AWS SES cost calculator

Amazon SES bills $0.10 per thousand emails sent, plus $0.12 per GB of attachment data. That's the entire pricing model. This works out what you'd pay at your volume, and what the same sending costs on the platforms built on top of it.

Emails per month

Contacts stored

Raw AWS SES

Infrastructure only. You build everything else.

$5.00/mo

SendKernel

Sending + marketing, buy either; compliance enforced

$54.00/mo

Resend$60.00/mo
Mailchimp$100.00/mo
SendGrid(sending only)$20.00/mo
Postmark(sending only)$55.00/mo

What the SES price doesn't include

The gap between the SES column and everything else is not pure margin. Using SES directly means you build and operate:

Bounce and complaint processing via SNS, with idempotent handlers
A suppression list, and the discipline to always check it before sending
Unsubscribe endpoints, including RFC 8058 one-click POST handling
DKIM key management and rotation
Contact storage, deduplication, and consent records
Reputation monitoring and automatic pausing before AWS pauses you
A dashboard for anyone who isn't an engineer

At low volume that work costs far more than any platform fee. At very high volume the arithmetic flips. Somewhere around a million messages a month is where teams with spare engineering capacity should start doing the maths seriously.

Competitor figures are list prices from public pricing pages as of September 2026 and exclude annual discounts and negotiated rates. SendKernel figures use the published plan tiers.