Amazon SES pricing explained

As of October 2026, Amazon SES pricing starts at $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails plus $0.12 per GB of attachment data, with no minimum fee. A standard dedicated IP is $24.95 a month; managed dedicated IPs are $15 a month plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails. AWS also sells three bundled plans (Essentials, Pro and Enterprise) from $0.16 per 1,000. Every figure here comes from AWS's own Amazon SES pricing page; confirm there before you budget.

Below we list the line items that matter for most senders, work through monthly bills at five volumes, and cover the costs that don't show up on the pricing page.

Amazon SES à la carte prices

À la carte means you pay only for what you use. These are the items most senders touch, as of October 2026:

The managed dedicated IP fee is charged in addition to the $0.10 outbound rate; AWS's own worked example bills both. Bring-your-own-IP is also available, at $24.95 per IP with a 256-address minimum, which is only relevant to very large senders.

Amazon SES plans: Essentials, Pro and Enterprise

AWS now also sells plans that replace the à la carte rate with a bundled one. Per 1,000 emails, for the first 10 million a month:

Rates drop above 10 million and again above 100 million a month. The quick test: Essentials beats à la carte only if you'd otherwise pay for Virtual Deliverability Manager ($0.10 + $0.07 = $0.17 per 1,000 vs $0.16). Pro and Enterprise make sense when you'd use most of what they bundle. If you only need to send, à la carte is the cheapest way to buy SES.

Is there an Amazon SES free tier?

Not a fixed one. As of October 2026, AWS's SES pricing page lists no free email allowance. New AWS customers instead get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for eligible services, SES included. The free plan lasts six months after you create the account, and credits must be used within 12 months.

Free doesn't mean ready, though. Every new SES account starts in the sandbox in each Region: verified recipients only, 200 messages a day, one per second. You request production access, and AWS gives an initial response within 96 hours.

Worked examples: what SES costs per month

À la carte, sending charges only. Data charges are covered in the next section.

The arithmetic, using 250,000 emails as the example:

shared IPs:        250 × $0.10                     = $25.00
standard IP:       $25.00 + $24.95                 = $49.95
managed IPs:       $25.00 + $15 + (250 × $0.08)    = $60.00

A few notes:

• A dedicated IP at 50k is rarely worth it. AWS itself recommends shared IPs unless you send large volumes on a regular, predictable basis. Our Amazon SES dedicated IP guide covers when that line is crossed.
• Standard IPs get cheaper per email as you grow; managed IPs don't, because of the $0.08 per 1,000 fee. Managed buys automation, not savings.
• One standard IP may not be enough at the top of this table. AWS suggests around 1,000 emails a day to each mailbox provider per IP to keep reputation, and very large senders spread volume across several.

Attachments and data charges

SES charges $0.12 per GB of data sent. The pricing page describes it as attachment data, but AWS's own examples compute it from total message size: 250,000 emails at 32KB each is 8 GB, or $0.96.

For plain transactional email, this is small change: 1,000,000 messages at 32KB is 32 GB, about $3.84. Attachments change that. A million emails each carrying a 1 MB PDF is roughly 1,000 GB, around $120, and more in practice because MIME encoding makes an attachment about 37% bigger in transit, according to AWS's quota documentation. If you send invoices or reports, link to the file instead of attaching it. AWS recommends the same for deliverability.

Size limits, for reference: 40 MB per message through the v2 API or SMTP, 10 MB on the older v1 API, and at most 50 recipients per message.

Costs that aren't on the SES pricing page

The per-email rate is real, but it isn't the whole bill.

Other AWS services

SES hands you events; storing and acting on them happens elsewhere. Bounce and complaint notifications go through SNS or event publishing to services like Firehose, EventBridge or CloudWatch. Each is billed under its own pricing, which we haven't priced here because it depends entirely on how you build. For most senders it's modest, but it's not zero.

Per-Region setup

The sandbox, sending quotas and plan fees all apply per AWS Region. Sending from two Regions means two production-access requests, two sets of quotas, and on Pro or Enterprise, two fixed fees.

Engineering time

This is the big one, and we won't invent a number for it. On SES you typically build, or at least wire up:

• Bounce and complaint events into your own app, so user records stay in sync with SES's suppression list
• Searchable logs that answer "did this email go out?"
• Alerts before your bounce rate reaches 5% or complaints 0.1%, the levels where AWS places an account under review
• Your own logic to stop a bad send, since SES doesn't stop it for you before AWS acts
• Blocklist and DNS monitoring; SES doesn't delist a dedicated IP for you

Price that work at your team's rate and add it to the comparison. Our Amazon SES alternative page has a full table of what SES provides and what's left to you.

How SES compares with other senders

SES is the cheapest raw sending we know of. For context, with prices as of October 2026:

Our pricing is $0.20 per 1,000 emails, a $10 monthly minimum that includes 50,000 emails, and a $10 one-time setup fee, with a dedicated IP from 200,000 a month. At 250,000 emails that's about what SES costs with a dedicated IP; above that, SES is cheaper. What we include is the part SES leaves to you: warm-up that adapts to how your mail is received, automatic suppression, auto-pauses on bad bounce or complaint rates, blocklist and DNS monitoring. See how SES stacks up against a full-featured API in Amazon SES vs SendGrid, and the wider picture in transactional email cost at scale.

How to estimate your own SES bill

1. Count every stream. Signups, resets, receipts, alerts and newsletters. Use a typical month, and remember quotas count recipients, not messages.
2. Decide on IPs. Shared, one or more standard IPs, or managed. Under steady high volume, standard IPs are cheapest.
3. Add data. Multiply average message size by volume and charge $0.12 per GB.
4. Add the extras you'll use: deliverability dashboards, validation, extra Regions, and the AWS services that store your events.
5. Price the build. Be honest about who maintains it.

The email cost calculator does the sending arithmetic for SES and the other providers in one place. If you'd rather pay for the managed parts than build them, see our pay-as-you-go pricing.