Understand your AWS SES costs
On BYOS you get two bills: EmailFig's subscription by contact count, and Amazon's charge for the email SES sends.
On BYOS you get two bills. EmailFig charges a monthly subscription based on your subscribed contact count, with no per-email charge and no send limit. AWS charges you directly for the email Amazon SES sends out of your own account, plus a very small amount for the delivery notifications that make your reports work.
What AWS charges for
- Outbound email. SES charges per message. Amazon’s published rate is $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Rates change, so check Amazon’s own pricing page for the current number.
- Notifications. Every delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click is published to an SNS topic and forwarded to EmailFig. SNS and SQS are billed per request, at a fraction of a cent per thousand, so this is a rounding error next to the email charge.
- Data transfer. SES bills for attachment data. EmailFig doesn’t send attachments, so this is normally zero.
New AWS accounts often have a free SES allowance, depending on your account’s age and Amazon’s current terms.
A worked example
A list of 20,000 contacts, mailed four times in a month, is 80,000 emails. At $0.10 per 1,000 that’s roughly $8 of AWS charges, plus pennies of notifications. EmailFig’s bill grows with your audience, AWS’s with your volume.
Where to see your AWS bill
Everything SES charges appears in your AWS billing console under the Amazon SES service, split by usage type. Cost Explorer breaks it down by day.
Set a budget alert in AWS before your first big send. It’s the cheapest way to find out you sent more than you expected.
What EmailFig charges
The same contact-count ladder as everywhere else in EmailFig, at a lower price than managed sending on every paid step. Up to 4,000 contacts is free, with EmailFig branding in the footer. There’s no cap on how many emails you send. Full detail is in BYOS pricing and How EmailFig pricing works.
Costs you can control
- Contacts you never mail still count. Your tier is set by subscribed contacts, so clearing out contacts you won’t email lowers the subscription. See Clean your list of inactive contacts.
- Bounces cost money twice: you pay AWS to send to a dead address, and it counts against your SES reputation. EmailFig suppresses hard-bounced addresses automatically. See Suppressions: why an address can’t be re-added.