Amazon SES vs Postal
Both are alternatives to SendGrid. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Postal 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.
Postal
Run your own mail server, properly — MIT, and complete.
Postal is a full self-hosted mail platform: sending, receiving, bounce handling, click and open tracking, DKIM signing and a web interface — the parts you would otherwise assemble from Postfix, OpenDKIM and a database. MIT, around 17k stars. It is the only option here where addresses never leave your infrastructure, which for GDPR-sensitive senders is not a preference but a requirement. The honest warning: running a mail server well is a real discipline, and reputation is unforgiving of mistakes.
Side by side
| Amazon SES | Postal | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 30 | 94 |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Local-first | No | Yes |
| License | Proprietary (hosted service) | MIT |
| Pricing | About $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Checked 2026-08-05. | Free and open source. You supply the server and the IP reputation. |
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
Postal
Strengths
- +MIT with no enterprise carve-out
- +Recipient addresses never leave your infrastructure
- +Full platform — sending, receiving, bounces, tracking, DKIM
- +No per-email cost at any volume
Trade-offs
- −You own IP reputation, and warming takes weeks of care
- −Running mail well is a genuine specialism
- −Blocklists are unforgiving of configuration mistakes
- −No shared warmed pool to fall back on
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-05. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.