How much does Amazon SES cost in 2026?

Is Amazon SES still $0.10 per 1,000 emails?

Yes — that is the exact figure Amazon publishes today, and it is the first thing most people come here to confirm. But the sentence needs one qualifier that did not exist before July 2026.

$0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails is the à la carte rate. Amazon’s wording: with SES à la carte pricing, you pay only for what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage. There are no volume tiers on that rate. One million emails costs $100. Ten million costs $1,000. Two hundred million costs $20,000. It does not get cheaper and it does not get more expensive.

What changed is that à la carte is now one of four ways to buy, and it is no longer the only default. If you are on a plan, your per-email rate is different — and in every case, higher.

What changed on 21 July 2026

SES spent fifteen years as a pure metered service: one price per email, buy add-ons individually. That model still exists, but Amazon has layered a plan structure on top of it. Here is what the announcement says and what it means.

Amazon’s framing is that each plan builds on the one before it, offering progressively more capability at a discount compared to à la carte pricing. The three plans are described as:

• Essentials — deliverability insights
• Pro — adds managed dedicated IPs, email validation, and global inbox placement visibility
• Enterprise — adds multi-region resilience, workload-level reputation isolation, and an annual deliverability assessment

Plans are available in every AWS Region where SES is available except Middle East (UAE) and Middle East (Bahrain).

Switching plans

You change or cancel from the Pricing plan page in the SES console. Upgrades take effect immediately. Downgrades and cancellations take effect at the start of your next billing cycle, with one exception: a first-time cancellation from the default Essentials plan takes effect immediately. Amazon publishes no minimum commitment period.

The four ways to buy SES, priced side by side

Rates below are per 1,000 outbound emails, USD, as published on Amazon’s SES pricing page. Note the tier structure, which is unusual and explained below the table.

Which option is actually cheapest: the arithmetic at five volumes

This is the calculation the plan announcement does not show. Sending cost only, no add-ons, applying the marginal tiers correctly.

À la carte wins on every row. There is no crossover volume at which a plan becomes cheaper on sending. That is not a criticism of the plans — it is what a bundle is. But it does mean the question “which plan should I be on” is really the question “which add-ons do I need”, and you should answer that one first.

When a plan does win

Two cases, both driven entirely by a single add-on.

Pro turns on email validation. Validation is $0.01 per validation à la carte and included on Pro. If you validate 20,000 addresses a month you are spending $200 on validation alone, which already exceeds Pro’s $105 fee. At 100,000 validations a month the à la carte cost is $1,000 and Pro is an obvious buy. Below roughly 10,000 validations a month, it is not.

The dedicated-IP case never justifies Pro on its own. Pro bundles Managed Dedicated IPs, which à la carte cost $15/mo plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails. Buying them separately therefore costs $15 plus $0.18 per 1,000 all-in, against Pro at $105 plus $0.22. Pro is higher on both the fixed fee and the unit rate, so there is no volume at which managed IPs alone make Pro the cheaper choice. Validation is what flips it, or nothing does.

The free tier: what happened to 62,000 emails a month

This is the single most out-of-date figure circulating about SES, and it is still quoted by guides written this year. Here is what Amazon’s pages actually say today.

For years SES carried a well-known allowance: 62,000 outbound emails per month at no charge when sending from an application hosted on Amazon EC2. That figure does not appear anywhere on Amazon’s current SES pricing page. We are reporting what the page contains, not asserting a retirement date Amazon has not published — but if you are planning around 62,000 free emails, stop.

What the pricing page does say is that new AWS customers receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, applicable to eligible services including SES. On the AWS Free Tier page the mechanics are: $100 in credits immediately, up to $100 more earned by exploring key services, valid for 6 months.

The sandbox, and why your first SES email costs nothing and reaches nobody

SES has a cost dimension that never appears on the pricing page: for the first hours or days of your account’s life, you cannot send to anyone.

Every new SES account starts in the sandbox, where the limits are severe:

Leaving the sandbox requires requesting production access and describing your use case. Once out, the daily quota and send rate are set by AWS based on that use case and raised on request. The practical consequence for a migration plan: budget days, not minutes, between opening the account and sending your first real message. This is the most common reason a “we’ll just move to SES this weekend” plan slips.

Other hard limits worth knowing before you design around SES: maximum message size is 40 MB after base64 encoding on the v2 API and SMTP (10 MB on the v1 API), maximum 50 recipients per message across To, CC and BCC combined, and 10,000 verified identities per Region. All quotas are per Region.

Amazon SES dedicated IP pricing

SES sells dedicated IPs three ways, and the cheapest headline is not the cheapest option for most senders.

The comparison that matters is Standard against Managed. Managed’s fixed fee is per account, not per IP, so it scales with volume rather than with IP count. At 1 million emails a month Managed costs $15 plus $80, or $95 — roughly four Standard IPs. At 100,000 emails Managed is $23, cheaper than a single Standard IP, and AWS does the warm-up.

The complete SES add-on price list

Every à la carte line item Amazon publishes. Anything not in this table, we could not source and do not quote.

Inbound email and Mail Manager

SES receives mail as well as sending it, on a completely separate meter. If you are only sending, none of this applies and you can skip it — but it is the part of the bill people most often fail to forecast.

Receiving costs $0.10 per 1,000 inbound emails, plus $0.09 per 1,000 incoming email chunks. A chunk is a unit of message content, so a mailbox receiving large messages costs more than the per-email figure suggests. Mail Manager email processing — rules, routing, transformation — is $0.15 per 1,000 emails plus $0.10 per 1,000 recipients beyond the first.

Archiving is the line that grows without anyone watching it: $2 per GB to ingest and $0.19 per GB per month to store. Ingestion is one-off, storage is forever. An archive accumulating 10 GB a month costs $20 to ingest in month one and $1.90 a month to hold — then $22.80 a month by month twelve, and $45.60 a month by month twenty-four, for data nobody has read.

What real accounts pay

Five worked examples using published à la carte rates, with the plan comparison where it changes the answer.

The pattern across all five: plans win only when a bundled add-on carries a large fixed or per-unit fee you would otherwise pay. Validation volume and VDM Global are the two that flip the answer. Sending volume alone never does.

How SES compares on price

SES is infrastructure, not a platform, and the price gap against every managed provider reflects exactly that.

SES is roughly seven times cheaper than Mailgun and five to thirteen times cheaper than SendGrid on raw sending. Nothing in this category competes with it on price, and nothing is going to. What you are not buying is the layer above the SMTP connection: log search you can use without writing a CloudWatch Insights query, bounce classification in plain language, address validation in the console, a template editor, deliverability alerting, and a support engineer you can phone.

The honest framing is that SES’s price is the price of an engineer’s time. If you have someone who will build the observability layer and enjoys it, SES is unbeatable. If that person does not exist, the $600 a month you save at 1 million emails buys about three hours of contractor time a month, and you will spend more than that on the first deliverability incident you cannot diagnose.

What we could not verify, and therefore do not state

• Whether the 62,000 emails/month EC2 free tier was formally retired, and when. It is absent from the current pricing page. Amazon has not published a retirement notice we could find, so we report the absence rather than a date.
• Whether your existing account is on à la carte or Essentials. Amazon’s docs support both readings. Check the console.
• Whether Pro includes VDM Global deliverability. The launch announcement describes Pro as adding “global inbox placement visibility”, while the pricing page’s feature matrix lists VDM Global deliverability under Enterprise only. We follow the pricing page, which is the billing document, and flag the discrepancy.
• Regional price variation. All figures here are the published US rates. SES prices differ by Region and VDM Global is explicitly billed per region. Check your Region before budgeting.
• Enterprise Discount Program and private pricing. Large AWS accounts negotiate. Any SES rate below the published one is somebody’s contract, not a rate card.

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