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.
Use-case matchups
| Use case | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ready-to-use marketing campaigns | Mailchimp | Mailchimp includes audience management, templates, automation, forms, and analytics. |
| Raw high-volume email infrastructure | Amazon SES | SES is much cheaper for teams that can build and maintain the missing marketing layer. |
| Non-technical marketing team | Mailchimp | Mailchimp works without engineering support. |
| Engineering-owned transactional email | Amazon SES | SES gives developers low-cost sending infrastructure inside AWS. |
| SaaS marketing plus transactional email | Sequenzy | Sequenzy avoids running Mailchimp and SES as separate tools for SaaS lifecycle email. |
Pricing reality
Amazon SES is dramatically cheaper for raw sends, but it is not a marketing platform. The hidden cost is engineering time: bounce handling, complaint processing, templates, subscriber management, scheduling, and analytics. Mailchimp costs more because those workflows are built in and usable by marketers.
Review signals
The reviews on this page point to the same tradeoff. Mailchimp users value shipping campaigns without developer involvement. SES users value low transactional cost at scale but acknowledge that they had to build and maintain the surrounding infrastructure.
Migration checklist
| Step | Moving to Mailchimp | Moving to Amazon SES | Moving to Sequenzy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Confirm campaigns, audiences, forms, templates, automations, and reporting needs. | Define sending architecture, templates, bounce/complaint handling, and unsubscribe logic. | Confirm contacts, campaigns, transactional templates, Stripe events, and lifecycle journeys. |
| Data export | Export contacts, segments, templates, automations, and suppression data. | Export recipients, templates, suppression records, and event requirements. | Export contacts, lifecycle fields, billing IDs, and suppression records. |
| Integration rebuild | Rebuild campaigns, forms, automations, and any transactional add-on setup. | Build or connect campaign tooling, SNS webhooks, suppression logic, and analytics. | Rebuild campaign, transactional, and billing-triggered workflows together. |
| QA | Test forms, automations, templates, bounces, unsubscribes, and analytics. | Test domain auth, sandbox exit, bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, and monitoring. | Test campaign, transactional, and Stripe-triggered paths end to end. |
Decision checklist
- Choose Mailchimp if marketers need to operate email without engineering help.
- Choose Amazon SES if engineers need low-cost raw sending and can own the missing platform layer.
- Choose Sequenzy if a SaaS team wants marketing and transactional email in one product with Stripe-aware automation.