Amazon SES vs SendGrid

Amazon SES and SendGrid sit at opposite ends of the email infrastructure market. SES is a low-cost building block inside AWS. SendGrid is a complete product with dashboards, templates and marketing tools. At high volume the price gap between them is large, and so is the difference in how much work you take on yourself.

At a glance

• Amazon SES is best for engineering teams that want the lowest cost per email and are comfortable building around it. Outbound email costs $0.10 per 1,000 messages, plus $0.12 per GB of attachments.
• SendGrid is best for teams that want a managed product with a user interface. Email API plans start at $19.95 a month, with the Pro plan from $89.95 a month.

Where Amazon SES is strong

Cost is the obvious advantage. At $0.10 per 1,000 emails, a million messages cost about $100 before any extras. No mainstream competitor comes close at that volume.

SES also fits naturally into an AWS environment. It integrates with IAM for permissions, SNS and EventBridge for bounce and complaint events, and CloudWatch for metrics. Dedicated IPs are available in two forms: standard at $24.95 a month per IP, which you warm and manage yourself, and managed, which costs $15 a month per account plus a small per-email fee and handles warm-up and scaling automatically.

For deliverability insight, the Virtual Deliverability Manager adds dashboards and recommendations for a per-email fee, starting at $0.07 per 1,000 messages.

Where SendGrid is strong

SendGrid gives you a finished product. You get a web interface for activity, suppressions and statistics, a template editor, and Marketing Campaigns for non-technical users. Bounce and unsubscribe handling work without any code.

The Pro plan includes a dedicated IP, subuser management, single sign-on and email validation credits. Support is part of the plan, and deliverability consulting is available as a service. For a team without spare engineering time, those things have real value.

Key differences

• Price. SES charges purely by usage and is far cheaper at scale. SendGrid uses monthly plans based on volume.
• Setup. SES starts in a sandbox. You must request production access, and you build your own handling for bounces, complaints and suppression logic beyond the basics. SendGrid works from the first day.
• Interface. SendGrid has a full dashboard and marketing tools. SES is operated through the AWS console and APIs.
• Dedicated IPs. Both offer them. SES's managed option automates warm-up.
• Support. SendGrid includes support in its plans. SES support depends on your AWS support plan.

Deliverability notes

SES has good deliverability when it is used well, and AWS enforces that. Accounts are placed under review or paused if bounce or complaint rates climb too high, with bounce rates above roughly 5% and complaint rates above roughly 0.1% drawing attention. That discipline keeps the shared pools healthy, but it means you need monitoring in place from the start.

The hidden cost of SES is engineering time. You are responsible for processing bounce and complaint notifications, maintaining suppression, building any reporting your team wants, and designing your own separation between mail streams using configuration sets and IP pools.

SendGrid handles most of this for you. In exchange, you share its infrastructure with a much wider range of senders unless you move to a dedicated IP.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Amazon SES if you send high volume, already run on AWS, and have engineers who can own the email pipeline.
• Choose SendGrid if you want a managed service with a user interface, marketing features and support, and volume is not yet large enough for cost to dominate.

Pricing was checked on each vendor's pricing page in October 2026 and changes often. Confirm current rates before you buy.