Amazon SES pricing and the plan default (2026)

Amazon SES pricing changed shape on 21 July 2026. Outbound email is still $0.10 per 1,000 on the old pay-per-use rate card, but a brand new SES account no longer starts there: it starts on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000, which is 60% more per message. Whether that is a price rise or a discount depends on one switch the plan does not flip for you.

How much does Amazon SES cost per 1,000 emails in 2026?

There are now two ways to be billed, and the Amazon SES pricing page lists both. À la carte is the original model: each feature is its own meter. Pricing plans bundle features into a higher per-message rate, with volume tiers and, above Essentials, a fixed monthly fee.

The plan tiers are marginal, so the first 10 million emails always bill at the top rate. An email here means a recipient for outbound mail: the page defines it as "Could be an email sent using SES Outbound (charged per recipient) or email processed using SES Mail Manager (charged per email)." One message to three people is three emails. Every model then adds $0.12 per GB of attachment data sent, and the fixed fee is charged per Region, so Pro in two Regions is $210 a month before a single message.

AWS's Example 1 prices 250,000 emails of 32KB on Essentials at $40.96. The same volume on the à la carte table is $25.96. That $15.00 gap is the whole question of this post.

Which Amazon SES pricing plan does a new account start on?

Essentials, unless the account has had metered SES activity in that Region since June 1, 2025. The pricing page footnote: "New SES accounts and account x region combinations with no metered SES activity since June 1, 2025 will start on the Essentials plan beginning July 21, 2026. You can upgrade or switch to à-la-carte pricing at any time." The launch post on the AWS Messaging Blog covers everyone else: "Customers who have sent or processed email through SES on or after June 1, 2025 remain on à-la-carte pricing and can switch to a plan anytime."

The catch is in the SES pricing plans documentation: "When you choose a plan, no features turn on automatically." The sending feature Essentials includes is Virtual Deliverability Manager SES deliverability, which costs $0.07 per 1,000 on its own à la carte. So the arithmetic splits cleanly:

• VDM enabled: à la carte is $0.10 plus $0.07, or $0.17 per 1,000. Essentials at $0.16 saves $0.01 per 1,000. On Example 1 that is $2.50 a month in favour of Essentials.
• VDM never enabled: an account defaulted onto Essentials pays $0.16 for what à la carte sells at $0.10, and the difference pays for a feature that is switched off.

Leaving is cheap if you do it first. The same page: "If you did not explicitly choose a plan and were defaulted to the Essentials plan, your first downgrade or cancellation to à la carte pricing also takes effect immediately. All other downgrades or cancellations take effect at the start of your next billing cycle." And it has to be done per Region: "Plans apply for each account and each AWS Region, so you manage your plan separately in each Region where you use Amazon SES."

To see which one you are on without the console, the SES v2 GetAccount call now returns a PricingAttributes object, whose CurrentPlan is one of NONE | ESSENTIALS | PRO | ENTERPRISE and whose NextPlan shows a scheduled change. Run aws sesv2 get-account in each Region you send from: NONE means à la carte, and ESSENTIALS on an account you never moved means it was defaulted. Check VDM in the same output before deciding which of the two cases above applies.

Is Amazon SES free for new accounts after July 2026?

Not through an SES allowance any more. The launch post is explicit: "As of July 21, 2026, the SES-specific free tier (3,000 email message charges per month for your first 12 months after first SES use) is no longer available for new customers." Accounts already inside that twelve months keep it until it runs out. What a new AWS customer gets instead is general credit, per the pricing page: "New AWS customers will receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which can be applied towards eligible AWS services, including Amazon Simple Email Service." How that credit is drawn down is covered in how AWS credits actually apply to a bill.

Two AWS pages disagree on this today. The Amazon SES FAQ still answers the free question with the retired offer: "Receive up to 3,000 message charges for free each month for the first 12 months after you start using SES." Budget from the launch post and the pricing page, which both describe the current terms.

The allowance people remember from older tutorials, free outbound mail from EC2, ended earlier still. When the 3,000 message tier replaced it on 1 August 2023, AWS described the old one this way: "Previously, the SES free tier only covered outbound messages sent from AWS compute services such as EC2 instances."

Two more things are not free while you test. The SES sandbox limits volume rather than price ("You can send a maximum of 200 messages per 24-hour period."), and "The sandbox status for your account is unique per each AWS Region." Test traffic to the mailbox simulator is billed too; the FAQ says "However, we do charge you for each message you send to the mailbox simulator, just as if they were messages you sent to actual customers."

When is the Amazon SES Pro plan cheaper than à la carte pricing?

Later than the launch post's headline suggests, unless you want Global deliverability. AWS says plans include capabilities "at up to 22% less than purchasing them individually", but none of the four pricing examples prices the same workload both ways. Example 2 prices Pro, and Example 4 prices a different à la carte workload. So we priced Example 2 on the à la carte table: 2M emails a month, 32KB each, with the features the example names.

At AWS's own example volume, Pro costs $10.00 more. Within the first tier the à la carte variable rate for that bundle is $0.26 per 1,000 against Pro's $0.22, and the fixed fees are $15 against $105, so Pro only wins above 2.25 million emails a month. At 10 million it is ahead by $310.

Global deliverability is what tips it, and it cannot be priced like for like. À la carte it is a $1,250 monthly package, and adding it to the column above gives $1,792.68. But the plan footnote says the Pro allowance is smaller: "Pro includes 1 domain, 1 DIPs and 5 seedlist tests; Enterprise includes 5 domains, 12 DIPs, and 25 seed list tests; Essentials plan customers pay $1,250 per month (includes 5 domains, 12 DIPs, and 25 seed list test)." There is no à la carte price for the one-domain version, so if you would never buy the $1,250 package, compare on the $542.68 column. That footnote also sits against the Dedicated IPs (managed) row of the comparison table, although its allowances match the Global deliverability package, so read it with care.

What is an incoming mail chunk in Amazon SES pricing?

It is the second meter on received mail, and the pricing page never defines it in words. Classic SES receiving is $0.10 per 1,000 emails plus "$0.09 for every 1,000 incoming email chunks". The size of a chunk appears only inside the Mail Manager lines of Examples 3 and 4, as a division: (50KB × 300K) ÷ 256KB × $0.09/1K gives $5.27. So a chunk is 256KB of received mail, billed on total volume: that example charges for 58,593.75 chunks, a fraction included. AWS does not say how a single message is rounded, and the table below assumes classic receiving uses the same chunk, since both carry the same $0.09 rate.

The chunk meter overtakes the message meter at about 284KB per email, and after that it is most of the bill. Applying AWS's example method to one thousand received emails:

Sizes use the decimal convention AWS's examples use (32KB written as 0.000032 GB). The 40MB row is the ceiling for mail stored in S3, per the SES email receiving concepts page: "If you store emails in an S3 bucket, the maximum email size (including headers) is 40 MB." An inbox that receives scanned documents is priced almost entirely by chunk.

The same page names the one way to receive less mail for free: "we don't charge you for messages that are blocked during the SMTP conversation", which is what IP address filters do. Rejecting mail with a receipt rule is not equivalent, "because receipt rules are processed after the SMTP conversation, we bill you for each message that you receive."

What do Amazon SES dedicated IPs and Mail Manager endpoints cost per month?

These are the fixed charges, and they bill whether you send or not.

The difference between the two dedicated IP models is how they scale. The managed dedicated IP documentation puts it plainly: "You will no longer be charged per IP, but instead will be charged based on the volume you send through the managed pool." Standard IPs cost the same at zero volume as at full volume, which makes an idle one a pure fixed cost. Mail Manager endpoints are the same trap: the pricing page says closing one does not stop the $50, and only deleting it does.

What else does Amazon SES email add to an AWS bill?

The actions that act on received mail bill in their own services. The pricing page lists them: "If you transfer incoming messages to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, you pay based on amount of data you store." Notifications bill under Amazon SNS, and CloudWatch dashboards or custom metrics bill under CloudWatch. Sending from EC2 adds compute and data transfer out.

The SNS route is the one with a size limit that changes the architecture. The SNS receipt action caps delivered mail at 150 KB: "Larger emails will bounce." The Lambda route does not carry the message at all. Per the Lambda receipt action page, "The data that Amazon SES passes to Lambda includes metadata about the message, as well as several email headers. However, it doesn't contain the body of the message." A function that parses mail therefore reads it back from S3, so a receiving pipeline usually pays SES chunks, S3 storage and Lambda duration for the same message. The Lambda side, including INIT billing, is in what Lambda cold starts cost, and function logs land in CloudWatch Logs pricing.

Because a defaulted Essentials plan shows up as a per-message rate change rather than a new line, it is the kind of step a cost monitor catches and a fixed budget does not; see AWS Budgets vs Cost Anomaly Detection. And to break SES spend down by usage type in your own billing data, start with Cost Explorer vs the Cost and Usage Report.