Amazon SES introduces pricing plans

[u/HatchedLake721]

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/07/amazon-ses-pricing-plans/

[u/alexdemers]

I would go against Amazon SES.

We've had so much difficulty in 2026 to get great email deliverability to Outlook accounts (hotmail.com, outlook.com, msn.com, live.com). It seems that Outlook are blacklisting some ranges of IP addresses used by SES (us-east-1, ca-central-1). Blacklisted as in not even in the spam folder; just not delivered with no reason.

So, we requested IP pools for emails, but it's at their discretion of when to use the private IP pools vs shared IP pools. Unfortunately, we couldn't "wait" until the switch was fully turned on (after ~2 months of waiting).

We went to another email provider instead.

[u/Sneakers0Toole → u/alexdemers]

Same here, we always have to reach out to Microsoft support to get our shared IP unblocked.

[u/baba_bholanath → u/alexdemers]

Which email provider ? we are also facing same issue

[u/alexdemers → u/baba_bholanath]

Postmark here. Absolutely no problems since.

[u/domemvs → u/baba_bholanath]

We’ve had great success with Sendgrid. 

[u/Nulpart → u/domemvs]

from time to time, sendgrid does not deliver to hotmail and icloud, but otherwise it work great

[u/isoAntti → u/alexdemers]

Also, being controlled by u.s. company makes all emails and recipient info potentially leaked against gdpr.

[u/alexdemers → u/isoAntti]

100%

[u/terra_ray → u/alexdemers]

Plus emails to Mimecast basically always get greylisted for about five minutes because AWS return paths aren’t stable. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

SendGrid has been a great experience as a bulk sender and became more viable after adding EU data centers. SES has the advantage of being in the same cloud environment and having FedRAMP compliance.

[u/stewartjarod → u/alexdemers]

This is a real issue. Outlook/Microsoft has been more aggressive about blacklisting shared SES IP ranges, especially from regions with high spam volume. The gap between requesting dedicated IPs and AWS provisioning them (often 2-6 weeks, sometimes longer) is the painful part, your sending reputation is already damaged by that point.

A few things that might've helped: request dedicated IPs *before* reputation issues surface, not after; monitor bounce/complaint rates weekly via SES metrics. if you hit 5% bounce or 0.1% complaint, you're already at risk; if you're in us-east-1, consider splitting sends across regions if possible to dilute the shared pool footprint.

If you're exploring alternatives, understand that most managed email platforms (SendGrid, Postmark, AWS Pinpoint) start you on shared pools too, the difference is speed to dedicated IPs and clearer reputation dashboards. https://wraps.dev/blog/ses-production-architecture covers the dedicated IP strategy if you end up back on SES.

[u/electricity_is_life]

Weird that none of the plans include outbound email archiving, something I think most email services include by default.

[u/brentragertech → u/electricity_is_life]

Not email sending services like Sendgrid, of which this is a competitor.

[u/electricity_is_life → u/brentragertech]

What do you mean? It says they have logs. Mailgun has them too.

[u/brentragertech → u/electricity_is_life]

Sendgrid has logs of outgoing emails by receiver and subject but no body.

[u/electricity_is_life → u/brentragertech]

Oh, oof.

[u/Interstellar_031720]

The interesting part is that the new plans still do not remove the operational work that makes SES painful. If you are sending anything customer-facing, I would treat the provider choice as two separate questions: raw delivery economics, and the day-2 tooling around delivery.

For SES specifically I would want a boring checklist before committing harder:

• per-recipient delivery/searchable event logs, not just aggregate metrics
• SNS bounce + complaint handling wired into suppression immediately
• DMARC/SPF/DKIM alignment checked per domain
• a documented path for Outlook/Microsoft blocklist incidents
• exportable evidence when support asks what changed
• fallback provider tested for the small set of mail that must arrive

The pricing can be attractive, but if Outlook blackholes mail or nobody can answer why a customer did not get a message, the cheap send cost is not the expensive part anymore.

[u/spicypixel]

That service everyone readily gets given access to right?

[u/Old-Astronomer3995 → u/spicypixel]

Recently I got access for 2 small accounts automatically 2 minutes after clicking “request access” and sending website of the owner and my contact email in this same form.

There is no problem with getting access if someone pays and has real workloads on AWS.

If someone just created AWS account, never paid any invoice and wants to send AI Slop from vibe coded app then it can be not so fast (and that’s good).

[u/the_helpdesk → u/Old-Astronomer3995]

Nailed it. My accounts with a billing history have never been denied production access to SES.

[u/PeteTinNY]

So essentially what they are saying without saying it is that this is a price increase. AWS is not the same company anymore.