What is Amazon SES?
Amazon SES is an SMTP relay service founded in 2011, headquartered in the United States. Starting at $0.10 per 1,000 emails, it targets AWS-native engineering teams that model audiences in their own database and want raw send capacity, not a campaign builder. Our verdict: $0.10 per 1,000, and reputation thresholds published as numbers. Watch for: 31% of reviews are about the sandbox, and the old free tier is gone. Rated 6.3/10 overall across ease of use, deliverability, and pricing value.
What is Amazon SES?
Amazon SES went live on 25 January 2011, and AWS was explicit at the time about where it came from: the email infrastructure Amazon.com had built to mail its own retail customers. It still carries Amazon Retail’s Prime Day traffic, and AWS now puts the service above a trillion messages a year.
It is deliberately not an ESP. There is no campaign builder and no drag-and-drop editor, and an account gets exactly one contact list with at most twenty topics on it, so audiences are something you model in your own database. Templates are Handlebars JSON created through the API. Support is not bundled and starts as a separate AWS plan. Even the credentials are AWS-shaped: the SMTP password is not something you choose but a value derived from an IAM secret access key through a fixed HMAC-SHA256 chain, valid only in the region that generated it. New accounts open in a sandbox capped at 200 messages a day until they request production access.
The headline price of $0.10 per thousand emails held from launch until 21 July 2026, when AWS introduced Essentials, Pro and Enterprise plans. Accounts that have been sending since June 2025 keep the old rate; everyone else now starts at $0.16 per thousand. Netflix moved all of its email here, and Duolingo and Grab run on it too.
Explore Amazon SES on SMTPedia
Frequently asked questions
Is Amazon SES worth it in 2026?
Our full editorial review covers pricing, deliverability, ease of use, support quality, and API/MCP maturity. Read the Amazon SES review →
How much does Amazon SES cost?
All pricing tiers, hidden fees, refund policy, and the true cost per email are broken down in the pricing tab. See Amazon SES pricing →
What are the best alternatives to Amazon SES?
Amazon SES compared with its closest competitors by use case, pricing, and switching cost. See alternatives →
What are the SMTP settings for Amazon SES?
Hostnames, ports, authentication, rate limits, and DKIM/SPF configuration for Amazon SES. See SMTP settings →
Does Amazon SES have an official MCP server?
Our API tab covers Amazon SES's REST API version, SDKs, rate limits, and MCP server support (official, community, and commercial wrappers). See API + MCP →
This review follows our email infrastructure testing methodology. We disclose affiliate relationships in our editorial independence policy.
