Amazon SES vs Mailgun
Raw infrastructure versus a developer-leaning managed sender.
What matters for early-stage startups
At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.
| Priority | Amazon SES | Mailgun |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts | 100/day permanent free plan |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | $0.10 | $0.70 |
| Starts at | $0.10 per 1,000 emails | $15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic) |
| DX score | 4/10 | 7/10 |
| Deliverability | Inherits AWS IP reputation. Generally good once warmed and configured, but the sender does the warming and complaint handling. | Generally good, with deliverability monitoring tools available on higher tiers. Inbound routes and suppressions are battle-tested. |
| Operating since | 2011 | 2010 |
| Scheduling | No | Yes |
| SDKs | node, python, go, ruby, php, java, rust, dotnet | node, python, go, ruby, php, java |
| Webhooks | No | Yes |
For a pre-revenue or early-revenue team running a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, Mailgun takes developer experience, operating track record, scheduling, and webhook coverage, while Amazon SES takes best published rate per 1,000 and SDK breadth. On free tier, Amazon SES offers Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts against 100/day permanent free plan from Mailgun. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Amazon SES | Mailgun |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts | 100/day permanent free plan |
| Starts at | $0.10 per 1,000 emails | $15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic) |
| DX score | 4/10 | 7/10 |
| Deliverability | Inherits AWS IP reputation. Generally good once warmed and configured, but the sender does the warming and complaint handling. | Generally good, with deliverability monitoring tools available on higher tiers. Inbound routes and suppressions are battle-tested. |
| SDKs | node, python, go, ruby, php, java, rust, dotnet | node, python, go, ruby, php, java |
| Webhooks | No | Yes |
| Tagline | Cheapest at scale, most setup work. | Developer-leaning email infra, owned by Sinch. |
| Pricing model | pay-as-you-go | tiered |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| Templates | basic | rich |
| React Email | No | No |
| Inbound | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-tenant | No | Yes |
| Idempotency | No | No |
| Dedicated IP | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | High-volume senders with AWS infrastructure, cost-optimized workloads, and teams comfortable wiring SNS/Lambda/EventBridge for events. | Technical teams that want SMTP relay plus advanced routing. |
Amazon SES
- ›Cheapest cost per email, by a large margin at scale
- ›Built for billions: handles the largest sender workloads in the world
- ›Multi-region (us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, ap-south-1, and more) with regional reputation pools
- ›Native integration with Lambda, SNS, SQS, EventBridge, and CloudWatch
- ›Dedicated IPs and managed dedicated IP pools
- ›VPC endpoints for sending from private networks
- ›Inbound receiving with S3 and Lambda for fully serverless email pipelines
- ›SDKs in every language AWS supports, from Rust to .NET
- ›IAM-based authentication; no separate API keys to manage
- ›Sandbox mode requires manual approval before sending to non-verified recipients
- ›No native webhooks; events route through SNS and you write your own glue
- ›No dashboard for message-level debugging
- ›Bounce and complaint handling is the sender's responsibility
- ›Templates are minimal
- ›Operational overhead is real if you are not already on AWS
Mailgun
- ›Strong SMTP relay support, useful when migrating off self-hosted Postfix
- ›Inbound routes with regex matching
- ›Validation and parsing tools available
- ›Sub-accounts for agency use cases
- ›Overage pricing and plan differences need close review at scale
- ›Documentation is comprehensive but occasionally out of date
- ›No idempotency keys
- ›Sinch ownership has moved focus toward enterprise