At $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000, Amazon SES has the lowest unit price in the category and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does not have is a UI, templates, automation, suppression tooling that thinks for you, or support that comes free.
Amazon SES costs $0.10 per 1,000 emails à la carte, or $0.16 per 1,000 on the Essentials plan, so 100,000 emails a month is roughly $10 to $16 — genuinely cheaper than Bluey's $14.95 transactional tier at the margin. The cost that does not appear on the AWS invoice is engineering: SES is a sending pipe, so bounce and complaint handling, suppression logic, templating, analytics and any marketing capability are yours to build and maintain. AWS Business Support alone starts at $100 a month. Pick SES if you have platform engineers, high volume and an existing AWS footprint; pick Bluey if you would rather not rebuild a sending platform to save a few dollars a month.
SES is a sending pipe by design. The bounce handler, the suppression logic, the template store, the analytics pipeline and the unsubscribe flow are all things you build and then maintain. That is a reasonable trade at high volume with a platform team. It is a poor trade at 100,000 emails a month.
AWS Business Support starts around $100 a month — more than six times Bluey's entire transactional plan at 100,000 emails. Without it, a deliverability problem is yours to diagnose from documentation.
There is no campaign builder, no template editor and no segmentation. Anything a marketer needs to do independently has to be built for them, or bought separately.
SES is the right answer more often than vendor comparison pages like to admit. Choose it when:
If three or more of those are true, use SES — you will spend less and get more control. If none are, the cost you are avoiding is an invoice and the cost you are taking on is a system.
SES to Bluey usually means deleting code rather than writing it: the handlers you built for bounces, suppression and templating become platform features.
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Start free and get the checklistPer email, yes — clearly. SES is $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000, so 100,000 emails is $10 to $16 against Bluey's $14.95, and at a million-plus SES is several times cheaper. The comparison is only fair if you also price the engineering time to build bounce handling, suppression, templates, analytics and an unsubscribe flow, plus AWS Business Support at $100 a month if you want a human when something breaks.
Not on its own. SES sends; it does not compose, segment, schedule or automate. Teams that want marketing on SES either build a layer themselves, add Amazon Pinpoint, or put a third-party front end on top — which reintroduces the subscription SES was meant to avoid.
New SES accounts start restricted: you can only send to verified addresses, with a low daily cap. Production access requires a review of your use case and bounce-handling plan, usually cleared within 24 to 48 hours. It is a sensible control, but it is a step between signup and your first real send.
It maintains an account-level suppression list and publishes bounce and complaint events, but consuming those events — subscribing to the SNS topic, processing them, updating your own database — is your code. Getting this wrong is the most common way an SES sender damages their reputation without noticing.
Bluey operates its own sending infrastructure with managed IP pools, reputation monitoring and automatic suppression. The point of the platform is that this layer is maintained for you rather than assembled by you.
Pricing verified 4 September 2026 against each provider’s public pricing page. Bluey figures use the Grow plan (send-based). Competitor tiers shift at least quarterly; figures marked “~” are interpolated between published tiers.
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