Amazon SES vs Postmark

Amazon SES compared with Postmark

The widest gap in the category: SES costs roughly fifteen to twenty times less per message. Postmark's premium buys sender vetting that keeps its shared IP pools clean, full message content searchable for up to 365 days, parsed inbound with reply-text stripping, and support on every plan. SES gives you none of that and will pause your account if complaints exceed 0.01 percent. If a failed password reset is a business incident and you send under a few hundred thousand messages a month, Postmark is the better buy despite the price.

Postmark compared with Amazon SES

SES costs about $0.10 per 1,000 emails, which makes Postmark roughly fifteen to twenty times more expensive at the same volume. Everything Postmark charges for is something you build or forgo on SES: message content search, template ergonomics, sender vetting, inbound parsing beyond raw S3 delivery, and a support relationship. SES also pauses accounts whose complaint rate crosses 0.01 percent. Below a few hundred thousand messages a month the price gap is smaller than the engineering cost of closing it.

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.

Postmark

Volume-metered on emails sent, with three feature tiers at the same base volume and different overage rates. No per-seat charge and no contact-based billing.

• Free$0
• Basic$15
• Pro$16.50
• Platform$18
• High volumeCustom

Modelled the way this directory compares platforms, Postmark is cheap at small scale and expensive at large scale. A product with 1,000 users receiving three notifications each sends 3,000 emails and pays $16.50 on Pro. Ten thousand users at three emails each is 30,000 sends, which is $16.50 plus $26 of overage, about $43. Fifty thousand users at three emails each is 150,000 sends, which is $16.50 plus $182, roughly $199 a month. Resend does that same 150,000 for about $80 and Amazon SES for about $15. What the premium buys is the shared-IP delivery quality that comes from Postmark refusing bulk senders, inbound parsing that Resend does not have at all, a year of searchable message content, and support included on every plan. For a product where a failed password reset is a support ticket and a failed invoice is a dispute, that is defensible up to a few hundred thousand messages a month. Past that, the overage curve stops making sense and you should be negotiating or moving.