Sendibl vs Amazon SES: the primitive, or the product on top of it
Full disclosure before anything else: Sendibl sends through Amazon SES. This isn't a comparison between two rival senders — it's a comparison between using the raw primitive yourself and paying for the product layer we built on top of it. That framing makes the trade-off unusually honest: you can always drop down a layer. Facts checked July 2026.
| Sendibl | Amazon SES | |
|---|---|---|
| Price at 100k emails/mo | $90/mo (Scale) | ≈$10/mo + your engineering time |
| Free tier | 3,000 emails/mo, ongoing | Intro tier for new accounts, then pay-as-you-go |
| Time to first production send | Minutes — sign up, verify, send | Days — sandbox exit request, IAM, event plumbing |
| Dashboard & email logs | ✓ | CloudWatch metrics; per-message logs are DIY |
| Event webhooks | HMAC-signed, 18 event types, retries | Build it yourself via SNS/EventBridge |
| Open & click tracking | Built in | Configuration sets + your own pipeline |
| Templates with versioning | ✓ | Basic template API, no history |
| Broadcasts, audiences, segments | ✓ | — |
| Suppression handling | Automatic + dashboard UI | Account-level list, API-first |
| Inbound email | Parsed webhook events | Receipt rules — parsing is DIY |
| SMTP relay | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dedicated IPs | Not yet (Scale, soon) | ✓ |
| Sending regions | 3 (us-west-2, us-east-1, eu-west-1) | 20+ |
Choose raw SES if…
…volume economics dominate everything else. At roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails, nothing beats SES on price, and at millions of sends per month the gap versus any wrapper product is real money. Choose it too if you need regions we don't cover, dedicated IPs today, or if your team already lives in AWS and genuinely enjoys wiring SNS topics to Lambda functions. The tooling you'd have to build — event pipelines, logs, suppression UX, template management — is work AWS assumes you'll do yourself.
Choose Sendibl if…
…you want SES-grade delivery without building the surrounding product. Verified domains with one-click Cloudflare DNS, per-message logs with full event timelines, signed webhooks, templates, broadcasts, segments, inbound parsing, and an SMTP relay — all live the moment you sign up. The honest math: if the tooling above would take your team more than a day or two per month to build and maintain, the wrapper costs less than the plumbing.
Try it in two minutes
Send to our test addresses before you verify anything — no sandbox-exit ticket required.