Integrations · Amazon SES

Amazon SES
without the markup.

The cheapest delivery at volume, if you are comfortable with AWS.

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Best for high volume on a tight budget
At a glance

Amazon SES, in six lines.

Pricing checked against the provider's own page on 1 August 2026 and stated as an approximation — always confirm current rates before you commit.

Provider type
amazon_ses
Approx. cost
À la carte is about $0.10 per 1,000 emails. New accounts opened from 21 July 2026 start on the Essentials plan at about $0.16 per 1,000 (0–10M/month). Confirm on the AWS pricing page.
Plans
À la carte, Essentials (no monthly fee), Pro (about $105/month per region), Enterprise (about $500/month per region). Higher volume tiers reduce the per-1,000 rate.
Free tier
The SES-specific 3,000/month-for-12-months tier is gone. New AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits usable across eligible services for 6 months.
Setup effort
High — sandbox removal, identity verification, and IAM credentials
Dedicated IPs
Available as a paid add-on
Support
AWS support plans, billed separately
Best fit
Portfolios sending serious volume where per-message cost dominates
Honest assessment

Where it wins, where it does not.

Strengths
  • By a wide margin the cheapest per-message cost of any provider here, and the gap widens as volume grows.
  • Effectively unlimited scale — you will not outgrow it.
  • Fine-grained IAM control, so the credentials you give SendNectar can be scoped to sending only.
  • Mature bounce and complaint notifications, which is what SendNectar's suppression handling consumes.
Trade-offs
  • New accounts start in a sandbox that only sends to verified addresses. Removing it requires a support request describing your sending practices, which can take a day or more.
  • The console is built for engineers, not marketers. Expect to read AWS documentation.
  • Deliverability support is thin compared with a specialist provider — you are largely on your own when placement drops.
  • Reputation is yours to manage. AWS will pause an account with sustained high bounce or complaint rates.
Setup

Connecting Amazon SES.

01

Leave the sandbox

Request production access in the SES console, describing what you send, to whom, and how you obtained consent. Do this first — approval can take a day or more, and nothing else is useful until it clears.

02

Verify your domain in SES

Add the domain and publish the DKIM CNAME records AWS provides. Wait for verification to complete before continuing. Use a subdomain such as news.yourbrand.com if you want to keep marketing reputation separate from corporate mail.

03

Create scoped IAM credentials

Create an IAM user with SES sending permissions only — not an admin key. Generate SMTP credentials from it, since SES SMTP credentials are derived from IAM and are not the same as your AWS access keys.

04

Connect it in SendNectar

Add a provider connection with type amazon_ses, set its purpose to marketing, transactional, or both, and submit the credentials. They go to a dedicated endpoint and are encrypted server-side — the API never returns them afterwards.

05

Run the connection test

Validate the connection against real health checks before any production mail moves through it. A failure here costs five minutes; a failure on your first campaign costs a week.

06

Add domains, sender profile, and warmup

Verify your sending, tracking, and return-path domains per brand, create a sender profile pinned to a verified identity and domain, and attach a warmup plan if the domain or IP is new.

The July 2026 pricing change

AWS restructured SES pricing on 21 July 2026, and most guidance written before that date is now wrong in two ways.

New accounts no longer default to the $0.10 rate. Accounts opened from that date start on the Essentials plan at roughly $0.16 per 1,000 emails — about 60% higher. À la carte pricing at $0.10 still exists, and there are now paid tiers above Essentials (Pro at roughly $105 a month per region, Enterprise at roughly $500) that buy support and higher-volume rate reductions rather than different deliverability.

The SES free tier is gone. The old 3,000-messages-a-month-for-twelve-months offer has been replaced by up to $200 in general AWS Free Tier credits spread across eligible services over six months.

Neither change alters the conclusion below — SES is still by a distance the cheapest option at volume — but it does move the break-even against a bundled platform, and it removes the free runway new accounts used to get.

When SES is the right call

Choose SES when per-message cost is the constraint that actually binds. At a few thousand messages a month the difference between providers is rounding; at several million a month it is the largest line in your email budget, and nothing else here comes close.

You are trading money for effort. The setup is genuinely more involved than the alternatives, and when deliverability goes wrong you get infrastructure rather than advice.

What SES does not give you

It is a sending API, and deliberately nothing more. There is no campaign builder, no audience management, no consent tracking, no segmentation, and no reporting beyond raw event notifications.

That is exactly why the pairing works. SES is the pipe; SendNectar is the operating layer — brands, audiences, consent evidence, workflows, and reporting on top. Neither is trying to be the other.

Notes for multi-brand senders

Verify a domain per brand. SES will happily send for several brands from one verified identity, and you should not let it. Reputation accrues per domain, so a shared identity means the least careful brand sets the ceiling for all of them.

Watch the account-level reputation dashboard. SES tracks bounce and complaint rates for the whole account, not per brand. One brand with a bad import can put the entire account under review — which is a strong argument for keeping SendNectar’s frequency caps and suppression enforcement in the path.

Consider separate configuration sets for marketing and transactional streams, so event data stays distinguishable at the AWS layer as well as inside SendNectar.

Other providers

Compare the alternatives

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Connect Amazon SES.
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Sandbox runs in test mode — wire up the connection and run a connection test before anything reaches a real inbox.

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