AWS SES
Ranked 4 of 6 email sending services by recommenders
People recommend AWS SES as a reliable, low-cost way to send email with strong deliverability, often a few dollars a month. The common caveat is that getting production access approved can take weeks and feels like a hassle.
People recommend AWS SES as a reliable, low-cost way to send email with strong deliverability, often a few dollars a month. The common caveat is that getting production access approved can take weeks and feels like a hassle.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 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
Strong deliverability and anti-spam reputation
“AWS SES (one of AWS's flagship products, and probably the biggest email sender in the world) is a pretty responsible anti-spam citizen.”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” “AWS SES is the gold standard of deliverability”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” Very cheap to run
“If you're willing to do a bit of work to use AWS SES, that would be $2-$5 a month.”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Last Issue of "ECMAScript News"” “With AWS SES for sending mail, this Cloudflare + Gmail setup would be ~free”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “All I wanted was a custom domain email”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Production approval slow and opaque
“It can take weeks to get AWS SES (Simple Email Service) approved for production on a small account”
Comment from 30 Oct 2026 in “Northflank Breached” “I had more trouble onboarding AWS SES, with a process that felt more like me begging”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite” “being told nope and we can't tell you why”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents” Setup takes too much work
“I had more trouble onboarding AWS SES, with a process that felt more like me begging”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite” “AWS SES is just too much work.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Onlyrecipe 2.0 – I added all features HN requested – 4 years later”
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 SES | 19 | 11 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| Postmark | 9 | 1 | 90% | 6 | — | — |
| AWS SESThis page | 8 | 6 | 57% | 5 | — | — |
| SMTP2GO | 7 | 1 | 88% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
13 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It can take weeks to get AWS SES (Simple Email Service) approved for production on a small account”
“Most have sufficient free tier for one or few users.”
“With AWS SES for sending mail, this Cloudflare + Gmail setup would be ~free”
“The hard part is the webmail access: you have to choose between a poor interface”
“AWS SES is the gold standard of deliverability”
“being told nope and we can't tell you why”
“AWS SES (one of AWS's flagship products, and probably the biggest email sender in the world) is a pretty responsible anti-spam citizen.”
“The circular logic here is genuinely frustrating”
“AWS SES does not work for me at all, the sending success rate is really bad.”
“it might be better to have one less internet-facing server to worry about”
“AWS SES is just too much work.”
“I had more trouble onboarding AWS SES, with a process that felt more like me begging”
“If you're willing to do a bit of work to use AWS SES, that would be $2-$5 a month.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.