Amazon SES vs Mailgun

Amazon SES compared with Mailgun

Both offer real inbound, but they hand it over differently: Mailgun parses messages into JSON and routes them with rules, SES Mail Manager delivers raw MIME to S3, Lambda, or SNS with rule sets around it. Mailgun costs roughly ten to fifteen times more per message and includes address validation, a console, and human support. SES wins decisively on price and on AWS-native integration; Mailgun wins on how much work you avoid.

Mailgun compared with Amazon SES

SES is roughly ten to fifteen times cheaper per email and has its own inbound capability through Mail Manager, though it delivers raw messages to S3 or Lambda rather than parsed JSON with routing rules. Mailgun charges a large premium for a console, structured parsing, validation, and someone to contact. SES also pauses accounts whose complaint rate exceeds 0.01 percent, which Mailgun does not do as abruptly. Below a few million messages a month Mailgun's premium is usually less than the engineering time SES demands.

Amazon SES

Pay-as-you-go metered infrastructure charged per 1,000 messages, plus separate meters for data transfer, dedicated IPs, deliverability tooling, and inbound. Named pricing plans (Essentials, Pro, Enterprise) sit above the a la carte rate with monthly minimums on the upper two.

• A la carte$0.10
• Essentials$0.16
• Pro$0.22
• Enterprise$0.23

The arithmetic is brutal in SES's favour and misleading at small scale. A product with 1,000 users receiving three emails each sends 3,000 messages a month and pays about 30 cents. Ten thousand users at three emails each is 30,000 sends, about $3. Fifty thousand users at three emails each is 150,000 sends, about $15, against roughly $80 on Resend, $145 on Mailgun, and $199 on Postmark. At a million messages a month SES is around $100 against $650 on Resend. Nothing in the category competes on price. But the comparison is not like for like: the $65 you save each month at 150,000 messages buys you nothing on SES that resembles a searchable log, a template editor, sender vetting, or a support relationship, and building the missing pieces is a week or two of engineering plus permanent maintenance. The honest threshold is somewhere around half a million messages a month, or wherever your team already has the AWS operational muscle. Below that, SES is cheap for the same reason a bag of flour is cheaper than bread.

Mailgun

Volume-metered on emails sent, with four tiers that differ mainly in included volume, log retention, inbound route allowance, and dedicated IP availability. Email validation is metered separately.

• Free$0
• BasicFrom $15
• Foundation$35
• Scale$90
• CustomQuoted

Modelled at this directory's three reference points, Mailgun is mid-market on price and top of the category on inbound capability. A product with 1,000 users receiving three emails each sends 3,000 a month and fits inside Basic at $15, or the free tier if the daily cap allows. Ten thousand users at three emails each is 30,000 sends, still inside Basic at $15 but far better served by Foundation at $35 for the log retention and the inbound routes. Fifty thousand users at three emails each is 150,000 sends, which is Scale at $90 plus roughly $55 of overage, about $145 a month. That sits between Resend at around $80 and Postmark at around $199 for the same volume, and it is roughly ten times Amazon SES. What separates Mailgun from the cheaper options is inbound routing with rules rather than a single webhook, and validation from the same vendor. What separates it from the more expensive ones is that Postmark keeps a year of full message content where Mailgun keeps 30 days of events. Buy Mailgun for inbound; buy something else if outbound is all you do.