About

Amazon SES grew out of Amazon's own need to email millions of order confirmations and shipping notices without paying an outside vendor for the privilege. AWS opened it up as a public product in 2011, and the pricing has stayed aggressive ever since, since Amazon is essentially selling spare capacity on infrastructure it already built for itself. If you're already running EC2 instances or Lambda functions, wiring in SES is often just another API call away, and the cost per email undercuts nearly every named competitor on this list once you're sending real volume.

None of this involves any artificial intelligence, to be clear. SES is undecorated sending infrastructure, and Amazon didn't build much around the engine itself. New accounts start in a sandbox that will only deliver to addresses you've manually verified, and getting out of it means submitting a request explaining your use case and waiting for AWS to approve it, anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. There's no template builder, no built-in unsubscribe management, and the console looks like the same utilitarian AWS interface you'd use to configure an S3 bucket. Plenty of companies use SES anyway, often as the delivery layer underneath a friendlier tool they built themselves or bought from someone else, because at scale the savings are hard to ignore.