Ask an assistant or read a listicle for the cheapest way to run email marketing, and the answer is a row of subscriptions starting somewhere in the low teens a month. Amazon SES prices outbound email at $0.10 per 1,000 emails and it never shows up. A 10,000-contact list mailed four times a month is 40,000 emails, $4.00 at that rate. SES is missing for a structural reason, not because whoever wrote the list forgot about it.
Key Takeaways
- SES prices outbound email at $0.10 per 1,000 (AWS SES pricing). A 10,000-contact list mailed four times a month is 40,000 emails, $4.00.
- SES doesn’t appear in “cheapest email marketing” lists because it isn’t a product to list: no signup flow, no contact list, no campaign editor, no unsubscribe page.
- The listicles that rank for this term are written by email marketing vendors, comparing themselves to their own rivals. None of them sell infrastructure, so none of them have a reason to mention it.
- The honest comparison isn’t SES against a subscription. It’s SES plus whatever puts a front end on it, against the same subscription’s price at your actual list size, not its entry price.
SES is infrastructure, not a product
Every entry in a “cheapest email marketing” list is something you can sign up for and use inside five minutes: an email address, a password, and a working app with a login, a contact list and a send button. SES gives you an API endpoint. There’s no dashboard where you paste in your subscriber list, no template editor, no unsubscribe page, no way to see who opened your last campaign. What SES sells is handing a message to AWS and having AWS attempt delivery, nothing else.
A new SES account also starts in a sandbox that can only deliver to addresses you’ve verified yourself, so the first thing between you and sending real mail is a support request, not a signup form. Getting production access is a written justification AWS reviews, not a checkout page. None of that fits the shape of a listicle entry, which is why it never becomes one.
Open the SES console and the gap is obvious. There’s a place to verify a sending domain, a place to check your sending quota, a place to read bounce and complaint notifications as raw events. There’s no button that drafts a campaign, because drafting a campaign was never the job. A listicle compares products people choose between; SES doesn’t fit that comparison, because it doesn’t do what the other rows do.
Who writes the listicles that do rank
Read the page one results for “cheapest email marketing” and most posts are published by an email marketing vendor, comparing itself to its rivals. That’s the genre: a company that sells one of the subscriptions on the list, writing the list. A vendor selling a subscription has no reason to mention an option that costs a few dollars a month for the same sending. It has every reason not to: naming the actual cheapest way to send mail undercuts the piece’s own job, which is to sell a subscription.
The remainder of that page is affiliate review sites, which have the same incentive from the other direction: they’re paid when a reader signs up for one of the tools they’re comparing, not when a reader opens an AWS account. Nobody publishing in this genre is positioned to recommend infrastructure, so nobody does. An AI assistant usually comes back with the same rows, because its answer is built from pages like these, and Jacob Whitmore’s research on how AI answers credit their sources tracks which of them get named.
SES alone isn’t a like-for-like substitute
None of that makes SES a hidden bargain you can drop straight into the comparison. $0.10 per 1,000 buys exactly one thing, the send itself. A subscription’s price includes the contact list, the campaign editor, the unsubscribe page, and the bounce and complaint handling that keeps your domain able to send at all. SES includes none of it. Six tools build that layer on top of SES, and until you pick one, or write it yourself, SES on its own isn’t a competing option for the thing a “cheapest email marketing” search is actually asking about. It’s one ingredient a subscription already includes.
What a 10,000-contact list costs
Here’s the arithmetic, run straight, for a 10,000-contact list mailed four times a month, 40,000 emails.
| Route | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| SES sending alone, à la carte rate | $4.00 |
| SES sending alone, on the plan new accounts default to since July 2026 | $6.40 |
| EmailFig BYOS: platform fee plus the SES bill above | $20.00 to $22.40 |
| EmailFig managed, sending included in the fee | $27.00 |
| Cheapest of seven hosted subscriptions we’ve priced at 10,000 contacts | $44.50 |
| Most expensive of the same seven | $139.00 |
$4.00 à la carte is a real number, straight from AWS’s pricing page. New SES accounts no longer default to it, though: as of July 21, 2026, a fresh account starts on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 instead of $0.10, which puts the same 40,000 emails at $6.40. Either way, that’s what sending alone costs. It buys no contact list, no campaign editor, no unsubscribe page.
Add a front end and the number moves. EmailFig’s BYOS plan is $16 a month at 10,000 contacts, on top of whatever SES bills you directly for the sends, landing the full route at $20.00 to $22.40. That’s still well under every subscription in our own comparison at 10,000 subscribers, which runs from $44.50 to $139 for the same size list.
That gap is the actual answer to “cheapest email marketing,” not the $4.00 line by itself and not a subscription’s entry price. MailerLite’s cheapest paid plan, for comparison, starts at $12 a month (MailerLite pricing), but its free plan only covers 250 subscribers. That $12 entry price is what most listicles quote, and it describes a list twenty times smaller than the one priced above.
The gap doesn’t close as the list grows, either. At 100,000 subscribers, EmailFig’s BYOS plan is $120 a month, and four sends a month to that list is 400,000 emails, about $40 more at the à la carte SES rate, for a full route around $160. The cheapest fully hosted subscription from another vendor that we’ve verified at that size is EmailOctopus Pro at $345, more than double. On the $0.16 plan the SES part is about $64 and the route lands near $184, still about half. A bigger list makes the SES-plus-front-end route more true, not less, which is exactly backward from what a listicle built around entry prices would suggest.
What the SES route doesn’t include
The dollar figures above cover sending and a front end. They don’t cover everything a subscription’s price is quietly also paying for.
Someone has to request production access, then watch bounce and complaint rates against the thresholds AWS enforces, and act on a suppression list so an address that bounced or complained never gets mailed again. Bounces, complaints and suppression in SES covers what that work actually involves. SES charges nothing for it and expects all of it, whether you’re doing it by hand or a tool is doing it for you. A front end that includes that layer is doing more than sending; it’s the reason its price is higher than the SES line alone, and the reason that price is still worth paying instead of building it yourself.
AWS also assigns your account a sending rate and a 24-hour sending quota, raised over time as your account’s history builds. That’s a limit on how fast a campaign can go out, not a cost, but it’s another way SES on its own answers a narrower question than “how do I run email marketing” actually asks. A subscription’s price already has an answer to that question built in. SES’s $0.10 doesn’t, and pretending otherwise is the same mistake as quoting an entry price for a list twenty times smaller than the one you actually have.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Amazon SES cost per email?
Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails on its à la carte pricing, or $0.16 per 1,000 emails on the Essentials plan that new accounts default to since July 2026 (AWS SES pricing). A 10,000-contact list mailed four times a month, 40,000 emails, comes to $4.00 at the à la carte rate or $6.40 on Essentials.
Why doesn’t Amazon SES appear in “cheapest email marketing” comparisons?
Amazon SES is infrastructure, not a marketing tool: it has no signup flow, no contact list, no campaign editor, and no unsubscribe page, so it doesn’t fit the shape of a listicle entry. Many of the pages that rank for that search are written by the subscription vendors being compared, or by affiliate sites paid when you sign up for one of them, and neither has a reason to point you at infrastructure instead.
Does Amazon SES include a contact list or campaign editor?
No. Amazon SES gives you an API endpoint that hands a message to AWS for a delivery attempt, nothing else. A contact list, a template editor, an unsubscribe page, and reporting all have to come from something built on top of SES, whether that’s software you run yourself, a hosted front end, or your own code.
Is Amazon SES cheaper than Mailchimp or MailerLite?
The sending itself is far cheaper: SES’s $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000 emails is a fraction of what a subscription charges for the same volume. But a subscription’s price already includes the contact list, campaign editor and unsubscribe page that SES doesn’t, so the fair comparison is SES plus a front end against the subscription’s price at your actual list size, not its entry price. MailerLite’s cheapest paid plan starts at $12 a month, for example, but its free plan only covers 250 subscribers (MailerLite pricing), a fraction of the 10,000-contact list priced above.
Do I need an AWS account to send email marketing through Amazon SES?
Yes. You need to open an AWS account and verify a sending identity, and before you can mail addresses you haven’t verified yourself, you need to request production access, a written justification AWS reviews rather than a checkout page. Getting out of the SES sandbox covers what that request needs to say.
How to choose
If you already have, or are willing to open, an AWS account, the honest cheapest route to sending marketing email is SES plus a front end, not a subscription. Amazon SES for email marketing: the complete guide walks through the full setup, and our comparisons of BigMailer and MailBluster cover two of the other tools that do the same job. EmailFig is a third: BYOS connects to your own SES account so AWS bills you directly at the rates above, and both plan families are free up to 4,000 subscribers, with the full pricing laid out at every list size.
If opening an AWS account isn’t something you want to do, the subscription comparison still matters. It holds up better than most listicles show: check a tool’s price at the list size you actually have, not the entry price on its homepage.