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.
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
| Amazon SES | listmonk | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 30 | 93 |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Local-first | 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. |
Amazon SES is Macrostack's recommended SendGrid alternative, so it's our pick here.
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
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-05. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.