On 21 July 2026, AWS restructured Amazon SES pricing. If you already have an SES account nothing changes for you today. If you are about to open one, or you are advising someone who is, two things are now different — and most guidance written before that date is wrong on both.
What changed
New accounts no longer default to $0.10 per 1,000.
SES now offers à la carte pricing alongside three named plans: Essentials, Pro and Enterprise. À la carte is still roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails. But accounts opened from 21 July start on Essentials, at roughly $0.16 per 1,000 for the first 10 million messages a month — about 60% higher.
Pro and Enterprise add a monthly account fee per region (roughly $105 and $500 respectively) on top of a slightly higher per-message rate. What they buy is support and volume-tiered rate reductions, not different deliverability.
The SES free tier is gone.
The old 3,000-messages-a-month-for-twelve-months offer no longer applies to new customers. It has been replaced by up to $200 in general AWS Free Tier credits, usable across eligible services over six months.
That is a meaningfully different thing. The old offer was a year of predictable free sending; the new one is a credit pool you will also be spending on everything else you run in AWS.
What it does not change
SES is still, by a wide distance, the cheapest way to send at volume. At 100,000 messages a month the difference between à la carte and Essentials is about $6. At 10 million it is around $600 — which matters, but nothing else on the market is close at that volume regardless of which rate you land on.
The deliverability story is unchanged too. SES’s reputation handling, bounce and complaint notifications, and account-level enforcement thresholds are the same as they were on 20 July.
Who should actually care
You are opening a new account. Budget on $0.16, not $0.10, unless you have deliberately selected à la carte. This is the whole practical impact.
You are running the numbers on unbundling. A bring-your-own-provider comparison built on the old rate is now optimistic by 60% on the delivery side. That moves the break-even against a bundled platform — not enormously, but enough to matter at the margin. Our markup calculator lets you set the rate yourself, which is precisely why it does.
You were relying on the free tier to prototype. Twelve months of 3,000 messages was a genuinely useful runway for a side project. Six months of shared credits is less predictable. If you are prototyping, our Sandbox tier runs in test mode for nothing and does not consume anything at AWS.
The bit worth sitting with
Every guide, comparison and calculator on the internet that quotes “$0.10 per 1,000” for SES is now subtly wrong for new customers — including, until this week, ours. We have updated the SES integration page.
That is not a criticism of anyone. It is the nature of writing about provider pricing: it decays silently, and the only defence is dating your claims and re-checking them on a schedule. We put the check date in the page metadata for exactly this reason.
If you find something on this site quoting a stale rate, tell us. We would rather fix it than have you plan around it.