12 Best Amazon SES Alternatives

Our Pick for SaaS Companies

Sequenzy

Complete marketing + transactional platform for SaaS. Unlike SES, includes visual builders, automation, analytics, and Stripe integration.

No AWS knowledge required. The AI writes entire email sequences based on your product and audience, so you skip months of building infrastructure. It connects directly to Stripe to trigger emails based on billing events like trial expiration, payment failure, or plan upgrades — all things you'd need to wire up manually with SES and Lambda.

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Best for

SaaS founders wanting a complete solution

Pricing

$49/month for 10,000 subscribers (120k emails)

Pros

Marketing + transactional in one platform
Visual drag-and-drop email builder
AI generates entire email sequences
Native Stripe integration
No AWS setup required

Cons

Higher cost per email than SES
No AWS ecosystem integration
No dedicated IPs on lower tiers
Newer platform

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Resend

Modern developer experience with beautiful APIs and React Email. All the features SES lacks (templates, analytics, better DX) without the DIY.

Transactional only. Resend was built by a developer frustrated with existing email APIs, and it shows — the SDK design is clean, the docs are excellent, and React Email lets you build templates as React components. You get a real dashboard with delivery tracking and logs, plus webhooks for bounces and complaints that just work without SNS configuration.

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Best for

Developers wanting modern DX for transactional

Pricing

$20/month for 50,000 emails

Pros

Best developer experience in email
React Email integration
Modern SDKs for every language
3,000 emails/month free
Actually has a dashboard

Cons

Transactional only (no marketing)
More expensive than SES at scale
No SMTP relay
Newer platform

Postmark

Exceptional deliverability with actual features. Dashboard, analytics, message streams.

What SES would be if AWS cared about user experience. Postmark is obsessively focused on getting emails to the inbox — they maintain separate infrastructure for transactional and marketing (called "message streams") to protect deliverability. They'll actually reject you as a customer if your use case might hurt their sending reputation. The 40-day message retention with full content search makes debugging delivery issues trivial compared to SES's CloudWatch logs.

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Best for

Apps where deliverability and support matter

Pricing

$15/month for 10,000 emails

Pros

Best deliverability in the industry
Actual dashboard and analytics
Message streams for organization
Human support
40-day email history

Cons

Transactional only
More expensive than SES
Will reject sketchy use cases
No marketing features

SendGrid

Marketing + transactional with actual features. Dashboard, templates, automation.

Still affordable compared to SES when you factor in build time. SendGrid has been around since 2009 and powers email for companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprises sending billions of messages. You get a template editor, campaign management, automation, and detailed analytics out of the box. The API is well-documented with SDKs for every major language, and it supports both API and SMTP sending. Now owned by Twilio, which adds SMS capabilities but has also led to some support quality concerns.

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Best for

Teams wanting features without AWS complexity

Pricing

$19.95/month for 50,000 emails (Essentials)

Pros

Marketing + transactional
Template editor included
Proven at scale
Both API and SMTP
Better analytics than SES

Cons

DX feels dated
More expensive than SES raw
Deliverability varies on shared IPs
Complex pricing tiers

Mailgun

Developer-focused with more features than SES. Email validation, inbound parsing, better documentation.

Similar philosophy but more polished. Mailgun gives you a proper dashboard with delivery analytics, bounce tracking, and log search — things you'd need to build yourself on SES. The email validation API is a nice bonus for keeping your list clean. Inbound email parsing lets you receive and process emails programmatically, which is useful for support ticket systems. Now owned by Sinch, and recent price increases have pushed some users to look elsewhere.

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Best for

Developers wanting SES-like API with features

Pricing

$35/month for 10,000 emails (Foundation)

Pros

Better DX than SES
Email validation included
Inbound email parsing
Good documentation
Both API and SMTP

Cons

More expensive than SES
Recently raised prices
No marketing features
Sinch acquisition concerns

Brevo

Budget-friendly with unlimited contacts. Marketing + transactional + SMS. Not the cheapest per email, but far more features than SES.

Brevo charges by emails sent rather than contacts stored, which is great if you have a large list but don't email everyone every day. You get a drag-and-drop email builder, automation workflows, landing pages, SMS, and WhatsApp — all in one platform. The transactional API works via SMTP or REST, making it a drop-in replacement for SES in most applications. It won't match SES on raw price per email, but the included features eliminate months of build time.

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Best for

Budget teams wanting all-in-one features

Pricing

$25/mo for unlimited contacts (20k emails)

Pros

Unlimited contacts
Transactional + marketing + SMS
SMTP and API
Actual email builder
No AWS complexity

Cons

Pay-per-email adds up
Interface is dated
Support can be slow
Not as cheap as SES at volume

SparkPost

Enterprise-grade with predictive analytics. Better tooling than SES with similar scale capabilities.

Good for high-volume transactional. SparkPost (now part of Bird) handles over 40% of the world's commercial email, so scale is not an issue. Their predictive analytics use machine learning to optimize send times and predict engagement, which is something SES doesn't touch. Real-time bounce classification and email validation help maintain list quality automatically. The downside is it's increasingly enterprise-focused with pricing to match.

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Best for

Enterprise high-volume senders

Pricing

$20/month for 15,000 emails

Pros

Predictive email analytics
Handles enterprise scale
Strong deliverability tools
Email validation
Real-time bounce classification

Cons

Enterprise-focused pricing
More expensive than SES
Owned by Bird (acquisition)
DX not modern

Customer.io

Full marketing automation with transactional. Email, push, SMS, in-app. For PLG companies who need sophisticated behavioral triggers.

Customer.io lets you send messages based on what users actually do in your product — every event, page view, or attribute change can trigger a workflow. The visual workflow builder is powerful for mapping complex user journeys across multiple channels. It's a big step up from SES if you need behavioral messaging, though the $100/mo starting price and complexity mean it's best for teams that have outgrown simple transactional needs.

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Best for

PLG companies with complex user journeys

Pricing

$100/month for 5,000 profiles (Essentials)

Pros

Most powerful behavioral automation
Multi-channel (email, push, SMS, in-app)
Transactional included
Excellent API
Built for product-led growth

Cons

Much more expensive than SES
Complex setup
Steep learning curve
Overkill for simple needs

Loops

Modern SaaS email with transactional included. Clean interface, good deliverability.

Built specifically for software companies. Loops combines marketing and transactional email in one clean platform designed around the SaaS user lifecycle. You can manage onboarding sequences, product updates, and password resets from the same dashboard. The interface is refreshingly simple compared to enterprise tools, and all features are available on every plan. It's more opinionated than SES — you get less flexibility but dramatically less setup work.

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Best for

SaaS teams wanting modern email

Pricing

$49/mo for 5k, ~$99/mo for 10k subscribers

Pros

Built for SaaS from day one
Transactional + marketing together
Clean, modern interface
Good deliverability
All features on all plans

Cons

More expensive than SES
Gets pricey past 10k
No AI content generation
Newer platform

#10

Mailjet

Mid-tier option with real-time collaboration. Marketing + transactional with a usable interface.

Good middle ground between SES and full platforms. Mailjet's standout feature is real-time collaboration on email templates — multiple team members can edit the same email simultaneously, like Google Docs for email. It handles both transactional and marketing email with a clean API and SMTP support. Pricing is straightforward and affordable, making it a sensible upgrade from SES when you need a UI and basic features without enterprise complexity.

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Best for

Teams wanting collaboration features

Pricing

$15/month for 15,000 emails

Pros

Real-time email collaboration
Transactional + marketing
SMTP and API
Good template editor
Affordable pricing

Cons

More expensive than SES
Owned by Sinch
Less powerful automation
Support varies by tier

#11

Sendy

Self-hosted newsletter app that uses Amazon SES for sending. One-time $69 payment, then just SES costs.

Best of both worlds if you can self-host. Sendy gives you a subscriber management dashboard, email builder, campaign analytics, and autoresponders — all powered by SES on the backend. You pay once for the software and then just SES sending costs, making it the cheapest option for ongoing use. The catch is you need to host it yourself on a PHP-capable server and handle updates manually. It's perfect for technical users who want SES pricing with a real UI.

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Best for

Technical users wanting SES prices + features

Pricing

$69 one-time + SES costs ($0.10/1k)

Pros

Uses SES for cheap sending
One-time payment (no subscription)
Actual email builder
Subscriber management
Campaign analytics

Cons

Self-hosted (requires server)
Setup takes time
No managed option
Limited automation

#12

Buttondown

Minimalist newsletter platform. Simple, focused, markdown-first. For writers who want basic features without SES complexity.

Buttondown strips away everything you don't need and gives you a clean writing experience with Markdown support, subscriber management, and paid newsletter capabilities. It handles deliverability, unsubscribes, and compliance so you don't have to think about the infrastructure side. It's the opposite end of the spectrum from SES — zero configuration, zero flexibility, but you can be sending newsletters in under five minutes.

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Best for

Writers wanting simple newsletters

Pricing

$9/month for 1,000 subscribers (~$90/mo at 10k)

Pros

Dead simple interface
Markdown support
No feature bloat
Import from other platforms
Good for technical writers

Cons

Very limited features
No automation
Newsletter-only
Not for marketing teams

Why Consider Alternatives to Amazon SES

Zero user experience

SES is raw infrastructure. No dashboard, no email builder, no subscriber management, no campaigns. Everything is DIY. Alternatives like Postmark or SendGrid include actual features.

Requires significant engineering

To make SES usable, you need to build bounce handling, analytics, templates, automation, and a user interface. This takes months. Platforms like Sequenzy or Resend provide it out of the box.

AWS complexity

SES requires AWS account setup, IAM roles, domain verification in AWS, and understanding of SNS for webhooks. Alternatives have simpler onboarding and don't require AWS knowledge.

The "cheap" gets expensive

SES is $0.10/1k emails. But factor in engineer time to build features, dedicated IP costs ($24.95/mo), Virtual Deliverability Manager ($0.07/1k), and the total cost rises significantly.

Feature

Amazon SES

Sequenzy

Resend

Postmark

SendGrid

Sendy

Price at 50k/mo

$49*

$20

$50

$19.95

$5 (SES)

Dashboard

None

Yes

Email builder

None

Yes

Templates

Yes

Automation

None

Yes

None

Yes

Basic

Deliverability

DIY

Managed

Good

Best

Variable

DIY

Setup time

Days

Minutes

Hours

When to Use Each Platform

Choose Sequenzy if...

You want a complete platform without building
SaaS-specific features matter (Stripe, churn)
You need marketing + transactional together
You don't want AWS complexity

Choose Stay with Amazon SES if...

Cost is everything and you can build
You're already deep in AWS
You have engineering resources for email infrastructure
You're sending millions monthly

Choose Resend if...

Developer experience is your priority
You only need transactional
You want features without AWS
Modern SDKs matter to you

Choose Postmark if...

Deliverability is critical
You want support and a real dashboard
Transactional is your focus
You'll pay more for reliability

Choose Sendy if...

You want SES pricing + features
You can self-host
Newsletters are your main use case
You're technical and don't mind setup

Why people leave Amazon SES

Amazon SES is the cheapest way to send email. At $0.10 per 1,000 emails, nothing comes close at scale. But "cheapest" often doesn't mean "best value." You're getting raw SMTP infrastructure with no dashboard, no templates, no subscriber management, and no automation — everything beyond sending bytes has to be built from scratch. For many teams, the engineering time spent building email features on top of SES costs far more than just paying for a platform that includes them. To understand what complete email platforms offer, read our guide to best email marketing tools for SaaS.

The DIY trap

SES is raw infrastructure. There's no dashboard, no email builder, no subscriber management, no campaigns, no automation. You get an API that sends HTML. Everything else—bounce handling, analytics, templates, unsubscribe flows—you build yourself.

That $5/month sending cost often turns into months of engineering work. Check our Amazon SES comparison for the full breakdown.

AWS complexity

Using SES means living in AWS. You need IAM roles, domain verification through Route53, SNS topics for webhooks, CloudWatch for monitoring. If you're not already an AWS shop, this learning curve is steep.

Alternatives like Resend or Postmark take minutes to set up. No AWS account required. No IAM policy debugging.

The hidden costs

SES is $0.10/1k emails. But add dedicated IPs ($24.95/mo), Virtual Deliverability Manager ($0.07/1k), attachment fees ($0.12/GB), and the math changes. Factor in engineer time to build features, and that "cheap" option gets expensive.

The alternatives, honestly

If you want features without DIY: SendGrid or Mailgun

SendGrid and Mailgun are SES with features attached. Dashboard, templates, basic marketing, better documentation. More expensive per email, but you're not building infrastructure. SendGrid is $19.95/mo for 50k emails. See our SendGrid comparison.

If you want modern DX: Resend

Resend is SES if AWS cared about developers. Beautiful API, React Email integration, modern SDKs. $20/mo for 50k emails—more expensive than SES but includes actual features. Transactional only, no marketing. Check our Resend comparison.

If you want complete marketing: Sequenzy

Sequenzy is the opposite of SES—complete platform with AI-powered sequences, visual email builders, Stripe integration, and marketing automation. $49/mo for 10k subs. Higher per-email cost, but you're not building anything.

Built for SaaS founders who want to send email, not build email infrastructure. See our Amazon SES comparison.

If you want SES pricing + features: Sendy

Sendy is the clever middle ground. Self-hosted newsletter platform ($69 one-time) that sends via Amazon SES. You get SES's $0.10/1k pricing plus an actual email builder, subscriber management, and campaigns. The catch: you host it yourself.

If deliverability is critical: Postmark

Postmark has the best deliverability because they're strict about customers. $15/mo for 10k emails—more than SES but includes a dashboard, analytics, and human support. For critical transactional emails (password resets, 2FA), the reliability is worth it. See our Postmark comparison.

The pricing comparison

At 50,000 emails/month:

Amazon SES: $5/month (DIY everything)
Resend: $20/month (transactional, best DX)
Postmark: $50/month (best deliverability)
SendGrid Essentials: $19.95/month (marketing + transactional)
Sequenzy: $49/mo at 10k subs (complete platform)
Sendy + SES: $5/month + $69 one-time (self-hosted)

Note: SES looks cheapest, but add dedicated IPs, engineer time, and feature development—the total cost often exceeds platforms with features included. See our pricing page.

When Amazon SES is still the right choice

SES wins if:

Cost per email is your only metric
You have engineers to build email infrastructure
You're already deep in the AWS ecosystem
You're sending millions monthly and every cent matters
You need global regions for data residency

Don't switch if SES is working and you have the engineering resources. But if you're spending engineer time building features that exist elsewhere, or if the DIY approach is slowing you down—the alternatives provide more value. Use our email warmup calculator to plan your transition.

Frequently Asked Questions

All Pricing Tiers

0-100 subscribers: Free (Free annually) - 3k emails/month

101-1,000 subscribers: $19/month ($205/year annually) - 15k emails/month

1,001-5,000 subscribers: $29/month ($313/year annually) - 60k emails/month

5,001-10,000 subscribers: $49/month ($529/year annually) - 120k emails/month

10,001-25,000 subscribers: $99/month ($1069/year annually) - 300k emails/month

25,001-50,000 subscribers: $199/month ($2149/year annually) - 600k emails/month

50,001-100,000 subscribers: $349/month ($3769/year annually) - 1.2M emails/month

100,000+ subscribers: Custom pricing (Custom annually) - Unlimited emails/month

Yearly billing: All plans offer a 10% discount when billed annually.

12 Amazon SES Alternatives Worth Considering

TL;DR

12 Best Amazon SES Alternatives

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Why Consider Alternatives to Amazon SES

Feature Comparison

When to Use Each Platform

Why people leave Amazon SES

The DIY trap

AWS complexity

The hidden costs

The alternatives, honestly

If you want features without DIY: SendGrid or Mailgun

If you want modern DX: Resend

If you want complete marketing: Sequenzy

If you want SES pricing + features: Sendy

If deliverability is critical: Postmark

The pricing comparison

When Amazon SES is still the right choice

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the best Amazon SES alternative for developers?

Is anything as cheap as Amazon SES?

Does Amazon SES have an email builder?

What's easier to set up than SES?

Does Amazon SES have marketing automation?

Can I use SES for marketing emails?

Is Postmark better than Amazon SES?

What's the best SES alternative for SaaS?

Does Amazon SES have a free tier?

Can I get SES pricing with more features?

How do I cancel my Amazon SES account?

What is Amazon SES's pricing structure?

How do I export my data from Amazon SES?

Does Amazon SES offer support?

What is Amazon SES's deliverability like?

Ready to try Sequenzy?

Sequenzy vs Amazon SES: Direct Comparison

More Alternatives

SendGrid Alternatives

Mailgun Alternatives

Sequenzy - Complete Pricing Guide

Pricing Model

All Pricing Tiers

Free Plan Features (2,500 emails/month)

Paid Plan Features (1,000 - 100,000 subscribers)

Enterprise Plan Features (100,000+ subscribers)

Important Pricing Notes

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