What Amazon SES actually costs

Sending 250,000 marketing emails through Amazon SES costs about $41 a month. The rate everyone quotes, $0.10 per 1,000 emails, would put it at $26. Both numbers come from the same AWS pricing page. The gap is the plan your account is on, and since July 2026 new accounts do not default to the cheap one.

That is most of the surprise. SES is still very cheap for plain outbound sending. What people miss is the default plan and a set of add-ons that meter separately, not the send rate itself, and that the rate buys exactly one thing: a message handed to AWS for delivery, with no list, campaign editor or unsubscribe page bundled in. Something has to supply those, which is why Amazon SES for email marketing treats the front end as part of the cost rather than an afterthought.

Every figure below comes from Amazon’s SES pricing page. Prices move. Check yours before you budget.

Key Takeaways

• À la carte SES outbound email is $0.10 per 1,000 emails, with no monthly fee and no minimum. That number is real.
• New SES accounts default to the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000, which is 60% more per email. You can switch to à la carte at any time.
• Plan tiers are marginal. A cheaper rate applies only to the emails inside its tier, never to your whole month.
• The add-ons are where bills get strange. One standard dedicated IP is $24.95 a month, the same as sending 249,500 emails à la carte.

The number everyone quotes, and what it buys

$0.10 per 1,000 emails is SES’s à la carte outbound rate, and it is a genuine price. No monthly fee. No minimum. No contract. A list of 20,000 contacts mailed four times a month is 80,000 emails, which is $8.00.

It buys exactly one thing: handing a message to AWS and having AWS attempt delivery. There is a second line for data at $0.12 per GB sent, listed as attachment data, though AWS’s own worked example applies it to the whole message. Everything else in the SES product family is a separate meter.

What the rate does not include is the work of getting there. A new SES account starts in a sandbox that only delivers to addresses you verified yourself, so your first cost is a support request rather than a charge. We walk through what AWS is looking for in requesting SES production access. AWS also sets a send rate and a 24-hour quota per account and raises them over time, which shapes how fast a large campaign can go out.

The plan your account is probably on

Amazon offers three subscription plans as an alternative to à la carte, introduced on July 21, 2026, and new SES accounts now start on the cheapest of them rather than on à la carte. The same applies to any account and region combination with no metered activity since June 1, 2025. You can move to à la carte whenever you want, but nothing prompts you to.

The plans price outbound email like this:

• Essentials: $0.16 per 1,000 up to 10M a month, $0.14 from 10M to 100M, $0.11 above 100M. No monthly account fee.
• Pro: $0.22 / $0.17 / $0.12 across the same tiers, plus $105 per account per region per month.
• Enterprise: $0.23 / $0.18 / $0.13, plus $500 per account per region per month.

Essentials costs more than à la carte at every single tier. At the entry tier it is 60% more per email.

The tiers are marginal, which is the part people get backwards. Crossing 10 million emails does not reprice the month. On Essentials, 20 million emails is $0.16 on the first 10 million and $0.14 on the second 10 million, so $3,000. It is not $0.14 on all of them, which would be $2,800.

Here is the same send priced three ways, at rates current as of July 2026. Outbound only, no attachment data, single region.

Two things stand out. Essentials tracks à la carte at a fixed 60% premium until the tier boundaries start to move, and Pro’s flat fee dominates its own bill at anything under a million emails. Note that the Pro and Enterprise fees are charged per account per region. Sending from two regions doubles them.

Those are rates, not feature sets. The plans differ in more than the per-email number, so check what a plan’s fee actually buys in Amazon’s plan documentation before switching either way.

The line items that meter separately

None of these are on by default. All of them are easy to switch on and then forget.

• Virtual Deliverability Manager, billed as SES deliverability, is $0.07 per 1,000 emails up to 10M a month, plus $0.0005 per 1,000 dashboard queries with the first 5,000 queries a month free. On 250,000 emails that is $17.50, which is 70% on top of an à la carte send bill.
• Dedicated IPs (standard) are $24.95 per month per IP. The managed option is $15 per month per account plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails up to 10M, falling to $0.04 from 10M to 50M and $0.02 from 50M to 100M.
• Inbound email is $0.10 per 1,000, plus $0.09 per 1,000 incoming email chunks. This one catches people who point a reply-to address at SES.
• Mail Manager meters in three places: $0.15 per 1,000 for email processing, $2 per GB ingested and $0.19 per GB per month stored for archiving, and $50 per month for each open or mTLS ingress endpoint. That endpoint fee is charged even when the endpoint’s status is Closed.
• Tenants, useful if you separate clients or brands, are $0.005 per tenant per month plus $0.005 per 1,000 emails.
• Global Endpoints are $0.03 per 1,000, charged only on mail sent through a multi-region endpoint.

Archiving is the one that compounds. Processing and ingestion are one-time charges per message, but $0.19 per GB per month is rent on a store that only grows.

One more meter lives outside SES entirely. Delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click events can be published to Amazon SNS, which bills on its own pricing page and shows up as a separate service in Cost Explorer rather than under SES.

AWS’s own example, checked

AWS publishes a worked example: 250,000 emails a month on Essentials, 32 KB each, for $40.96. The arithmetic shows something the price list does not.

Outbound is 250 lots of a thousand at $0.16, so $40.00. The data charge is $0.96, and the only way to get there is 8 GB at $0.12. That means AWS counted 250,000 messages of 32,000 bytes each and billed the whole message, not just an attachment. If your templates run heavier than 32 KB, that line scales with them. A 100 KB HTML email at the same volume is 25 GB, so $3.00 instead of $0.96. Still small next to the send charge, but it is not zero, and image-heavy templates are how it grows.

The same send à la carte is $25.00 plus $0.96, so $25.96. Turn on Virtual Deliverability Manager and it becomes $43.46. Add one standard dedicated IP and it is $68.41. The send itself never changed.

When SES stops being the cheap option

Fixed monthly fees are what break the model, and they break it hardest at low volume. Past a certain point the whole approach stops paying, which when bringing your own Amazon SES is the wrong choice takes apart at the list sizes where it bites. Every fee has an equivalent in emails, which is the clearest way to judge one:

• Pro’s $105 per month equals 1,050,000 emails at the à la carte rate.
• Enterprise’s $500 equals 5,000,000 emails.
• Virtual Deliverability Manager’s Global option, at $1,250 per month per region per account, equals 12,500,000 emails.
• Bring Your Own IP is $24.95 per month per address with a 256-address minimum, so the floor is $6,387.20 per month. That is roughly 63.8 million emails.

Run that test on a small sender and the answer gets uncomfortable fast. At 20,000 emails a month, sending costs $2.00 à la carte. One standard dedicated IP is $24.95. The IP is then about 93% of the bill, and it is the component least likely to help a sender at that volume, because a dedicated IP has to be warmed and kept busy to build any reputation at all. Who actually needs a dedicated IP on Amazon SES works through the volume where one starts paying for itself.

The managed option softens that but does not change the shape. At 20,000 emails it is $15.00 for the account plus $1.60 of usage, so $16.60. Better than $24.95, and still eight times the cost of the email it is carrying.

The cost that never appears on any AWS invoice is the operational one. Somebody has to watch bounce and complaint rates against the thresholds AWS enforces, keep a suppression list, and handle it when a domain’s reputation slips. AWS charges nothing for that and expects all of it.

What to do with this

Two checks, both about five minutes.

Open the SES console and find which plan the account is on. If it was created after July 21, 2026, or sat idle through 2025, assume Essentials until you have seen otherwise. If you send plain marketing email and use none of the add-ons above, à la carte is cheaper at every volume.

Then open Cost Explorer and group SES by usage type. The line items separate cleanly, and an add-on somebody enabled once is obvious the moment you can see it on its own row. Look for an ingress endpoint you stopped using and a dedicated IP nobody warmed, because those two bill on the calendar rather than on your sending. If you send through EmailFig on your own AWS account, which parts of that bill are Amazon’s is worth knowing before the first invoice.

Free tier allowances depend on the account and are not on the SES price list. Check AWS’s current free tier terms for yours before budgeting around one.

For most senders the conclusion holds up: SES at $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000 is close to the cheapest way to put marketing email on the wire, and the honest caveat is that it gives you a delivery API and nothing else. You still need something to build lists, write campaigns, track events and manage unsubscribes. That is either your own code or a tool on top, which is where the comparisons get interesting. Our writeups of BigMailer and MailBluster cover two of the hosted options in that space.

EmailFig is one more. Its BYOS plans connect to your own AWS account, so SES bills you directly at the rates above, and its managed plans include sending for people who would rather not open an AWS account at all. Both are free up to 4,000 subscribers, and the BYOS and managed prices sit side by side.