What is BYOS?

Amazon SES (BYOS)Updated

BYOS means EmailFig sends your campaigns through Amazon SES in your own AWS account. Here's what changes and what you take on.

BYOS (“bring your own SES”) gives you the whole of EmailFig, with one difference: each message leaves through Amazon SES in your own AWS account. The AWS bill and the sending reputation are yours.

You choose between managed sending and BYOS when you create your account, and that choice stays for the life of the account. See Can I switch between platform and BYOS?.

What stays the same

Everything you actually use. Contacts, lists, segments, the template editors, campaigns, automations, forms, reports, imports and exports are identical. Domain verification produces the same DNS records. Your subscription is still priced on your subscribed contact count.

What is different

  • You connect an AWS account. One CloudFormation stack creates a single IAM role that lets EmailFig drive SES on your behalf. See Connect your own Amazon SES account.
  • AWS bills you directly for the email SES sends. Your EmailFig subscription is separate, and at the same contact count it costs less than managed sending. See Understand your AWS SES costs.
  • Your sending reputation is yours alone. Nothing you send affects another EmailFig customer, and nothing they send affects you. Amazon’s bounce and complaint thresholds apply to your account directly. See Bounce and complaint rates AWS enforces.
  • Your send rate comes from your AWS account, not from a setting in EmailFig. See Your SES sending quota and send rate.
  • You start in the SES sandbox, which delivers only to addresses you’ve verified yourself. Lift it by requesting production access inside AWS. See Leave the SES sandbox.
  • us-east-1 only. BYOS sends from the AWS us-east-1 region and no other.
  • Tracking links carry Amazon’s awstrack.me host rather than EmailFig’s.
  • A broken AWS connection pauses sending. EmailFig re-checks every few hours and holds new sends if anything it needs is missing. See AWS connection health errors.

Emails we send you (sign-in codes, billing notices, the alert that says your AWS connection is broken) always go through EmailFig’s own infrastructure, so you’ll still hear from us when your SES account is in trouble.

Is BYOS right for you?

BYOS suits you if you already run on AWS, want unlimited sending volume, and are happy owning an AWS account, its bill and its reputation. If you’d rather not run an AWS account, managed sending is simpler and gives you every EmailFig feature BYOS does.

Getting started

BYOS accounts sign up at their own door, /auth/byos. Signing in works the same way as anywhere else: type your email and enter the six-digit code we send. There’s no Google sign-in on the BYOS door, because continuing with Google would create a managed account, and the choice is permanent. Signing up through the ordinary door likewise creates a managed account.

The free tier is available on BYOS too: up to 4,000 contacts, no charge, with EmailFig branding in the footer.

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