Amazon SES vs listmonk
Both are alternatives to SendGrid. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as listmonk vs Amazon SES — same comparison, one verdict.
listmonk is open source (AGPL-3.0) and Amazon SES is not (Proprietary (hosted service)) — so the real question is whether you want to own the transactional & bulk email stack or rent it.
Amazon SES
TOP PICKRoughly $0.10 per thousand — the price floor for this category.
SES is deliberately unglamorous: an API and an SMTP endpoint, priced at around $0.10 per thousand emails, which is a fraction of every managed competitor. There is no campaign builder and the interface is AWS-plain. What you get is Amazon's deliverability infrastructure at close to cost, and for transactional mail — resets, receipts, alerts — that is the entire requirement. The friction is the sandbox: new accounts are limited until you request production access and explain your sending practices, which is a deliberate anti-spam gate rather than an obstacle.
listmonk
Self-hosted newsletters — a single binary handling millions.
listmonk is a self-hosted newsletter and mailing-list manager: subscriber management, segmentation, templates, analytics and bounce processing, as one Go binary with Postgres behind it. AGPL-3.0, around 23k stars, and documented as handling millions of subscribers on modest hardware. It is not a transactional sender — it hands off to SES or your own SMTP — which makes it a complement rather than a competitor. For anyone paying Mailchimp per subscriber for a newsletter, this removes that bill entirely.
Side by side
10 points of comparison, every one read from a verified field. Green marks the side that wins a row outright. A dash means we do not hold that fact — never that it is zero.
| Amazon SES | listmonk | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty ScoreOur transparent 0–100 composite for data ownership and exit cost. | 30 | 93 |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Local-first data | No | Yes |
| License | Proprietary (hosted service) | AGPL-3.0 |
| Pricing | About $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Checked 2026-08-05. | Free and open source. You pay only for the underlying sending. |
| RAM to run it wellThe figure that actually matters, not the vendor's minimum. | — | 1 GB |
| Realistic running costWhat the box costs each month if you run it yourself. | — | $6/mo plus SMTP relay costs, against Mailchimp pricing that scales per subscriber |
| Setup timeHonest first-install estimate, not the marketing quickstart. | — | 1 hour for the app, plus the real work below |
| Ongoing maintenanceThe part nobody budgets for. | — | Low for the app. Deliverability is the ongoing job. |
Amazon SES is Macrostack's recommended SendGrid alternative, so it's our pick here.
Weighing both against staying on SendGrid? Is SendGrid free? What it actually costs →
Amazon SES
Strengths
- +Cheapest credible option by a wide margin
- +Amazon's deliverability infrastructure at near cost
- +Scales to enormous volume without renegotiation
- +Free from EC2 within generous limits
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted; deepens AWS dependency
- −No campaign builder or marketing tooling
- −Sandbox approval required before production sending
- −You configure DKIM, SPF and DMARC yourself
listmonk
Strengths
- +Removes per-subscriber pricing entirely
- +One Go binary plus Postgres — genuinely simple to run
- +Handles very large lists on modest hardware
- +Subscriber data stays on your infrastructure
Trade-offs
- −Not a transactional sender — pairs with SES or your own SMTP
- −AGPL-3.0 needs reading before embedding it in a product
- −No shared IP reputation; deliverability is yours
- −Fewer templates than the commercial platforms
Which one fits you
The trade-offs above, turned into a decision. Find the line that describes your team.
Choose Amazon SES
if cheapest credible option by a wide margin.
Choose listmonk
if you want the source and the option to fork it, and you would rather run it on your own hardware, and your data should stay on machines you control.
Neither, yet
if both carry a real cost you should weigh first — proprietary and hosted; deepens AWS dependency, and not a transactional sender — pairs with SES or your own SMTP. If either of those is a dealbreaker for your team, the shortlist is wrong rather than the choice.
What it takes to run these yourself
Real requirements and honest running costs, not the vendor quickstart.
Amazon SES vs listmonk — common questions
Is Amazon SES a better fit than listmonk for transactional & bulk email?
It depends on what you are optimising for, and the honest split is this: listmonk scores 93 to Amazon SES's 30 on data ownership and exit cost, so it is the safer choice if you care about being able to leave. Amazon SES earns its place on a different axis — cheapest credible option by a wide margin. Neither is a wrong answer for every team; the table above is the actual comparison.
What happens if we want to switch later?
listmonk keeps its data local or in open formats, so leaving is an export rather than a negotiation. Amazon SES keeps your data on its own infrastructure, which is the part to plan for: confirm the export path before you commit, not when you are already trying to leave.
Is listmonk free?
listmonk: Free and open source. You pay only for the underlying sending.. The other side of this comparison, Amazon SES, is priced as About $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Checked 2026-08-05.. "Free" here means no licence fee — if you self-host it you still pay for the server, and the running cost row above is our honest estimate of that.
Can I self-host listmonk?
listmonk can be self-hosted; Amazon SES cannot, so it stays on the vendor's infrastructure whatever you do.
Are Amazon SES and listmonk both alternatives to SendGrid?
Yes — both appear in our SendGrid comparison, which is why they are worth putting side by side. People usually arrive here already having decided to move off SendGrid and now choosing between the two replacements, which is a narrower and much easier question.
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-09-27. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.