The short answer
Amazon SES is billed pay-as-you-go per 1k emails. It has a free tier: 3,000 messages/mo (first 12 mo). The paid plans we list start at $24.95 / month per IP (Dedicated IP (standard)).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Outbound email | $0.10 / 1,000 emails | Pay-as-you-go base rate, billed per recipient; plus $0.12 per GB of attachment data. |
| Inbound email | $0.10 / 1,000 emails | Plus $0.09 per 1,000 incoming email chunks (256 KB each). |
| Dedicated IP (standard) | $24.95 / month per IP | Manually managed dedicated IP addresses for reputation isolation. |
| Dedicated IP (managed) | $15 / month per account | Auto-managed pool with tiered sending: $0.08/1k (0-10M), $0.04/1k (10-50M), $0.02/1k (50-100M). |
| Virtual Deliverability Manager | from $0.07 / 1,000 emails | Deliverability advisor; tiered to $0.05/1k (10-100M) and $0.02/1k above 100M. Global add-on $1,250/mo per region. |
| Mail Manager | $0.15 / 1,000 emails processed | Plus $50/mo per ingress endpoint, $2/GB archive ingestion, $0.19/GB-month archive storage. |
How Amazon SES bills you
The pricing model is pay-as-you-go per 1k emails. The cheapest at scale at $0.10/1k emails, with full AWS SDK coverage but raw, low-level DX. Best suited to: lowest-cost email at massive scale.
The pricing page we read
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Amazon SES with alternatives
Other transactional email apis: SendGrid, Resend, Postmark, Mailgun, Loops.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Amazon SES score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Amazon SES pricing.