more. SES’s own dedicated IP economics run differently, and often aren’t worth it below a similar volume threshold: dedicated IPs, who needs one.
Postmark’s rules for bulk and marketing email
Postmark’s own support pages are explicit that bulk and marketing email is supported: “Message Streams makes it possible to send all application email, including bulk messages, through Postmark.” What changes is where it runs. A Broadcast Message Stream is separate infrastructure from a Transactional stream, on its own subdomain and its own IPs, specifically so a promotional send never puts a password-reset email’s deliverability at risk.
Three things about that separation are enforced, not just suggested. Postmark requires a visible, clear unsubscribe link on every broadcast message, and inserts one automatically if you don’t. It requires the broadcast subdomain to carry its own SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, separate from your root domain’s. And its terms of service prohibit sending to a purchased, free-acquired or inherited list, broadcast stream or not. None of that is a content-approval gate: creating a Broadcast stream and sending through it is self-serve, with no review step described anywhere in Postmark’s docs.
The honest read of Postmark’s own positioning is that transactional is the product it was built for, and broadcast is a capability it added and now enforces good behavior on, rather than a use case designed in from the start. That shows up as real constraints more than as an outright restriction, and for a marketing sender who values list hygiene anyway, most of it isn’t a cost.
The honest ranking
SES is cheapest and gives you the least. No plan, no dashboard beyond delivery stats, no message-type separation, no policy enforcement of any kind. You build the rest or buy it separately.
Mailgun sits in the middle on price and on scope. A real dashboard and list handling ship in the base plan; the deliverability tooling that would make it a genuine step up from SES is a separate paid product, and its overage rate stops improving after its top self-serve tier, which is why it’s not the middle option at every volume.
Postmark is the most expensive at low volume and the most opinionated at every volume, and it earns that reputation by enforcing the habits that keep marketing mail out of a transactional inbox’s way: stream separation, mandatory unsubscribe links, a no-purchased-lists policy. If your list is genuinely permission-based and you’re already thinking in terms of stream hygiene, you’re paying for infrastructure that agrees with you. If you just want the cheapest way to get a monthly newsletter delivered, that opinion is worth exactly nothing to you.
What to do with this
Match the tool to what you’re actually optimizing for. If price per email is the whole decision, SES wins outright, and the cost of that win is that you supply everything else yourself: a way to build lists, write campaigns, track opens and clicks, and handle unsubscribes. Bring your own SES explains what connecting an AWS account for that purpose involves, and what a full SES bill actually includes is worth reading before you assume $0.10 per 1,000 is the whole number. What SES does and doesn’t give you beyond the price tag is the subject of Amazon SES for email marketing: the complete guide.
If you’d rather not run raw SES yourself, that missing layer is what hosted BYOS tools sell. Our own writeups of two of them, BigMailer and MailBluster, cover what they add on top of the same SES sending rate. A fuller ranked comparison of five of those tools is in the best email marketing tools for Amazon SES. EmailFig is a third option in that space: connect your own AWS account and pay Amazon directly at the rates above, or send managed and skip the AWS account entirely. Both start free up to 4,000 subscribers, and the full price list has both side by side.