AS
Replacement brief
AWS SES
Replaces transactional/marketing email sending
Cheap at the unit price, expensive in operational tax. Replacing it means owning deliverability (IPs, DMARC, bounces).
The verdict weighs direct cost against maintenance, reliability, migration risk, and founder time.
- Verdict
- medium Operational work required
- Estimated annual saving
- $0 no meaningful saving
- Open-source options
- 2 reviewed alternatives
What founders here actually pay
List price is not the bill.
No founder on RealCost has published a AWS SES cost line yet. When they do, the real bills appear here beside the list price — no estimates, no filler. Add your numbers.
01 / Deploy
Start with one command
A Teploy-style starting point for a small VPS. Review the generated configuration, then replace the example host and domain with your own.
teploy deploy --compose postal --host hetzner --domain mail.example.comBefore you migrate
Price the operational work alongside the server bill. SES is already near-free per email ($0.10/1k). Self-hosting only wins when you'd otherwise pay a managed ESP markup.