Is Amazon SES free for transactional email?

No — there's no free plan, but no monthly fee either: you pay for what you use (À la carte: emails $0.1 per 1,000 emails).

How much does Amazon SES cost for transactional email?

Pay per email with no monthly fee: $0.10 per 1,000 on à la carte pricing, plus $0.12 per GB of attachments. At list prices: emails 5k emails: $0.50/month (À la carte); emails 50k emails: $5.00/month (À la carte); emails 1M emails: $100/month (À la carte).

Amazon SES pricing

How Amazon SES charges, what to know before you commit, and what you'd pay at your usage — next to what the alternatives would cost for the same thing.

How it charges

Checked 2026-10-03 on aws.amazon.com ↗ · USD, list prices

In short

Pay per email with no monthly fee: $0.10 per 1,000 on à la carte pricing, plus $0.12 per GB of attachments.

Free plan: Yes
Side project: $0.50/mo À la carte
Growing: $5.00/mo À la carte
Scaling: $100/mo À la carte

What the model leaves out

$0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails (per recipient), plus $0.12 per GB of attachments. New accounts since July 21, 2026 start on the Essentials plan ($0.16 per 1,000 up to 10M, then $0.14, then $0.11 above 100M; no monthly fee) but can switch to à la carte at any time. Pro ($105/mo + $0.22 per 1,000) and Enterprise ($500/mo + $0.23 per 1,000) bundle deliverability tools. New AWS customers get up to $200 in Free Tier credits.

Before you commit

Outbound email is charged per recipient, so one message to five addresses is five billable emails.
New accounts (and account-region pairs with no SES activity since June 1, 2025) start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 from July 21, 2026, unless you switch to à la carte.
Attachments add $0.12 per GB sent, and EC2 data transfer charges may apply on top.
Dedicated IPs cost extra: $24.95 per IP per month, or $15 per month plus a per-email fee for managed IPs.