Amazon SES vs Mailgun Pricing: Cost at Every Volume

Amazon SES is cheaper than Mailgun at every published volume, and the two curves never cross. At 10,000 emails a month SES a la carte costs $1.00 against Mailgun Basic's $15. At 1,000,000 it is $100 against Mailgun Scale's $700. The multiple narrows from 150 times at the bottom to 5 times at the top, but Mailgun's cheapest unit rate anywhere on its ladder is still five times SES's most expensive one. Price is not the reason to choose Mailgun. What you get for the difference is.

That makes this a different comparison from most. When we put SendGrid and Mailgun side by side, the two ladders crossed four times and the right answer genuinely depended on your volume. Here there is no crossover to find. So the useful question is not which is cheaper, it is what Mailgun's $700 buys that SES's $100 does not, and whether that is worth it for the way you send.

Both ladders below were read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 2 September 2026, with the currency forced to USD. Nothing here came from a roundup.

Amazon SES pricing: four ways to buy the same email

SES sells a la carte and on three plans. AWS publishes a per-1,000 rate for each plan at each of three volume tiers, plus a fixed monthly fee on the top two plans.

Two things in that table catch people out. The first is that climbing the SES plan ladder raises your unit cost rather than lowering it: Pro charges 37.5% more per thousand than Essentials and adds $105 a month. You buy Pro for managed dedicated IPs and the global deliverability feature, never for a better rate. The second is the word Region. Those fixed fees are per account per Region, so a two-Region deployment pays them twice.

There is also a default that changed recently. Since 21 July 2026, new SES accounts and account and Region combinations with no metered activity since 1 June 2025 start on Essentials at $0.16, not on a la carte at $0.10. You can switch, but you have to know to.

Mailgun pricing: four plans across an eight-step volume selector

Mailgun publishes a free tier and three paid plans, and the plan price moves as you step the volume selector. The rung that trips up most comparisons is Foundation, which has two prices rather than one.

Overage above the included allowance is $1.80 per thousand on Basic, $1.30 on Foundation at 50,000 and $1.10 on Foundation at 100,000 and on Scale's first rung. Additional dedicated IPs are $59 a month each, with one included from the Foundation 100K rung upward.

Side by side at the volumes people actually send

SES is shown a la carte, which is its cheapest configuration. Mailgun is shown at the smallest plan that covers the row, which is how you would really buy it.

The gap is 150 times at 1,000 emails, 15 times at 10,000, 7.5 times at 100,000 and 5 times at 2,500,000. It narrows because Mailgun's unit rate improves with volume while SES's a la carte rate stays flat at $0.10 until 10M. It never closes.

Mailgun's cost per thousand goes up three times as you send more

Divide each Mailgun plan price by its included volume and the curve is not a smooth descent. It is $1.50 at Basic, then $0.70 at Foundation 50K, then back up to $0.75 at Foundation 100K, up again to $0.86 at Scale 250K, down to $0.80, down to $0.70, and finally $0.50 at 2.5M.

Scale 250K is the single worst value on the Mailgun ladder at $0.86 per thousand, worse than the 50,000 plan four steps below it. If you send around a quarter of a million a month, staying on Foundation 100K and paying $1.10 per thousand in overage on the excess is worth pricing against the Scale plan before you upgrade. Cost creep like this hides well inside a monthly invoice, which is exactly why teams that watch their cloud and SaaS spend line by line catch it and everyone else finds out at renewal.

What the extra money actually buys

If the price gap were about delivery quality this would be an easy article. It is not. Both services put mail on shared or dedicated IPs and both authenticate with SPF and DKIM the same way. Here is the honest list of what Mailgun gives you that SES does not.

No sandbox. This is the big one. Every new SES account starts in a sandbox, tracked per Region, where you can send only to verified addresses, a maximum of 200 messages per 24 hours at 1 message per second. Getting out is a production access request that AWS reviews on its own schedule. Mailgun lets you send real mail the day you sign up.

Logs you can search without building anything. Mailgun retains message logs for 1 day on Basic, 5 days on Foundation and 30 days on Scale, in a searchable interface. SES gives you event publishing to CloudWatch, Kinesis Firehose or SNS through configuration sets, which is more powerful and considerably more work. If nobody on your team wants to own that pipeline, the Mailgun premium is buying you an afternoon a month forever.

Inbound routing without a separate product. Mailgun includes inbound routes. On SES, inbound handling now lives in Mail Manager, where an open ingress endpoint is $50 a month per endpoint, and AWS notes that the charge applies even when the endpoint status is Closed. You have to delete it to stop paying.

Bundled validations. Mailgun's Scale plan includes 5,000 email validations. At its own first-tier rate of $1.20 per 100 that is $60 of validation sitting inside a $90 plan. SES charges $0.01 per validation with none bundled on Essentials.

Unlimited users. Every Mailgun plan except Free and Basic has unlimited seats. SES access is managed through IAM, which is far more capable but is a policy-writing exercise rather than an invite button.

Where Mailgun does not help: it is still a relay. Its own documentation says there is no send button in Mailgun. It is a wire, not an application, and so is SES.

Is Amazon SES cheaper than Mailgun?

Yes, at every volume both vendors publish. SES a la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 emails with no fixed fee. Mailgun's best unit rate anywhere on its ladder is $0.50 per 1,000, at 2,500,000 emails a month, which is still five times SES's rate. The two curves never cross, so there is no volume at which Mailgun wins on price alone.

Which is better, Amazon SES or Mailgun?

Mailgun is better if you want to be sending today, want searchable logs without building a pipeline, or have no AWS expertise on the team. Amazon SES is better if you send high volume, already run on AWS, and have someone who will own event publishing and bounce handling. At 10,000 emails a month the difference is $14, which is not worth a week of engineering; at 5,000,000 it is thousands a month, which is.

How much does it cost to send 100,000 emails a month?

On Amazon SES a la carte, $10.00, plus roughly $0.38 in attachment data charges for 32KB messages. On the SES Essentials plan, $16.00. On Mailgun's Foundation plan at the 100,000 rung, $75. On Mailgun Scale at the same volume, $90, which buys 30-day log retention, a dedicated IP and 5,000 validations. Those are the four honest answers, and the $65 spread between them is entirely tooling, not delivery.

Can you use Mailgun or Amazon SES for cold email?

Neither is built for it, and both will measure you on complaint rate. AWS publishes its thresholds directly: maintain a complaint rate below 0.1%, and at 0.1% or greater it places the account under review, with sending possibly paused at 0.5%. Bounces trigger a review at 5% and a possible pause at 10%. Ten spam-button clicks on a 10,000-email campaign is 0.1%.

Beyond policy, neither product gives cold outreach what it needs. There is no sequence engine, no reply detection, no rotation across several mailboxes and no warm-up in either one. Teams build all of that on top and end up maintaining a thinner version of software that costs less than their AWS bill. If prospecting is the job, the right shape is a sending application running on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes you own, so your domain reputation is yours rather than entangled with a shared relay pool.

Which one should you pick

Send transactional email under 100,000 a month with a small team and no appetite for AWS plumbing: Mailgun, and treat the $15 to $75 as a tooling subscription rather than a delivery cost. Send more than a million a month with engineering capacity: SES, and put the saved $600 a month into bounce handling and suppression. Send cold outreach: neither, for the reasons above.

If you are weighing this because SES itself is not working out, we have worked through the wider set in our guide to Amazon SES alternatives, which prices eight providers against SES's own current ladder. The full SES breakdown including every add-on is in Amazon SES pricing, and Mailgun's plans, overage and validation ladder are in Mailgun pricing. For the consent question specifically, the best SMTP providers for cold email compares what each one's terms actually permit.

Prices verified 2 September 2026 from aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing, the AWS SES developer guide and mailgun.com/pricing. Vendors change prices without notice; check the source pages before you commit.