Amazon SES Pricing and Cost Per 1,000 Emails: AWS SES Pricing Plans for 2026

Amazon SES has four ways to pay: three named plans and a la carte. This is the complete ladder, read from the AWS Price List API published July 22, 2026 and confirmed against the live pricing page on August 19, 2026. Rates below are for US East (N. Virginia).

AWS states that the tiered rates are applied marginally, meaning each rate applies only to the emails inside that band and not to your entire volume. Most articles that quote SES pricing apply the headline rate to the whole send, which overstates the bill for anyone in the second or third band.

Nearly every guide to Amazon SES pricing says the service costs $0.10 per 1,000 emails. That number is real, but since July 21, 2026 it is no longer the default. AWS footnotes the change on its own pricing page:

"New SES accounts and account x region combinations with no metered SES activity since June 1, 2025 will start on the Essentials plan beginning July 21, 2026. You can upgrade or switch to a la carte pricing at any time."

If you opened an AWS account this month and started sending, you are on Essentials at $0.16 per 1,000, which is 60% more than the figure the roundups quote. Nothing is broken and nothing is hidden, but you have to actively switch to a la carte to get $0.10. That single sentence is the difference between a $100 bill and a $160 bill on a million emails.

The second stale claim is the free tier. SES used to include 62,000 free emails a month when sent from EC2. That is retired. What AWS now offers new customers is up to $200 in Free Tier credits, a free plan available for six months after account creation, and a requirement that all credits be used within 12 months of account creation. There is no perpetual free SES allowance any more.

This is the part of SES pricing that surprises people who have bought SendGrid or Mailgun. On those platforms, higher tiers buy you a lower price per email. On Amazon SES the ladder runs the other way: every step up increases both the fixed monthly fee and the per email rate.

So Pro and Enterprise are never volume discounts. They are feature purchases, and you should only buy one when a specific included feature costs more as an add on than the plan does. There is exactly one case where that math is dramatic, and it is worth knowing about.

Global Virtual Deliverability Manager, the tier that monitors sending domains and IPs across mailbox providers, costs $1,250 a month as an add on for an Essentials account. It is included at no extra charge on Pro and on Enterprise. The AWS Price List API prices the Pro and Enterprise versions of that subscription at $0.00. So the moment you genuinely need global deliverability monitoring, the Pro plan at $105 a month replaces a $1,250 a month add on. On a million emails that is $325 on Pro against $1,410 on Essentials with the add on, a saving of $1,085 a month.

Pro also includes 1 monitored domain, 1 dedicated IP and 5 seed list tests. Enterprise includes 5 domains, 12 IPs and 25 seed list tests. Beyond those allowances AWS charges $25 per domain, $12.50 per IP and $10 per seed list test.

A la carte is the pay for what you use option, with no plan fee and no minimum. These are the published US rates as of August 19, 2026.

Two of these bite people. The ingress endpoint keeps charging $50 a month while its status shows Closed, because only deleting it stops the meter. And Bring Your Own IP looks like the cheap route to owned reputation until you read the 256 address minimum.

Worked from the published rates, outbound only, no add ons. The a la carte column is what you pay if you deliberately choose it. The Essentials column is what a new account pays by default today.

Add $24.95 for each dedicated IP. AWS publishes its own worked example on the pricing page for a large mixed workload combining outbound, managed dedicated IPs, global endpoints, Mail Manager processing and an open ingress endpoint, and lands on a total monthly cost of $1,963.31. That figure is a useful reminder that at scale the add on meters, not the per email rate, are what move the bill.

No, not for outbound prospecting to people who have not asked to hear from you. This is the question that brings most sales teams to an SES pricing page, and the honest answer is not about price at all. AWS is explicit in its own documentation on how SES accounts should acquire recipients:

"Don't buy, rent, or share email addresses. Send email only to recipients who explicitly requested to receive email from you."

The same guidance appears three separate times in the SES sending review FAQs, under bounces, under complaints and under spamtraps. AWS defines the problem case directly: unsolicited emails are emails that the recipient did not explicitly ask to receive. When an account is reviewed manually, one of the questions AWS asks is whether you acquired addresses in any way other than a customer interacting with you and requesting email.

The enforcement thresholds are published, and they are tight for anyone mailing a prospect list:

AWS recommends staying below 2% bounces and below 0.1% complaints. A 0.1% complaint rate is one person hitting Report Spam per 1,000 emails. On a cold list that is an ordinary Tuesday. Worse, the rate is not calculated over a fixed window: AWS uses a representative volume that changes with your sending pattern, so you cannot reset it by pausing for a month. Only hard bounces to unverified domains count toward the bounce rate, which is the one piece of good news in the calculation.

This is why cold outreach is not an SES workload at any price. Sending prospecting mail through mailboxes and domains you own keeps the reputation, the consent record and the consequences with you, rather than on shared infrastructure that AWS will pause to protect its other customers. That is the model a dedicated cold email SMTP sender is built around, and it is why our own pricing starts at $29 a month rather than at a rate per thousand.

The comparison people actually want is not SES against SES. It is SES against the managed platforms, at the volume they send.

SES is between three and thirteen times cheaper per email than the managed alternatives at this volume, and that gap is real. What the gap buys the others is a console, deliverability tooling in the base price, support, and a shorter path from signup to first send. On SES you verify domains, request production access to leave the sandbox, wire up SNS for bounce and complaint handling, and own your reputation monitoring. For a team with an engineer, that trade is usually worth $80 a month. For a team without one, it usually is not. Our full breakdown of SendGrid pricing covers the managed side of that comparison band by band.

None of these numbers apply to outbound prospecting, because none of these platforms permit it on shared infrastructure. If you are pricing cold email specifically, the meter that matters is mailboxes and domains, not emails, and our cold email software pricing breakdown works through that math.

Search Amazon SES pricing and you will get $0, $0.10, $0.16 and $105 from four different pages, all confident. There are four concrete reasons, and none of them is that anyone is lying.

• The default changed on July 21, 2026. New accounts and dormant account and region pairs now start on Essentials at $0.16 rather than a la carte at $0.10. Anything written before late July describes the old default.
• The free tier was replaced. The old 62,000 free emails a month from EC2 is gone, replaced by up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits and a free plan for the first six months. Articles still quoting 62,000 are describing a retired program.
• Named plans are new. SES was a single pay as you go service for years. Essentials, Pro and Enterprise are a recent layer on top, so older guides have no reason to mention $105 or $500.
• Bands are marginal, and get applied wrong. AWS applies each rate only to the emails inside its band. Writers who multiply a whole volume by the band rate it lands in get a number that is too low at the bottom and too high at the top.

The way to settle it for your own account is to skip the articles entirely. AWS publishes the complete SES rate card as machine readable JSON at the Price List API endpoint for AmazonSES, with a publication date on it. Every figure on this page came from that file, cross-checked against the human pricing page the same day.