Amazon SES pricing calculator
Outbound, Inbound, Mail Manager & VDM. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon SES pricing works
What you pay for
- Outbound email $0.10 per 1,000 plus $0.12 per GB of attachments; inbound $0.10 per 1,000 plus 256 KB chunks.
- Dedicated IPs ($24.95 per IP per month standard; managed dedicated IPs priced by volume), BYOIP.
- Virtual Deliverability Manager, Mail Manager (endpoints, processing, archiving), email validation, global endpoints, tenant management.
Common cost traps
- Dedicated IPs bill monthly even at low volume and need warm-up.
- Large attachments add $0.12/GB.
- Mail Manager endpoints carry a monthly fixed fee.
- Poor list hygiene can trigger account review; validation charges add up if run on every send.
Ways to reduce cost
- Stay on shared IPs until volume justifies dedicated IPs.
- Link to files instead of attaching them.
- Use VDM only for streams where you need deliverability insight.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Legacy accounts: 3,000 message charges per month for the first 12 months after you start using SES (outbound, inbound or Mail Manager messages). New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon SES?
SES outbound and inbound email, attachments, dedicated IPs, Virtual Deliverability Manager, Mail Manager, email validation and tenant management are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $5.24 | 1,908.4 mo. | 4,771.0 mo. | 19,084.0 mo. |
| Medium | $370.95 | 27.0 mo. | 67.4 mo. | 269.6 mo. |
| Large | $3,409.80 | 2.9 mo. | 7.3 mo. | 29.3 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
50,000 outbound emails, 2 GB attachments | Outbound emails: 50 thousand x $0.1 = $5.00; Attachment data: 2 GB x $0.12 = $0.24 | Total ~$5.24/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
2 M outbound emails, 50 GB attachments, 1 standard dedicated IP, VDM on all mail | Outbound emails: 2,000 thousand x $0.1 = $200.00; Attachment data: 50 GB x $0.12 = $6.00; Dedicated IP: 1 IP-month x $24.95 = $24.95; Virtual Deliverability Manager: 2,000 thousand x $0.07 = $140.00 | Total ~$370.95/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
30 M outbound emails, 500 GB attachments, 4 dedicated IPs, 2 M inbound emails, 1 Mail Manager ingress endpoint | Outbound emails: 30,000 thousand x $0.1 = $3,000.00; Attachment data: 500 GB x $0.12 = $60.00; Dedicated IPs: 4 IP-months x $24.95 = $99.80; Inbound emails: 2,000 thousand x $0.1 = $200.00; Mail Manager ingress endpoint: 1 month x $50 = $50.00 | Total ~$3,409.80/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon SES pricing FAQ
How much does SES cost per email?
$0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails in us-east-1, plus $0.12 per GB of attachments.
Is there still a free tier?
Legacy accounts get 3,000 message charges per month for 12 months. Newer accounts use Free Tier credits.
Do I need a dedicated IP?
Usually not below a few hundred thousand emails per month. Shared IPs are included; dedicated IPs cost $24.95 per month each.
Do credits cover SES?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card ses (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ before publishing.