Overview

Mailchimp and Amazon SES represent opposite ends of the email spectrum. Mailchimp is a polished email marketing platform with visual tools, automation, and templates ready to use in minutes. Amazon SES is raw cloud infrastructure that sends email at $0.10 per 1,000 emails but has zero marketing features.

The choice depends entirely on your team composition and what you are building.

The 100x Price Difference

At 10,000 emails per month, Mailchimp costs roughly $100. Amazon SES costs roughly $1. At 100,000 emails, Mailchimp costs $350+ while SES costs about $10. The cost gap is enormous and only grows with volume.

However, this comparison omits the development cost. SES requires building campaign tools, templates, automation, bounce handling, and subscriber management. For a company without developers, SES is not even an option. For companies with engineering teams, the investment can pay for itself quickly at scale.

Marketing Capabilities

Mailchimp has comprehensive marketing tools - visual campaign builders, automation workflows, A/B testing, landing pages, audience segmentation, and analytics dashboards. A marketing manager can run the entire email operation without technical help.

SES has none of this. It is an API that sends email. Everything else - templates, scheduling, subscriber lists, analytics - must be built or sourced separately. Tools like Sendy exist to add a layer on top of SES, but they add complexity.

Infrastructure Power

Where SES excels is raw sending power. It handles billions of emails for companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Reddit. There are effectively no volume limits, dedicated IPs are $15/month, and the AWS ecosystem provides monitoring and scaling automatically.

Mailchimp is designed for small to mid-size businesses. At high volumes, both cost and rate limits become factors that SES handles effortlessly.

For SaaS Companies

SaaS companies often need both marketing email and transactional email. Running Mailchimp for marketing and SES for transactional is a common pattern. Sequenzy offers a unified alternative with both capabilities plus Stripe integration for subscription-aware automation at $49/month.