Amazon SES email marketing: what you need on top
Amazon SES is the cheapest way to send email at volume, and AWS allows marketing email on it. What SES does not give you is a place to write a campaign, a form to collect subscribers, or a button that sends to your list on Tuesday at 9am. Email marketing on SES means pairing it with software that does those jobs. This page covers what SES handles, what it leaves to you, and the five ways to fill the gap.
Quick answer
SES sends the email. You need software for the list, the campaigns and the sign-up forms. Listmonk is free and processes SES bounces and complaints. Sendy is $69 once and was built for SES. Mautic is free with deep automation and a heavy stack. EmailOctopus Connect is a hosted tool that sends through your SES account. Broadcast is $250 once, self-hosted, and sets up the SES webhooks for you. Writing your own is possible and is more work than it looks.
Conflict of interest
We make Broadcast, one of the options below. AWS facts come from the SES developer guide and pricing page, and competitor facts from each vendor’s own site or repository, all checked on 25 October 2026.
What Amazon SES gives you
More than most people expect. SES is not only an SMTP relay.
Sending. An SMTP interface and an API, at $0.10 per 1,000 emails on its à la carte rate. A weekly email to 10,000 subscribers is 40,000 emails and $4 a month. The full price list, including the newer Essentials, Pro and Enterprise plans, is on our Amazon SES pricing page.
A suppression list. Accounts created after 25 November 2019 use the account-level suppression list by default for both bounces and complaints. Only hard bounces are added. Addresses stay on it until you remove them, and SES accepts but does not deliver mail to them.
Event notifications. SES publishes sends, deliveries, bounces, complaints, opens and clicks through configuration sets to Amazon SNS or other destinations. Your software subscribes to those events.
Basic list management. This one surprises people. SES has contact lists with topics, and it can insert an unsubscribe link into your email with the {{amazonSESUnsubscribeUrl}} placeholder. The limits are tight: one contact list per AWS account, 20 topics per list, and everything runs through the API. It is a building block, not a campaign tool.
What SES leaves to you
Writing and sending a campaign. There is no editor, no template library, no preview and no scheduler. To send to a list you call the API once per recipient, inside your sending quota and rate.
Collecting subscribers. No sign-up forms, no double opt-in confirmation, no landing pages.
Segments and automation. No segments beyond the 20 topics, no welcome series, no drip sequences.
Acting on bounces and complaints in your list. SES reports them and suppresses hard bounces, but your list does not know unless your software listens to the events. One gap matters more than the rest: SES’s documentation says Gmail does not provide complaint data to SES. A Gmail user who clicks Spam is not added to your suppression list. You see the damage only in Gmail’s Postmaster Tools.
Staying under the review thresholds. AWS places an account under review at a 5% bounce rate or a 0.1% complaint rate, and can pause sending at 10% or 0.5%, according to the SES sending review FAQ. Your software has to stop mailing bad addresses fast enough to stay below those lines.
Reports a marketer can read. SES’s reputation metrics are for your account as a whole. Opens and clicks per campaign are your software’s job.
Five ways to do email marketing on SES
| Option | Price | Runs where | Sends through | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Listmonk | Free, AGPL | Your server | SES or any SMTP | Developers who want free and fast |
| Sendy | $69 once per domain | Your server, PHP | SES, plus SendGrid, Mailjet, Elastic Email | The cheapest paid tool built for SES |
| Mautic | Free, GPL v3 | Your server, PHP | SES or any SMTP | Teams with an ops person who need automation |
| EmailOctopus Connect | Free to 2,500 subscribers, then from $9 a month | Hosted | Your SES account | People who want SES prices with no server |
| Broadcast | $250 once per server | Your server, Docker | SES, Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid, Resend, SMTP | Small teams who want a product with support |
Listmonk
Listmonk is a single Go binary with a Postgres database, free under the AGPL. Its bounce documentation lists an Amazon SES webhook, and the SES setup in that guide blocklists an address after one complaint. It also reads bounces from a POP3 mailbox. Listmonk has no drip sequences. The latest stable release is v6.2.0, from 26 June 2026.
Choose Listmonk if you are comfortable in a terminal and send campaigns, not sequences.
Sendy
Sendy is a PHP application for $69 once, licensed per domain. It started as an SES front end, and its site now says it also works natively with SendGrid, Mailjet and Elastic Email. It handles bounces, complaints and unsubscribes in real time and has autoresponders. The current version on its site is v7.1.7.
Choose Sendy if you want the cheapest paid tool, a LAMP server is familiar ground, and a timed autoresponder covers your automation. See Broadcast vs Sendy for where the two differ.
Mautic
Mautic is free under the GPL v3 and has the deepest automation of any open-source tool. It also asks the most of you to run and tune. Version 7.2.1 shipped on 23 September 2026.
Choose Mautic if you need marketing automation and have someone who will own the PHP stack.
EmailOctopus Connect
EmailOctopus is a hosted newsletter tool, and Connect is its plan that routes your email through your own Amazon SES account. It is free up to 2,500 subscribers with no monthly email limit, and Pro on Connect starts at $9 a month on monthly billing. You pay AWS for the SES sending on top. It is the only option here with no server. Details on EmailOctopus pricing and alternatives.
Broadcast
Broadcast is self-hosted software for $250 once, and SES is one of the providers it supports. Its guided setup creates the SES configuration set, the SNS topic and subscription, and the event destinations for you. Bounce and complaint webhooks deactivate the subscriber and add the address to the channel’s suppression list. It can also sync with your SES account-level suppression list. Sequences with branching and segments are built in. The SES integration docs show every step.
Choose Broadcast if you want SES prices and a finished product, and you accept running one server. For a side-by-side with raw SES, see the Amazon SES front end comparison.
Build your own
You can. You will write a sign-up form with double opt-in, an unsubscribe endpoint, the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers, an SNS webhook for bounces and complaints, a job queue that respects your sending rate, and a campaign editor someone else can use. Budget weeks, not an afternoon, and keep budgeting for maintenance.
What it costs
SES is $0.10 per 1,000 emails. The rest depends on where the software runs.
A weekly newsletter to 25,000 subscribers is 100,000 emails a month. On SES that is $10. Add a $12 DigitalOcean server with 2 GB of RAM and the self-hosted options cost $22 a month, plus Sendy’s $69 or Broadcast’s $250 once. EmailOctopus Connect’s 25,000-subscriber tier is $56 a month plus the same $10 of SES, and needs no server.
For comparison, a hosted platform that sends for you bills that list by subscriber every month: EmailOctopus’s standard Pro plan is $94.50 at 25,000 subscribers. Prices checked on aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing, emailoctopus.com/pricing and digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets on 25 October 2026. For more volumes, see what 100,000 emails a month costs on your own server.
Setting up email marketing on SES
This is the order that works. The details differ by tool.
- Verify your sending domain in SES. Add the DKIM records SES gives you to your DNS. Pick one AWS region and stay in it, because sandbox status and the suppression list are per region.
- Add SPF and DMARC. Set a custom MAIL FROM domain so SPF aligns, and publish a DMARC record. Gmail requires SPF, DKIM and DMARC from anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day. Our DNS authentication guide covers the records.
- Request production access. New accounts are in the sandbox: verified recipients only, 200 messages per 24 hours, one per second. AWS says it responds within 96 hours. Our guide to getting out of the SES sandbox covers what to write.
- Install your email marketing software and give it SES credentials: SMTP credentials, or an IAM user with SES and SNS permissions if it uses the API.
- Connect bounce and complaint events. Create a configuration set with an SNS destination and point it at your software’s webhook. Broadcast and some other tools do this step for you.
- Import your list and warm up. Start with your most engaged subscribers and raise volume over a few weeks. The domain warm-up guide has a schedule.
Frequently asked questions
Can you use Amazon SES for email marketing?
Yes. AWS asks you to choose Marketing or Transactional when you request production access, and marketing email is allowed if recipients asked for it. You need separate software for lists, campaigns and sign-up forms, because SES is a sending service.
Does Amazon have an email marketing tool?
Not a full one. SES sends email and has basic contact lists with topics and an unsubscribe placeholder, managed through its API. There is no campaign editor, scheduler or sign-up form. Most people pair SES with tools like Listmonk, Sendy, Mautic, EmailOctopus Connect or Broadcast.
How much does Amazon SES email marketing cost?
SES costs $0.10 per 1,000 emails, so a weekly email to 25,000 subscribers is about $10 a month. Self-hosted software adds a server at about $12 a month and a one-time license from $0 to $250. Hosted tools on your SES, like EmailOctopus Connect, add a monthly fee by subscriber count.
Does SES handle unsubscribes?
Partly. With its list management feature SES inserts an unsubscribe link and stops mail to contacts who opt out. Most email marketing software handles unsubscribes itself and adds the one-click unsubscribe headers Gmail requires.
What is the difference between this page and the Amazon SES alternative page?
This page covers every way to do email marketing on SES. The Amazon SES alternative page compares Broadcast on top of SES with raw SES in detail, and Amazon SES pricing covers only the price list.
Related
- Bulk email software, priced at 50k and 500k emails
- Amazon SES pricing
- How to get Amazon SES out of the sandbox
- Postmark vs Mailgun vs Amazon SES
- Sendy alternatives
- Email providers Broadcast works with
SES prices, with the marketing layer done
Broadcast sets up the SES webhooks, handles bounces and complaints, and gives you campaigns, sequences and sign-up forms on your own server. A $250 one-time license, and email support when you need it.
