Amazon Simple Email Service is AWS’s managed service for sending email from
applications. It exists because sending email reliably at any volume is a specialised
problem — one involving authentication, reputation, bounce processing and feedback
loops — and very few teams should be solving it themselves. If you want to
buy Amazon SES account access, this page lists two configurations, at $750
and $1,250, distinguished by their SMTP sending limits.
Overview: what Amazon SES does
SES accepts messages from your application and delivers them to recipient mail
servers, handling the infrastructure that determines whether those messages arrive. It
does not manage mailing lists or design campaigns; it is the delivery layer beneath
whatever sends.
Two interfaces are available. The SMTP interface accepts messages over
authenticated SMTP on submission ports, which means any application or appliance that can
already speak SMTP works without code changes. The API offers finer
control and is generally preferred for new development. Both deliver through the same
infrastructure. AWS documents the service in the
Amazon SES documentation.
What you are actually paying for is AWS’s sending infrastructure and its standing with
receiving mail providers — the IP reputation, the established feedback loops with
major mailbox providers, and the operational machinery that processes bounces and
complaints.
Available Amazon SES configurations
The table below is the complete list. Read it as the menu you choose from when you buy Amazon SES account configurations on this page — each row is priced and specified independently, so nothing is bundled or assumed.
| Configuration | Price |
|---|---|
| SMTP 50K Limits | $750 |
| SMTP 100K Limits | $1,250 |
SMTP 50K Limits — $750
A configuration with a 50,000 sending limit. In SES terms a sending quota is the
maximum number of messages that may be sent in a 24-hour period, and it is enforced
per-account, per-region.
SMTP 100K Limits — $1,250
The same service with a 100,000 limit. Double the sending headroom for less than
double the price, which makes this the better value where volume genuinely warrants
it.
Both configurations describe the sending limit only. Nothing here states a sending
rate per second, a specific region, or a particular reputation state — those are
account properties governed by AWS. Confirm anything your project depends on before
ordering.
Key features
The points below summarise what distinguishes these options for anyone about to buy Amazon SES account configurations for the first time.
- Two sending-limit tiers at 50,000 and 100,000.
- SMTP and API interfaces, so existing applications integrate without rewriting.
- Built-in bounce and complaint handling through SNS notifications.
- DKIM signing support managed by the service.
- Configuration sets for separating and measuring different message streams.
Understanding sending limits and the sandbox
Two SES concepts cause more confusion than anything else, and understanding them
prevents most disappointment.
The sandbox
New SES accounts start in a sandbox where messages may only be sent to verified
addresses, and the sending quota is very low. Moving out of the sandbox requires a
request to AWS in which you describe your use case, how recipients consent to receiving
mail, and how you handle bounces and complaints. This is a review of sending practice
rather than a formality, and AWS declines requests that cannot answer those questions
credibly.
Quota versus rate
These are separate limits and both apply. The sending quota is the
24-hour ceiling — the figure the configurations above name. The sending
rate is the maximum messages per second. An account can have generous daily
headroom and still throttle a burst if the per-second rate is exceeded, which is why
production senders queue messages rather than firing them all at once.
How limits change
AWS adjusts limits based on sending history: consistent volume, low bounce rates and
low complaint rates lead to increases. High bounce or complaint rates lead to review and
possibly suspension. Limits are therefore a function of behaviour over time rather than a
fixed property you purchase once.
Deliverability: what actually determines whether mail arrives
This is the part most people underestimate. A sending limit governs how much you
may send. Deliverability governs how much actually reaches an inbox, and the two
are almost independent.
Authentication records
SPF declares which servers may send for your domain.
DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature proving a message was not altered
in transit and genuinely originated from you — SES can manage DKIM signing for
verified domains. DMARC ties both together, tells receiving servers what
to do when a check fails, and returns reports on what is being sent in your name. All
three are effectively mandatory now; major mailbox providers treat unauthenticated bulk
mail with considerable suspicion.
Bounce and complaint handling
SES publishes bounce and complaint events, typically through SNS. You are expected to
consume them and act: suppress hard bounces permanently, and remove anyone who marks a
message as spam immediately. Failing to do this is the fastest route to having sending
privileges reviewed, because it signals to AWS and to mailbox providers that you are
sending to people who do not want your mail.
List quality and consent
Sending only to recipients who genuinely asked is both the legal requirement in most
jurisdictions and the single largest factor in deliverability. Purchased or scraped lists
produce high bounce and complaint rates, which damages sender reputation quickly and is
difficult to recover from.
Warming up
Reputation accrues gradually. Ramping volume over weeks establishes a pattern that
receiving systems recognise; a sudden large burst from a new sender looks exactly like
abuse and is filtered accordingly.
Engagement
Mailbox providers increasingly weight whether recipients open, reply to and do not
delete messages. Mail that is consistently ignored drifts toward spam folders regardless
of technical correctness. Sending less, to people who want it, outperforms sending more.
Who should buy Amazon SES account configurations
- Applications sending moderate transactional volume — SMTP 50K Limits ($750).
- Higher-volume transactional systems — SMTP 100K Limits ($1,250).
- Teams migrating from a self-hosted mail server to managed infrastructure — either tier, sized to current volume.
- Products with notification-heavy workflows — alerts, receipts, digests — where volume scales with users.
Common use cases
Transactional application email
Password resets, email verification, receipts, order confirmations, security alerts.
These are the messages users expect and actively want, and they are where SES fits most
naturally. Deliverability matters acutely here — a password reset in a spam folder
is a support ticket.
Notification and alerting systems
Monitoring alerts, workflow notifications, scheduled digests. Volume scales with the
number of users and the amount of activity, which makes the sending quota the figure to
size against.
Replacing self-hosted mail infrastructure
Organisations running their own mail transfer agent frequently move to SES to stop
managing IP reputation, patching and blocklist removal themselves. The migration is
usually straightforward, since existing applications that speak SMTP can point at the SES
SMTP endpoint with a credentials change.
Multi-tenant platforms
SaaS products sending on behalf of many customers. Configuration sets allow separating
streams so that one tenant’s poor practice does not contaminate metrics for everyone,
and per-stream reputation can be monitored independently.
Choosing between the two configurations
Size against measured volume, not aspiration. Count what you actually send in a
24-hour period at peak — including retries, notifications and any scheduled digests
— and add headroom for growth. If that number is comfortably under 50,000, the
lower tier is correct.
Two things push toward the 100,000 tier. The first is genuine volume above 50,000 a
day. The second is spiky sending — a daily digest that fires for every user at
once, for instance — where the peak day is far above the average and a limit sized
to the average will fail exactly when it matters.
Technical considerations
Region selection
SES operates per-region, and sending limits, verified identities and configuration are
all region-scoped. An identity verified in one region is not verified in another. Choose
a region and keep sending consolidated there unless you have a specific reason to
distribute.
SMTP credentials
SES SMTP credentials are derived from IAM credentials but are not the same string.
They must be generated specifically for SMTP use through the SES console or API. Treat
them as secrets: store them in a secrets manager rather than in application configuration
or source control.
Ports
SES SMTP accepts connections on standard submission ports with TLS — typically
587 or 465, with 2587 and 2465 available where a network blocks the usual ports. Note
that this is authenticated submission, not port 25 relay. If a provider blocks outbound
port 25, that does not prevent using SES, because SES does not require it.
Configuration sets and event publishing
Configuration sets group sending and attach event destinations, so deliveries, bounces,
complaints and opens can be published to SNS, CloudWatch or Kinesis Data Firehose. Setting
this up before sending volume, rather than after a problem, is what makes reputation
issues diagnosable.
Dedicated IP addresses
SES offers dedicated IPs as an option for senders with sufficient consistent volume.
Shared IPs benefit from the aggregate reputation of all SES senders; dedicated IPs isolate
you from others but require enough sustained volume to establish reputation on their own.
For most senders, shared is the better choice.
Migrating sending onto Amazon SES
Most SES accounts replace something — a self-hosted mail server, or another
sending provider. A staged migration avoids the failure mode where a domain’s whole email
reputation is moved at once and delivery collapses for a week.
Verify identities first
SES requires you to verify the domains or addresses you send from. Domain verification
is the one worth doing, because it lets you send from any address on that domain and
enables managed DKIM signing. Verification is region-scoped, so verify in the region you
intend to send from.
Update DNS carefully
Adding SES to an existing SPF record means including AWS’s mechanism alongside whatever
is already there rather than replacing it, otherwise mail from your current provider
starts failing authentication immediately. If DMARC is already published, keep the policy
permissive during the transition and tighten it once reports show the new path
authenticating cleanly.
Move traffic in stages
Send a small share through SES first — a single low-risk message type such as
internal notifications — and watch bounce and complaint metrics before moving
anything user-facing. Password resets and receipts should move last, because those are
the messages where a delivery failure is most visible.
Wire up event handling before volume
Bounce and complaint notifications should be flowing into something that suppresses
addresses automatically before real volume starts. Retrofitting suppression after a bad
send is far harder than building it first, because by then the reputation damage has
already occurred.
Monitoring and troubleshooting delivery
The metrics that matter
- Bounce rate. Hard bounces mean the address does not exist. A rising rate signals list quality problems and attracts AWS review.
- Complaint rate. Recipients marking mail as spam. This is the most damaging signal of all and should be kept as close to zero as possible.
- Delivery rate. Accepted by the receiving server — note this means accepted, not necessarily placed in an inbox.
- Rejections. Messages SES itself declined, often because of a suppressed address.
When mail is accepted but not seen
This is the most common and most frustrating situation: SES reports successful
delivery, and recipients say nothing arrived. Delivery means the receiving server took the
message; where it placed it is a separate decision. Investigate authentication first
— DMARC reports will show whether SPF and DKIM are aligning — then content and
engagement patterns. Rising complaint rates and low open rates both push mail toward spam
folders even when everything technical is correct.
The account-level suppression list
SES maintains a suppression list of addresses that previously hard-bounced or
complained, and by default it will not send to them. This protects reputation but can
surprise you when a legitimate re-subscription appears not to work. The list is
inspectable and manageable through the API.
Important considerations
A sending limit is not deliverability. The configurations name sending
limits. Whether messages reach inboxes depends on authentication, list quality, bounce
handling and engagement — none of which any configuration can confer.
AWS governs limits and account standing. Sandbox status, quota
increases and reputation review are determined by AWS based on sending behaviour. Nothing
on this page changes or guarantees those outcomes.
Sending law applies. Anti-spam legislation — CAN-SPAM, GDPR,
CASL and equivalents — governs commercial email in most jurisdictions, generally
requiring consent, accurate headers, a valid postal address and working unsubscribe
handling.
Provider terms apply. See the
AWS Service Terms
and the AWS Acceptable Use Policy,
both of which govern email sending from AWS infrastructure.
Prices are per configuration, exactly as listed.
Frequently asked questions
Which configuration should I choose?
Match the configuration to the workload rather than to the price. Most people who buy Amazon SES account configurations start from the smallest option that covers their current need and move up once real usage is measured, which avoids paying for headroom that never gets used. The comparison sections above set out the trade-offs; the FAQ page covers ordering questions.
Is it safe to buy Amazon SES account configurations listed here?
Every configuration on this page states its specification and price exactly as supplied, and nothing is implied beyond what is written. Anything your project depends on that is not named should be confirmed on the contact page before you buy Amazon SES account configurations.
What is the difference between the two configurations?
The sending limit — 50,000 versus 100,000 — at $750 and $1,250
respectively. The service itself is the same.
Does a higher limit mean better delivery?
No. A limit is a ceiling on how much you may send. Delivery depends on authentication
records, list quality, bounce and complaint handling, and recipient engagement.
Do I need port 25 for SES?
No. SES uses authenticated submission on ports such as 587 and 465. Port 25 relay is a
different thing entirely, relevant only when running your own mail transfer agent —
see DigitalOcean,
Linode or
Hetzner for that.
What is the SES sandbox?
A restricted initial state where you may only send to verified addresses at low volume.
Leaving it requires a request to AWS describing your use case, consent model and bounce
handling.
Can I use SES with my existing application?
Generally yes. Anything that can send over authenticated SMTP works after a
configuration change. New development usually uses the API instead for better control.
What happens if my bounce rate is high?
AWS reviews accounts with elevated bounce or complaint rates and may pause sending.
Consuming bounce notifications and suppressing bad addresses promptly is the way to avoid
this.
Should I use a dedicated IP?
Only with consistent, substantial volume. Below that, shared IPs benefit from
aggregate reputation and are usually the better choice.
How do I order?
Select the configuration above, add it to the cart and complete checkout through the
configured cryptocurrency gateway.
Where to buy Amazon SES account configurations
Everything needed to buy Amazon SES account configurations is on this page — the full list of 2 options, the price of each, and the specification each one carries.
Every configuration described above can be ordered directly from this page. Select the one you need in the selector at the top, add it to the cart and complete checkout — there are 2 configurations listed, $750.00 – $1,250.00. Checkout collects only a name and an email address, and payment runs through the cryptocurrency gateway configured on this site.
If you are unsure which option fits, describe the workload on the contact page before ordering rather than after — it is usually possible to narrow the list quickly. Common questions are collected on the FAQ page.
What you get when you buy Amazon SES account
Every listing on this page is a specific, named configuration rather than an open-ended arrangement. When you buy Amazon SES account here you are choosing one of the 2 configurations described above, at the stated price $750.00 – $1,250.00, with the specification exactly as written.
- The exact configuration named in the selector, with no substitutions.
- The price shown, with no added fees at checkout.
- A checkout that asks only for a name and an email address.
- Direct contact before ordering if you are unsure which option fits.
If you are comparing providers rather than configurations, the Cloud Accounts and Cloud Infrastructure categories list the alternatives side by side. If you already know what you need, you can buy Amazon SES account configurations directly from the selector at the top of this page.
Related products
SES sits in the Email
Infrastructure category. For AWS compute alongside it see
Buy AWS Account, and for AWS software procurement
see Buy AWS Marketplace Account.
Servers capable of running your own mail transfer agent are listed under
Cloud Infrastructure. Common
questions are on the FAQ page.
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