Understand your AWS SES costs
With your own Amazon SES you pay two bills: EmailFig's plan, based on your contacts, and Amazon's charge for the email you send.
When you send through your own Amazon SES, you pay two separate bills:
- EmailFig charges for your plan, based on how many subscribed contacts you have. There’s no charge per email and no monthly email limit. See How EmailFig pricing works.
- AWS charges you directly for the email Amazon SES sends from your account.
So EmailFig’s bill grows with your audience, and AWS’s grows with how much you send.
What AWS charges for
- Email sent: Amazon SES charges per email. At the time of writing its published rate is $0.10 per 1,000 emails, but check Amazon’s SES pricing page for the current rate and any free allowance.
- Notifications: each delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click is a notification, billed by Amazon SNS in your account. These cost a tiny fraction of the email charge.
For example, 20,000 contacts mailed four times in a month is 80,000 emails. At $0.10 per 1,000, that’s about $8 from AWS, plus pennies for notifications.
Seeing and limiting your AWS bill
Your SES charges show in the AWS Billing console under Amazon SES, and Cost Explorer breaks them down by day.
Set an AWS budget alert before your first big send, so you hear about unexpected costs early.
Bounces cost you twice: you pay to send to a dead address, and Amazon trusts your account a little less. EmailFig stops sending to addresses that hard bounce, and cleaning out inactive contacts lowers both bills.