Amazon SES Pricing

What Changed on July 21, 2026

SES built its reputation on $0.10 per 1,000 emails. A developer who signs up today does not get that rate by default. On July 21, 2026, AWS added three bundled plans (Essentials, Pro and Enterprise) and made Essentials the starting plan for new accounts.

• New accounts start on Essentials at $0.16 per 1,000 emails. So does any account and region combination with no metered SES activity since June 1, 2025, which catches dormant accounts and anyone opening SES in a new region.
• Accounts that sent or processed mail on or after June 1, 2025 stay on à la carte pricing at $0.10 per 1,000 until they choose otherwise.
• The SES free tier is closed to new customers. It used to cover 3,000 messages a month for 12 months. New AWS customers get up to $200 in general AWS Free Tier credits instead, shared across every eligible AWS service.

À la carte has not been withdrawn. You can switch to it at any time from the Pricing plan section of the SES console.

Which Plan Is Cheaper for You

The plan cards above show each plan’s rate for the first 10 million emails a month. Rates are tiered, so each applies only to the volume inside its band, and they drop above 10 million and again above 100 million.

Plain sending. If you don’t use dedicated IPs, validation or deliverability tooling, à la carte wins at every volume. At 500,000 emails a month it costs $50 against $80 on Essentials; at 5 million, $500 against $800.

Essentials is à la carte with Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) for SES traffic folded in. VDM bought separately costs $0.07 per 1,000 emails at this volume, so if you already pay for it, Essentials’ $0.06 premium is a small saving. If you don’t use VDM, Essentials is a 60% price rise with a dashboard attached.

Pro is worth it for one feature: VDM global deliverability, which shows inbox placement across mailbox providers and costs $1,250 a month on its own. Pro includes it, along with managed dedicated IPs and 2,500 API email validations per account per region each month. A sender doing 2 million emails a month with managed dedicated IPs and VDM pays about $515 à la carte ($200 sending, $140 VDM, $175 managed IPs) against $545 on Pro, and Pro adds the global deliverability data on top.

Enterprise adds global endpoints for multi-region failover and 1,000 tenants per account per region for reputation isolation. Those two features, not the per-email rate, are the reason to buy it.

Costs Outside the Rate Card

SES has no visual editor, contact management or campaign tools, and AWS support is billed separately. Templates, suppression handling and analytics are yours to build, so price those engineering hours before treating SES as the cheapest option. For a managed alternative, see Amazon SES vs SendGrid.