AWS SES Pricing
TL;DR
AWS SES pricing involves some not very obvious components. The overall price of SES is at least 15% more than the list price. Don't worry. This is still significantly lower than any other email service provider.
The Free Tier
AWS had a very generous free tier for SES users - 62000 emails per month. This was reduced to 3000 emails per month since August-2023. Many people think this is a bad move on part of AWS. According to us this is an outstanding move.
Let us explain.
The free limit of 62k emails made AWS SES a magnet for spammers and frivolous users. Most SES users rely on shared IP's to send emails. When spam originates from an IP address, it affects the reputation of everyone using that IP - including genuine email senders. This is the primary reason why many companies do not use AWS SES even though their entire tech stack is on AWS.
AWS SES is no longer desirable for spammers. So genuine users like you can rest easy. Also, AWS only reduced the free tier limits. They never increased the price of emails - which remains at $1 per 10000 emails. This along with the stricter enforcement of SPF, DKIM, DMARC rules makes SES unbeatable on both price and reliability terms.
The Components of AWS SES Pricing
AWS SES costs $0.10/1000 emails ($1 per 10000 emails).
Most pricing discussions about SES just end here. As usual the devil is in the details. There are a few more components that affect SES pricing. While these can increase the cost for high volume senders, the overall price of SES will still be significantly lower than any other email service provider.
Let's take a look at these components.
- DATA TRANSFER - $0.12 per GB. If you send 100000 emails and each mail is 100 KB, the data transferred will be 10 GB (100000 x 100 KB ). This will cost $1.2 (10 GB x $0.12)
- S3 Storage - $0.023 per GB. You will incur these charges if your email has images or attachments and you store them in S3. S3 storage is quite cheap so lets not bother calculating this and move on to the next charge.
- S3 Data Transfer - $0.09 per GB. Lets say you store only one image of 100 KB and attach that image to an email campaign you send out to 100000 subscribers. Your charges will be $0.9 (assuming everybody opens your email which is rarely the case.)
- PUT Requests - $0.005 per 1000. When you 'put' an image in S3 it counts as a request. Again, this is very cheap. No point counting it.
- GET Requests - $0.0004 per 1000. These are charges for retrieving images or files stored in S3. If you send an email campaign containing one image to 100000 subscribers and all of them open the email, you will incur $0.04 in charges.
- SNS Notifications - $0.5 per million. If you want to track email deliveries, opens, clicks, etc (which you WILL want) you must use SNS. Each email on average generates 3 events. That will be at least 300000 SNS notifications for a 100000 email campaign. The charges will be $0.15.
- SNS Data Transfer - $0.09 per GB. Assume each SNS notification is 5KB. So if you have a 300000 SNS notifications of 5KB each, your charges will be $0.14.
There are other charges, like for Dedicated IP, Mail Manager, Inbound Email, Virtual Deliverability Manager, etc. But these are add-ons. So lets ignore them.
There you have it. All the charges that can be attributed to sending emails via SES. These charges do not reflect in your SES bill but will be listed under their own head. For example you might incur S3 charges towards sending emails but these will be listed under charges for S3 without any break up attributed to SES.
As a thumb rule just add 15% to the SES list price. If SES list price is $1 per 10000 emails, you will incur $1.15.
OK. We did a lot of price nit-picking here. Should you be scared? NO. Even if you incur all these charges, SES is going to be still 10x cheaper than the other popular alternatives while offering the same reliability.
Spotted a mistake in our calculations? Just let us know.
AWS SES Pricing Calculator
This simple spreadsheet will give you the true cost of using AWS SES.