# Startup Mail vs Amazon SES > Compare Startup Mail and Amazon SES for custom-domain email, sending, receiving, AWS setup, inboxes, APIs, scaling, and total cost. Amazon SES gives developers low-level email infrastructure. Startup Mail gives a company a working mailbox built on managed email infrastructure. Choose Startup Mail when you want to connect a domain and use email through a web inbox, forwarding, API, webhooks, or MCP. Choose Amazon SES when you want control, high volume, low unit costs, and the engineering work that comes with them. ## The short answer Amazon Simple Email Service can send and receive email. It provides APIs, SMTP, receipt rules, reputation controls, and delivery events. It does not turn those parts into a normal company inbox. To build one on SES, you need storage, MIME parsing, threads, attachments, permissions, a user interface, queues, retries, bounce handling, and operational monitoring. You also need to secure every AWS resource involved. Startup Mail provides those pieces as a product. You pay more per message in exchange for doing less infrastructure work. ## Startup Mail and Amazon SES at a glance | Capability | Startup Mail | Amazon SES | | --------------------------------- | ------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | Custom-domain sending | Yes | Yes | | Email receiving | Yes | Yes, in supported Regions | | Human web inbox | Yes | No | | Stored mailbox threads | Yes | Build it | | Shared and private mailbox access | Yes | Build it | | Gmail or Outlook forwarding | Yes | Build routing or use another service | | REST API | Mailbox-level API | Email infrastructure API | | SMTP | No | Yes | | Application events | Signed HTTPS webhooks | Configure an AWS event destination | | MCP | Yes | No native mailbox MCP interface | | Attachment storage and access | Included in mailbox model | Build with S3 or another store | | Delivery events and suppression | Included | Configure with SES and other AWS services | | Open and click tracking | No | Available through event publishing | | High-volume sending | Not the main use case | Yes | | Dedicated IP options | No | Yes | | Infrastructure control | Managed product | High | AWS details come from the [SES receiving guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/receiving-email.html), [event destination guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/event-destinations-manage.html), [quota documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/quotas.html), and [pricing page](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/). We checked them on 25 August 2026. ## What Amazon SES provides SES handles the email network boundary. For outbound mail, an application can use the SES API or SMTP. SES can publish delivery, bounce, complaint, delay, open, and click events to services such as CloudWatch, EventBridge, Firehose, or SNS. For inbound mail, SES accepts messages in supported Regions and applies receipt rules. A rule can save a message to S3, publish to SNS, call Lambda, route mail to WorkMail, or reject it. These are useful building blocks. They leave product decisions to you. SES does not decide how a support thread should appear, who can read a founder's mailbox, how an agent should receive a limited key, or how a Gmail user should reply from a forwarded message. Your system must provide those answers. ## What you need to build around SES A basic send API can be small. A safe two-way mailbox is not. A production mailbox built on SES may need: 1. Domain and identity verification 2. MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup 3. SES production access and quota management 4. Receipt rules for valid addresses 5. S3 or another store for raw messages and attachments 6. SNS, EventBridge, Lambda, or queues for events 7. MIME parsing and HTML sanitisation 8. Spam and virus verdict handling 9. Message and attachment size limits 10. Duplicate event handling 11. Thread matching from email headers 12. A database for mailboxes, threads, labels, and read state 13. Authentication and tenant-scoped authorisation 14. A web inbox 15. API keys and scopes 16. Webhook signing and retries 17. Bounce, complaint, and suppression handling 18. Monitoring, alarms, backups, and recovery tests SES can support all of this. It does not supply it as one mailbox product. The work may be worthwhile when email is a strategic part of your platform. It is harder to justify when a small team only needs several working company addresses. ## Choose Startup Mail when the mailbox is the goal Startup Mail turns a verified domain into shared or private mailboxes. Incoming mail is parsed, stored, grouped into threads, and made available through the web inbox, forwarding, REST API, SDKs, signed webhooks, and MCP. Outgoing mail from those interfaces returns to the same conversation history. A control-plane API can also provision domains, tenants, mailboxes, drafts, and communication policies; administrators manage keys in the web app. Mailbox access and workspace administration remain separate. An admin can manage the domain without reading a private mailbox. An agent key can be limited to one tenant or mailbox, then narrowed further by capabilities. Choose Startup Mail for: - A small company's custom-domain email - Shared `hello@`, `support@`, or `billing@` addresses - Private founder or employee mail - Gmail or Outlook forwarding - Human and agent collaboration - An inbound email API with stored threads - Direct and requested transactional conversations Startup Mail does not offer general SMTP or IMAP access, marketing campaigns, or the infrastructure controls available in AWS. ## Choose SES when control and volume matter SES is the better choice when your engineers want to own the mail system. It can support high sending volumes, dedicated IPs, custom event pipelines, several AWS integrations, detailed IAM controls, and region-specific architecture. Teams already running on AWS may prefer to keep email events, storage, monitoring, and audit data inside the same platform. Choose SES for: - Large transactional sending volumes - SMTP requirements - Custom delivery event pipelines - Dedicated IPs - AWS-native security and observability - A product with its own mailbox interface - Custom retention and storage policies - Teams with email and cloud operations expertise That control also makes your team responsible for IAM policies, public endpoints, storage lifecycle, queue failures, parsing bugs, and tenant boundaries. ## Pricing is only one part of cost Since 21 July 2026, [AWS's SES pricing page](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/) says new account and Region pairs without metered SES activity since 1 June 2025 start on the Essentials plan. For the first 10 million outbound emails or emails processed by Mail Manager, Essentials lists $0.16 per 1,000. Customers can switch to à-la-carte pricing, which lists $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails and $0.10 per 1,000 inbound emails. Extra charges may apply for outgoing message data, incoming 256 KB chunks, Mail Manager, open ingress endpoints, dedicated IPs, Virtual Deliverability Manager, and the AWS services used around SES. The raw email charge is low. At 10,000 simple outbound messages, the à-la-carte message charge is about $1 before data and other services. That is not the total cost of a mailbox. Add S3, Lambda, SNS or EventBridge, queues, logs, monitoring, engineering time, security review, and maintenance. Startup Mail costs $2 per month or $12 per year for 1,000 email events per month. An incoming delivery, each outbound recipient, and each forwarded copy count as events. SES has the lower raw unit cost and better high-volume economics. Startup Mail can cost less overall when it removes enough engineering and operating work. ## The SES sandbox and production access New SES accounts begin in a sandbox for each Region. The sandbox allows up to 200 messages in 24 hours at one message per second. Sending to ordinary recipients is restricted until AWS grants production access. Production quotas then depend on the account, use case, and Region. Startup Mail handles this provider account process. It applies its own sending limits and abuse controls at the workspace level. A team that uses SES directly must plan for quota requests, warm-up, bounce and complaint rates, and provider review. ## Can you use both? Yes. A larger company may use its own SES account for high-volume product messages while keeping human mailboxes in Startup Mail. For example: - SES sends password resets and service alerts. - Startup Mail handles `founder@`, `hello@`, and `support@`. - An agent reads one Startup Mail inbox through a mailbox-scoped key. - Product engineers inspect SES events in their AWS monitoring stack. This keeps low-level delivery separate from company correspondence. ## Which should you choose? Choose Startup Mail if you want the result: a custom-domain mailbox used by people and software. Choose Amazon SES if you want the parts and have a reason to assemble them yourself. SES is better for scale, SMTP, unit price, dedicated IPs, and AWS control. Startup Mail is better for quick setup, a human inbox, stored threads, team permissions, forwarding, and agent access. The deciding question is simple: do you want to operate email infrastructure, or use a mailbox? ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Startup Mail an Amazon SES alternative? Yes, for teams that want managed custom-domain sending and receiving. It is not a replacement for SES when raw volume, SMTP, dedicated IPs, or custom AWS architecture are central requirements. ### Can Amazon SES receive email? Yes, in supported AWS Regions. Receipt rules can store messages in S3, publish events, call Lambda, route to WorkMail, or reject messages. ### Does SES include an inbox? No. SES provides sending and receiving infrastructure. You must build the mailbox data model, storage, interface, permissions, threading, and operational controls or add another AWS product. ### Is Amazon SES cheaper? Its raw message price is lower. The full cost depends on data, add-ons, other AWS services, engineering time, maintenance, and support. SES is usually more economical at high volume when a team can operate it well. ### Which is better for an AI agent? Startup Mail is easier when the agent needs a scoped mailbox with threads and human oversight. SES is more flexible when you are building the whole agent email system and want AWS-level control. ### Can Startup Mail send marketing campaigns? No. Startup Mail is for direct and requested transactional mail. SES can send marketing email, but you must manage consent, unsubscribes, reputation, and applicable law. ## Related reading - [Email API vs inbox API: What are you actually building?](https://staging.startupmail.dev/guides/email-api-vs-inbox-api.md): Learn the difference between a sending API, inbound email processing, and an inbox API, then choose the right email architecture for your product. - [How to get custom-domain email without an office suite](https://staging.startupmail.dev/guides/custom-domain-email-without-office-suite.md): Set up email on your own domain without buying calendars, documents, meetings, and other office-suite tools you may not need. - [Startup Mail vs Postmark](https://staging.startupmail.dev/compare/postmark-alternative.md): Compare Startup Mail and Postmark for transactional sending, inbound email, persistent inboxes, teams, APIs, analytics, and pricing.