Amazon SES vs Resend

Amazon SES compared with Resend

SES is about five times cheaper at 150,000 messages a month ($15 against roughly $80) and the gap widens with volume. Resend gives you a searchable 30-day log, guided DKIM setup, thirteen first-party SDKs, React Email, and support that answers, none of which SES has. Below roughly half a million messages a month the absolute saving is smaller than the engineering time SES demands, so most small software businesses should be on Resend. Above it, the arithmetic flips hard.

Resend compared with Amazon SES

SES is roughly five to ten times cheaper per email at $0.10 per 1,000 a la carte, and it is the price floor everyone else is measured against. What you pay for that is doing the work yourself: no usable log viewer, no template ergonomics, a sandbox you must apply out of, and an account that gets paused if your bounce rate crosses 5 percent or complaints cross 0.01 percent. Resend costs more and hands you observability, guided authentication, and a human to email. Under a million messages a month the difference is tens of dollars, and Resend usually wins on total cost including engineering time.

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.

Resend

Two separate meters. Transactional email is billed on monthly send volume with per-thousand overage. Marketing email is billed separately on contact count. Neither meter charges for team seats.

• Free$0
• Pro$20 for 50,000 emails, $35 for 100,000 emails
• Scale$90 for 100,000 rising to $1,150 for 2.5M emails
• Marketing Pro$40 to $650
• EnterpriseCustom

Modelled at the three volumes this directory uses, Resend's transactional meter behaves nothing like a contact-priced ESP. A product with 1,000 users sending each of them roughly three notifications a month is inside the free tier at zero. Ten thousand users at three emails each is 30,000 sends, comfortably inside the $20 Pro plan. Fifty thousand users at three emails each is 150,000 sends, which is $35 for the first 100,000 plus $45 of overage, or about $80 a month. Against Postmark that is roughly half the price at volume, against SendGrid it is competitive, and against Amazon SES it is about five times more expensive. You are paying a modest premium over the raw infrastructure price for a console you can navigate, docs you can read, and support that answers. For most small software businesses that trade is obviously worth it.