Amazon SES
Ranked 2 of 6 email sending services by recommenders
People recommend it as a cheap, reliable way to send email through SMTP or an API, with good deliverability. Common caveat: sending approval is hard to get.
People recommend it as a cheap, reliable way to send email through SMTP or an API, with good deliverability. Common caveat: sending approval is hard to get.
30 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 63%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Very low per-email cost
“At a few cents for five-figure numbers of emails, it's as close to free for personal/vanity email quantities as it gets”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “Self-host your mail server” “its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “All I wanted was a custom domain email” “I realized how cheap SES is and thought I might as well make the service free.”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)” - Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: I wrote an email app that accepts only one sender per inbox”
- Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What email API providers to use for pet project?”
- Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “All I wanted was a custom domain email”
- Comment from 27 May 2026 in “Show HN: Open-source Workspace (mail,docs,spreadsheet,drive) web/iOS”
Good deliverability
“Cheap ($0.10/1000 emails) + good deliverability”
Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What email API providers to use for pet project?” “to ensure high deliverability from day one”
Comment from 13 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: I built an email API because of limited domains and flaky inbound” “It fixed all my deliverability problems.”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “Self hosted email continues to steeply decline” Easier than running own SMTP
“using SES is probably a better option compared to running a VPS just for SMTP”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” “I feel as if Amazon SES might be the best option for it”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes” “I gave up and moved everyone over to SES instead.”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “Self-host your mail server” Reliable performance and uptime
“their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres” “Amazon SES works well and is cheap for SMTP.”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “All I wanted was a custom domain email”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Shared AWS IPs get blocklisted
“I have seen them do this to IPs fro Hetzner, Linode, Amazon AWS (SES), etc.”
Comment from 4 Mar 2026 in “Users fume over Outlook.com email 'carnage'” “I have seen blocks of ip addrs blocklisted from AWS due to others abusing nearby ip addrs”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “Self hosted email continues to steeply decline” AWS console and support frustrations
“finally forget about the nightmare of logging into the AWS console”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “You can just port things to Cloudflare Workers” “It is a major pita dealing with the SES team.”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” “I’ve used Amazon SES begrudgingly for years”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” Hard to get sending approved
“Amazon gates usage and denies it even for super boring internal company email.”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “Amazon SES introduces pricing plans” “It's next to impossible to get approved on Amazon SES now vs 10 years ago.”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” Rewrites Message-ID, breaks threading
“the provider (SES) rewrites the Message-ID in transit, so In-Reply-To/References matching silently breaks”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: ResolveHQ – A Helpdesk Built on Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2 and Queues” “SES for instance throws away your Message-ID and replaces it with another one”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Email is tough: Major European Payment Processor's Emails aren't RFC-Compliant”
Other email sending services people recommend
The four most recommended other email sending services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Email Service | 27 | 21 | 56% | 5 | — | — |
| Amazon SESThis page | 19 | 11 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| Postmark | 9 | 1 | 90% | 6 | — | — |
| AWS SES | 8 | 6 | 57% | 5 | — | — |
| SMTP2GO | 7 | 1 | 88% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
All 30 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“also ends up being free due to super low volume of emails”
“Amazon SES works well and is cheap for SMTP.”
“its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably”
“the provider (SES) rewrites the Message-ID in transit, so In-Reply-To/References matching silently breaks”
“I have seen blocks of ip addrs blocklisted from AWS due to others abusing nearby ip addrs”
“It fixed all my deliverability problems.”
“Amazon is always overpriced though.”
“I gave up and moved everyone over to SES instead.”
“using SES for sending avoids this entirely”
“At a few cents for five-figure numbers of emails, it's as close to free for personal/vanity email quantities as it gets”
“Amazon gates usage and denies it even for super boring internal company email.”
“Especially when compared to SES, we're a dev-friendly, fully modern sending platform”
“Cheap ($0.10/1000 emails) + good deliverability”
“it looks fairly affordable as well”
“their documentation, examples and error responses gave me a really easy time setting it up”
“It's next to impossible to get approved on Amazon SES now vs 10 years ago.”
“It is a major pita dealing with the SES team.”
“using SES is probably a better option compared to running a VPS just for SMTP”
“I’ve used Amazon SES begrudgingly for years”
“the SES → S3 approach is worth looking at”
“I have seen them do this to IPs fro Hetzner, Linode, Amazon AWS (SES), etc.”
“SES for instance throws away your Message-ID and replaces it with another one”
“I realized how cheap SES is and thought I might as well make the service free.”
“Cloudflare/SES works if you want raw email sending and receiving.”
“I feel as if Amazon SES might be the best option for it”
“finally forget about the nightmare of logging into the AWS console”
“my deliverability actually went down compared to sending the mail directly”
“to ensure high deliverability from day one”
“their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay”
“There are checks and hoops to jump through to ensure you can't send out spam.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.