When bringing your own Amazon SES is the wrong choice
Bringing your own Amazon SES account is genuinely cheaper, but only past a certain list size. Below it, an AWS account costs more than it saves.
If you are mailing fewer than about 10,000 contacts, do not bring your own Amazon SES account. Take managed sending, pay the extra few dollars a month, and never open the AWS console. The savings from running your own SES account at that size are real but small, and they do not cover what an AWS account costs you in attention.
EmailFig’s own published prices and Amazon’s own rate card back it up.
Key Takeaways
- Bring your own SES (BYOS) costs less per month than managed sending at every contact tier, because on BYOS you also pay Amazon directly for sending.
- Below roughly 10,000 contacts, the net saving after Amazon’s bill is a few dollars a month. That does not pay for an AWS account.
- Past about 30,000 to 100,000 contacts, the net saving crosses $20, then $75 a month. That is worth managing.
- The managed fee buys you out of the sandbox, the IAM role, the bill risk, and owning your own reputation with Amazon directly.
What running your own SES account actually commits you to
BYOS means you connect your own AWS account, and Amazon SES sends your mail out of it instead of EmailFig’s. Everything else about EmailFig stays the same: the same campaign builder, the same segments, the same reports. What changes is who is standing behind the sending infrastructure. On BYOS, that is you.
You request your own way out of the sandbox. A new AWS account only delivers to addresses you have verified yourself. EmailFig can tell you when Amazon lifts that restriction, but the request itself happens inside your own AWS console, and if AWS says no, the appeal is between you and Amazon. We cannot open, chase, or argue that case for you. What AWS is actually looking for in that request, and what makes one get denied, is covered in getting out of the SES sandbox.
You connect an IAM role. EmailFig makes this closer to one click than a policy-writing exercise: connecting your own SES account is a single CloudFormation stack that creates one role, scoped to SES and to the SNS topics EmailFig creates. But it still means having an AWS account, being the kind of person willing to click “create stack” and tick the box that says it creates IAM resources, and trusting that role to send mail through your own AWS account. What that role should and shouldn’t be allowed to do, for us or anyone else, is covered in connecting an AWS account safely.
Amazon’s bounce and complaint thresholds apply to your account, not ours. AWS places an SES account under review once its bounce rate reaches 5% or its complaint rate reaches 0.1%, and can pause sending outright at 10% and 0.5%. AWS measures both against a representative volume of your sending rather than a fixed window, and the numbers show in your own AWS console. EmailFig suppresses hard bounces and complainers automatically, but the account those numbers are measured against is yours.
The bill has more meters than the headline rate. Sending itself is cheap and metered cleanly. What is easy to turn on and then forget is everything next to it, dedicated IPs, the deliverability dashboard, archiving. We priced those out separately in what Amazon SES actually costs, and the short version is that add-ons, not the send rate, are where a surprising invoice comes from.
It is what “your own AWS account” means. The question is whether the money it saves you is worth carrying it.
Where the line actually is
EmailFig charges by contact count on both plan families. Managed sending bundles the AWS side into one price. BYOS charges a lower monthly subscription and lets Amazon bill you directly for the mail SES actually sends, at Amazon’s own à la carte rate of $0.10 per 1,000 emails, with no monthly minimum.
The table assumes a list mailed four times a month. EmailFig’s prices and Amazon’s $0.10 per 1,000 rate are current as of August 2026. Swap in your own send frequency and the arithmetic still holds: multiply your contacts by how many times a month you send, divide by 1,000, multiply by $0.10, and subtract that from the subscription gap.
| Contacts (up to) | Managed | BYOS subscription | Subscription saving | AWS bill at 4 sends/month | Net BYOS saving |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $8/mo | $6/mo | $2.00 | $0.40 | $1.60 |
| 2,500 | $11/mo | $8/mo | $3.00 | $1.00 | $2.00 |
| 5,000 | $15/mo | $10/mo | $5.00 | $2.00 | $3.00 |
| 7,500 | $21/mo | $13/mo | $8.00 | $3.00 | $5.00 |
| 10,000 | $27/mo | $16/mo | $11.00 | $4.00 | $7.00 |
| 30,000 | $75/mo | $40/mo | $35.00 | $12.00 | $23.00 |
| 100,000 | $235/mo | $120/mo | $115.00 | $40.00 | $75.00 |
| 500,000 | $1,035/mo | $520/mo | $515.00 | $200.00 | $315.00 |
Full ladders for both families are on the pricing page.
The shape is the point. Under 10,000 contacts, the net saving from running your own SES account is single-digit dollars a month, less than a coffee. It does not cover the afternoon it takes to understand what you just signed up for, let alone the risk of a bill line you did not expect or an AWS support case you have to argue yourself. Past 30,000 contacts the saving is real money, $23, then $75, then over $300 a month at half a million contacts. That is the line: not a contact count so much as the point where the saving stops being trivial and starts being worth the attention an AWS account demands.
What the extra fee on managed sending buys
Concretely, not vaguely:
- No AWS account, no CloudFormation stack, no IAM role to trust with your sending identity.
- No sandbox request and no waiting on Amazon’s answer to it.
- EmailFig owns the infrastructure your mail goes through, so when sending breaks, it is ours to fix, not yours to debug in a console you rarely open.
- Sign in with Google is available on the managed signup door. It is not offered on the BYOS door, because that choice is permanent from signup.
- Tracking links carry a
trkfig.comsubdomain unique to your account, rather than Amazon’s defaultawstrack.me.
If you are the kind of reader who already runs infrastructure and finds an IAM role unremarkable, none of that costs you anything to give up, and the savings above are yours starting on day one. If AWS is new territory, that list is what a few dollars a month is buying you, and at small volume it is worth every cent of it.
The honest answer
Bring your own SES when the subscription gap plus your own comfort with AWS clears the operational bar: comfortable owning an AWS bill, comfortable being the one Amazon holds to its bounce and complaint thresholds, and past roughly 10,000 contacts, where the net saving actually adds up to something. Below that, take managed sending. You are not leaving money on the table. You are paying a small, predictable fee to never have to think about an AWS account at all, and for most people at that size, that is the better trade every time.
BYOS is one of the four ways to put a front end on SES; the complete guide covers the other three.
Either way, both plan families are free up to 4,000 subscribers.