The cheapest Amazon SES alternatives, by monthly cost

The cheapest alternative to Amazon SES is, honestly, Amazon SES. At $0.10 per 1,000 emails as of October 2026, no hosted email API we've found charges less. So the real question is which alternative costs the least once you count what SES leaves you to build. Among managed senders, that's us at $0.20 per 1,000. Below are the numbers at four volumes, for shared and dedicated IPs, so you can check that yourself.

All competitor prices are as of October 2026, from the vendors' pricing pages where they publish them. Prices change, so confirm on each vendor's page before you decide.

How we ranked them

We compared the cheapest published plan that covers each monthly volume, sending only, before attachment data and taxes. We split it two ways because the answer changes:

• Shared IP: fine for most senders under about 200,000 emails a month.
• Dedicated IP: what most senders want above that, so their reputation is their own. Our guide to shared vs dedicated IPs explains when it matters.

We left out free tiers. Resend's free plan (3,000 a month, 100 a day) and the 100-a-day free plans at SendGrid and Mailgun are useful for testing, not for production volume.

Cheapest at 100,000 emails a month (shared IP)

At this volume SES wins clearly, and we're the cheapest of the rest. The $10 difference between SES and us is the price of not wiring up events, logs and alerts yourself. Whether that's worth $10 a month is your call. Our cost to send 100k emails page breaks this down further.

Cheapest with a dedicated IP, 250k to 1M emails a month

How to read it:

• SES is the cheapest at every volume. At 250,000 we're level ($49.95 vs $50); above that SES pulls ahead.
• We're the cheapest managed option, by a wide margin: at 1M emails, $200 against about $680 to $900 for Resend, SendGrid and Postmark.
• Postmark only sells dedicated IPs from 300,000 emails a month on Pro or higher.
• Mailgun doesn't publish prices above 100,000; its Scale plan's published overage would put 250,000 at up to $255, but ask them for a quote.
• SES's managed dedicated IPs cost more than a standard IP: about $60 at 250,000 and $195 at 1M, per our SES pricing explainer.

For more volumes, try the email cost calculator.

The cheapest options, one by one

1. Amazon SES: cheapest raw sending

$0.10 per 1,000, $24.95 a month per standard dedicated IP. SES suppresses hard bounces and complaints by default (accounts since November 2019) and warms standard dedicated IPs automatically over 45 days. What you build: bounce and complaint events into your app, searchable logs, alerts, logic to pause a bad send, and blocklist and DNS checks. AWS also controls your account through the sandbox, per-Region quotas and reviews at a 5% bounce or 0.1% complaint rate. See our SES sandbox guide if you're just starting.

2. OwnMailServer: cheapest managed sending

That's us, in early access. $0.20 per 1,000 emails, a $10 monthly minimum that includes the first 50,000, and a $10 one-time setup fee. No plans, no contract. From 200,000 emails a month you get your own dedicated IP; below that you send from our shared pool.

What the price includes: a Resend-style REST API and SMTP on port 587, automatic suppression of hard bounces and complaints, an automatic pause if hard bounces pass 5% or complaints pass 0.3% over 24 hours, hourly blocklist checks, daily DNS checks and a daily summary. Warm-up raises your limit about 25% after each clean day and usually reaches full volume in three to five weeks. We review every signup, usually within one business day. Full details on pay-as-you-go pricing.

We run our own sending servers, not SES, so you're off AWS entirely.

3. Tools built on SES: cheap, but still AWS

useSend (AGPL-3.0, hosted from $10 a month) and FreeResend (MIT) add a friendlier API or dashboard on top of SES. They can be cheap because SES does the sending. The trade-off: you still need an AWS account, so the sandbox, quotas and account reviews still apply. Our open-source alternatives roundup compares them.

4. Hosted APIs: more expensive, more built in

Resend, SendGrid, Postmark and Mailgun cost several times more per email but include dashboards, suppression and support. Resend has a strong developer experience; Postmark is known for transactional-only sending. If price is your main reason for leaving SES, these won't help. If you want a polished product and the volume is small, they're reasonable. See Amazon SES vs SendGrid and Resend vs Amazon SES.

5. Your own server: cheapest in dollars, dearest in time

A Postfix server on a VPS typically costs $5 to $20 a month, with no per-email fee at all. Postal (MIT) is an open-source mail platform with its own SMTP server. The real cost is setup, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reverse DNS, a slow warm-up, and watching blocklists from then on. AWS blocks outbound port 25 by default, so the server usually lives elsewhere. Our Postfix on Ubuntu guide shows what's involved, and our managed email server service does it for you on your own VPS.

When SES is still the right answer

• You send under 200,000 a month and are happy to build the tooling. SES on shared IPs is the cheapest thing available.
• You send well over 250,000 a month and the per-email difference matters more than engineering time.
• You already have bounce handling, logs and alerts built and someone maintaining them.
• You need AWS features like multi-Region endpoints or IAM integration.

If you're only leaving because mail is landing in spam, switching may not fix it. Check SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reverse DNS first with our free email checker.

The bottom line

If you want the lowest possible price and you'll build the rest, use SES. If you want the lowest price for sending that's already managed, we're the cheapest we've found: about what SES costs with a dedicated IP at 250,000 emails a month, and a fraction of the big hosted APIs at every volume. Compare the two in depth on our Amazon SES alternative page, or sign up and we'll review your account, usually within one business day.