Amazon SES vs SendGrid: Cost, Deliverability and Which to Pick in 2026

Amazon SES is roughly three to nine times cheaper per email than SendGrid, and SendGrid is meaningfully faster to get running. At 100,000 emails a month SES costs $10.00 on a la carte pricing or $16.00 on the Essentials plan, against $34.95 for SendGrid Essentials and $89.95 for SendGrid Pro. The trade is real work: SES expects you to verify domains, request production access, wire up your own bounce and complaint handling, and watch your own reputation metrics. Neither one permits cold outreach to people who did not ask for your mail.

Both sets of figures below were read from primary sources on August 19, 2026: the AWS Price List API for SES, and Twilio's live plan calculator for SendGrid. Neither came from a comparison roundup, which matters more than usual here because both vendors changed their pricing this year.

Amazon SES vs SendGrid pricing, side by side

SES bills per recipient with optional plan fees. SendGrid bills per email in fixed monthly steps. Lining them up at matched volumes is the only honest way to compare them.

Two details behind that table are worth knowing before you use it. First, SES changed its default on July 21, 2026: new AWS accounts, and account and region pairs dormant since June 1, 2025, now start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 rather than a la carte at $0.10. You have to switch deliberately to get the cheaper rate. Second, SendGrid's own pricing URLs now redirect to a notice about the sendgrid.com to twilio.com website merge, which is why published comparisons of these two disagree so wildly. The live calculator moved to twilio.com. Our page on Amazon SES pricing carries the complete SES rate card including every add on meter, and the SendGrid pricing breakdown does the same band by band.

Is Amazon SES cheaper than SendGrid?

Yes, at every volume, and the gap widens as you scale. At 100,000 emails SES a la carte is $10.00 against SendGrid Essentials at $34.95, a 3.5x difference. At 1.5 million emails it is $150.00 against $799.00, a 5.3x difference. Against SendGrid Pro the multiple is larger still. Nothing about the SES rate card has a hidden markup at volume: a la carte stays flat at $0.10 per 1,000 no matter how much you send.

Where the comparison flips is in what you do not have to build. SendGrid's price includes a console, template management, suppression handling, event webhooks, support and deliverability tooling. On SES those are either your code or a separate meter. Virtual Deliverability Manager is $0.07 per 1,000 emails on top of sending. Email validation is $0.01 each. The global deliverability tier is a $1,250 a month subscription unless you are on the SES Pro plan at $105 a month, which includes it.

A useful way to decide: if an engineer will spend two days building bounce processing and reputation alerting, and their loaded cost is $800 a day, SES has to save you $1,600 before it breaks even on setup alone. At 100,000 emails a month it saves about $25. At 5 million it saves thousands every month and the answer is obvious.

Which has better deliverability, Amazon SES or SendGrid?

Neither is inherently better, because on both platforms deliverability at default settings is decided by the shared IP pool you land in and by your own list quality. The meaningful difference is what each one gives you to manage it.

SendGrid Pro includes a dedicated IP and a deliverability console in the base price. SES charges $24.95 per dedicated IP per month, which is cheaper per IP, but treats the tooling around it as separate line items. SES also offers managed dedicated IPs at $15 a month plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails, where AWS runs the warm up schedule for you. That is genuinely useful if nobody on your team wants to own a warm up ramp, and it has no direct SendGrid equivalent at that price.

Both enforce reputation thresholds. AWS publishes its numbers: an SES account goes under review at a 5% bounce rate or a 0.1% complaint rate, and sending can be paused at 10% bounces or 0.5% complaints. AWS calculates both over a representative volume rather than a fixed window, so you cannot reset a bad rate by pausing for a month.

Can you use Amazon SES or SendGrid for cold email?

No, not on either one, and this is the question most people are really asking. AWS documentation is direct about it: "Don't buy, rent, or share email addresses. Send email only to recipients who explicitly requested to receive email from you." That guidance appears three separate times in the SES sending review FAQs. AWS defines unsolicited email as email the recipient did not explicitly ask to receive, and when it reviews an account manually it asks whether addresses were acquired any way other than a customer requesting mail from you.

SendGrid's position is the same in substance. Both companies run shared sending infrastructure, which means your list quality affects other customers' delivery, which is why both reserve the right to pause an account quickly. A 0.1% complaint rate is one Report Spam click per 1,000 emails. On a prospect list that is a normal week, not a crisis.

This is not a pricing problem and no plan tier fixes it. Outbound prospecting works differently: you send from mailboxes on domains you own, at human volumes, rotating across a handful of inboxes so no single mailbox looks like a broadcaster. Most teams running that model buy separate sending domains rather than risk the reputation of the one their invoices go out from, and picking up a short brandable domain to send from costs less than a month of either platform. Our guide to the best SMTP provider for cold email walks through which providers actually permit that workload, and how many sending domains you need covers the arithmetic.

When to pick Amazon SES

• Your application already runs on AWS, so SES is one IAM role away and lands on an invoice you reconcile anyway.
• You send more than about 500,000 emails a month, where the unit price difference outweighs any engineering time.
• You have an engineer who can wire SNS notifications for bounces and complaints and set CloudWatch alarms on reputation metrics.
• You want cheap dedicated IPs at $24.95 each, or managed IPs where AWS owns the warm up.
• Your mail is fully consented: transactional messages, product notifications, opt in newsletters.

When to pick SendGrid

• You need to be sending this week and nobody is available to build bounce handling.
• Your volume is under about 100,000 a month, where the absolute saving from SES is $25 or less.
• You want a marketing UI, templates and campaign scheduling rather than an API and a queue.
• You want a dedicated IP and deliverability tooling bundled rather than metered separately.
• Non engineers on your team need to see what was sent and what happened to it.

What about Amazon SES vs Mailgun?

Mailgun sits between the two on both price and effort. Its Foundation plan is $35 a month for 50,000 emails with overage from $1.30 per 1,000, and Scale is $90 for 100,000 with overage from $1.10 per 1,000 and a dedicated IP included. So at 100,000 emails Mailgun Scale is $90.00 against SES Essentials at $16.00 and SendGrid Essentials at $34.95. Mailgun's pitch is developer ergonomics and built in validation rather than lowest unit cost, and it prices accordingly.

The short answer

Pick Amazon SES if you have engineering capacity and volume, because nothing beats $0.10 per 1,000 and the add on meters are honest. Pick SendGrid if speed to first send and a managed console are worth roughly $25 to $75 a month at your volume. Pick neither for cold outreach, because both platforms define the mail you want to send as unsolicited, and the complaint threshold that gets an account reviewed is one report per thousand emails. For that job the right infrastructure is mailboxes and domains you control, on a flat plan with no per email meter.

Last updated August 2026. SES figures from the AWS Price List API published July 22, 2026 and aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing. SendGrid figures from Twilio's live plan calculator. Mailgun figures from mailgun.com/pricing, which served USD.