Amazon SES vs Postmark
Two sides of the transactional email decision: raw infrastructure and transactional API. When each fits, what it costs, who moves from one to the other, and what makers who chose it say.
Which fits you
Choose Amazon SES if- You send at high volume and cost per email matters most
Use it whenYou already run on AWS, or your email volume makes per-message price the main cost.
Trade-offBare-bones; you build templates, bounce handling and tooling yourself.
Choose Postmark if- Your login codes and password resets must arrive within seconds
Use it whenLogin codes and password resets are arriving late or in spam with your current sender.
Trade-offStrict about transactional-only sending — marketing email goes through a separate stream — and the free developer plan is small.
At a glance
| Amazon SES | Postmark | |
|---|---|---|
| Used by | 4 makers' products · 32 open-source projects | 612 makers' products · 5 open-source projects |
| Cost at default usageemails 50k emails | $5.00/mo À la carte | $55/mo Basic 50k |
| Downloads | 3.6M/wk−15% vs npm | 1M/wk−8% vs npm |
| Pricing | Pay per message; the cheapest option at high volume. · paid from $0.10 per 1k emails | Small free developer tier; paid plans by monthly emails. · paid from $15/mo |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Open source | No | No |
Cost as you grow
At 1k emails Amazon SES costs less ($0.10 vs $15); and still does at 5M emails ($500 vs $7,765). They're different kinds of tool — raw infrastructure and transactional API — so the prices don't buy the same thing.
The numbers, plan by plan
| Emails per month | Amazon SES | Postmark |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $0.10 À la carte | $15 Basic 10k |
| 5,000 | $0.50 À la carte | $15 Basic 10k |
| 10,000 | $1.00 À la carte | $15 Basic 10k |
| 25,000 | $2.50 À la carte | $42 Basic 10k |
| 50,000 | $5.00 À la carte | $55 Basic 50k |
| 100,000 | $10 À la carte | $115 Basic 125k |
| 250,000 | $25 À la carte | $245 Basic 300k |
| 500,000 | $50 À la carte | $455 Basic 700k |
| 1,000,000 | $100 À la carte | $775 Basic 1.5M |
| 5,000,000 | $500 À la carte | $7,765 Basic 700k |
From each vendor's pricing page: Amazon SES, Postmark.
What makers say
Makers on using it for transactional email, from Product Hunt and Starter Story interviews, each linked to the source. Products with a page of their own and fuller notes first.
On Amazon SESNo maker quote about Amazon SES for transactional email yet.
On PostmarkWe use Postmark not only for our emails, but also to power Ply's built-in dynamic email capabilities. It's reliable, well documented and most of all - comes with awesome human support.
We use some integrations that nowadays have become basic for our business like Postmark (for transactional emails) or Sift (to detect users with not very good intentions).
Once you get familiar with Postmark's layouts and templates, the service is great for quickly creating email templates and sending them out using their simple API. The UI is simple and intuitive.
Loved and watch-outs
Themes that recur in makers' words and Hacker News comments, each linked to what it summarises.
Amazon SESPostmarkWho uses each
Amazon SES4 makers' products
Chat Data
UptimeRobot
AskReferral
BlogBowl
Central
Invite.socialWhat makers pair each with
With Amazon SES
Langfuse
Novu
PostHog
Twenty
documensoethereum-org-websiteletterpadneuronpediaralllyaws-doc-sdk-examplesbackstagecatalystgrucloudhashisland.iskurrierand 13 more
Strapidocumensoethereum-org-websiteneuronpediaralllyaws-doc-sdk-examplesbackstagecardstackcatalyst
Directusgrucloudhashisland.isand 14 moredocumensonocodb
Trigger.devWith Postmark
PodSnap.AISalesHandySEO Kickstarter
SublayAgen
AirtopAlchemyArceeand 171 more
Reach from SalesStream.ai
Bolt
daily.dev
Digits
graph8
Sailhouse
Budibase
Decoded
Hello Inbox
Known AgentsLabsMobileMentorCruisePassionfrootPDFShiftSaasRockand 154 more
BetterBugs.io
Cotypist
Forecastio
KotaeHello Inbox
MailTockPDFShiftArcee
Bond
ClarityUX
CodeAnt AI
ComputerX
Coso.ai
Fluencyand 52 more
Chat Thing
IFTTT
Hex
Journey Now
FireCut AI
Honeybadger
Laravel
SanityNeither quite right?
See the whole transactional email decision →
ResendTransactional APIA modern developer API with email templates written as React components.vs Amazon SES →vs Postmark →
MailgunTransactional APIHigh volume and inbound email parsing and routing.vs Amazon SES →vs Postmark →
SendGridTransactional + marketingOne vendor for both jobs at large scale.vs Amazon SES →vs Postmark →