AWS has an amazing free tier. For an indiehacker, and someone just starting to build, there are some really great services. If your SaaS/product needs a solid backend, then you are covered extremely well by the free tier. All my SaaS run on Lambda, SQS, Cloudfront. I pay a few bucks per month and process a tonne of data. I would recommend for anyone building data heavy products to use AWS backend. Also, if you send emails, AWS SES is a no brainer. The cheapest solution on the market. And probably the most reliable. The only downside to AWS is solid hosting for things like Nextjs. I hope they will have very cheap/free (starter) solutions for hosting nextjs for public websites. Overview of all the key free tier services: • Lambda: 1M requests, 400K GB-seconds. 1M requests/month, 400K GB-seconds compute. Enough for a small API or background jobs. • DynamoDB: 25 GB. 25 GB of storage and 25 read/write capacity units per month, always free, which works out to up to 200 million requests per month. • CloudFront: 1 TB. 1 TB of data transfer out to the internet per month, 10,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS requests and 2,000,000 CloudFront Function invocations per month. Invalidations, Lambda@Edge, Origin Shield and other usage types are excluded. This is the most valuable allowance on the list. • Cognito: 10K MAU. 10,000 monthly active users per month per account or AWS organization on Lite or Essentials. There is no free tier for the Plus tier, and SAML/OIDC federated users get only 50 MAUs. The often-quoted 50K figure applies only to user pools created on or before November 22, 2024. • SQS: 1M requests. 1M requests/month. Used for async job queues. • SNS: 1M publishes. 1M publishes, 100K HTTP deliveries, 1K email deliveries/month. • CloudWatch: 10 metrics and 10 alarms. 10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 1M API requests/month. Basic monitoring is free (5-minute intervals), while detailed monitoring (1-minute) costs $2.10/metric/month.
Amazon SES on X
SES is recommended as the cheapest, most reliable way to send, and it is where people land after leaving subscriber-priced platforms. The warnings are about what it leaves to the sender: deliverability and reputation, a clunky console, and production access that can be refused.
First written 27 Oct · what changed · from 115 posts by 98 people
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Tone· 65 posts from 57 people· written 27 Oct
How do people feel about Amazon SES?
Most of the talk is praise: 38 people call SES the cheap, reliable way to send, and they are joined by 12 who describe leaving a paid platform and cutting the bill. The disappointed are a minority of 5, mostly over a refused production-access request.
Praise is both general and specific: SES is "a no brainer" for sending, "the cheapest solution on the market", and the backend people fall back on when another provider lets them down. Quoted prices are $0.10 or $0.16 per 1,000 emails, and its free tier is named as enough for a small product.
The switchers mostly moved off a subscriber-priced platform. A newsletter writer left one after its third price rise, from a $1,000 first bill to a projected $4,000, and now pays under $300 a year on SES. Others replaced Resend at around $90 a month with SES at about $5, left Klaviyo after a bill tripled, or cut a €130 monthly stack to roughly a tenth across their whole toolchain.
The disappointed describe production access refused even for a verified business — "We won't give you access" — mail not reaching Apple users, and assert people are "replacing aws SES rn". 4 are glad to use it while naming the rough edges: more setup than Cloudflare, and Resend still ahead on developer experience.
- Praises it, recommends it43
- Switched to it and cut the bill13
- Frustrated with it or leaving5
- Happy, with reservations4
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Bye bye Beehiiv 👋 I vibe-coded my own newsletter platform: 📧 Campaign management w/ editor 🖥️ Web archives (link 🔗 API support 🫧 List cleanup, deliverability reports It took a few prompts with Opus 5.5. I left Beehiiv because they raised prices for the 3rd time in 2 years. - My first yearly bill was $1,000. - My future bill would have been $4,000. Now I'm using AWS SES + MongoDB, and I will pay less than $300/year. Newsletter platforms charge per subscriber, when in fact the real cost is the number of emails sent. Subscribers will naturally become inactive, so you end up paying more for something that hurts your deliverability (sending to dormant subscribers = spam trap). So I've set a cleanup cron job for my newsletter alternative. It marks inactive subs as dormant, sends one last re-engaging email, and stops emailing them. Money saved. Deliverability increased. I also gain a priceless feature: Freedom. I can change the UI, add features, connect all my apps - anything is possible with just a prompt. I'm replacing Resend next. I love it, but it's very expensive ($400/mo)
Some indie hackers are claiming: "Software is dead" "You can vibe code any alternative" Let me share a story... A founder came to us with a SaaS he vibe coded himself. A fitness app. It worked. 100+ users. The bill didn't. $300/mo across Resend, Vercel and Supabase. We moved it: - resend → aws ses - vercel → hetzner + coolify - supabase storage → cloudflare r2 Then we found the app making third party API calls it didn't need. On every request. New bill: $10/mo. Took us 3 weeks. He didn't need someone to write code. AI does that now. He needed someone who's shipped 25+ of these and knows where the money leaks. You can't vibe code that. Software isn't dead. Shipping it alone just got more expensive.
Bu ay e-posta listemi yönettiğim platformdaki faturam 3 katına çıktı. Ödemedim, kendi aracımı kurdum artık aylık maliyetim 3$’ın altında 💁♂️ Klaviyo’ya eylüle kadar ayda 20 dolar ödüyordum. Ekimde fatura 60 dolar geldi. Listeme günde ~100 yeni kişi dahil olduğu için sırada: 2.501 kişide 70 dolar, 3.501 kişide 100 dolar fatura ödemek durumunda kalacaktım. Araştırırken Amazon’un e-posta gönderme servisi SES’e denk geldim: 1.000 mail 10 sent. 3 günde yaptıklarım: - açık kaynak bir mail uygulamasınının üzerine kendi ihtiyaçlarımı ve gördüğüm eksiklikleri ekledim. - Aws SES başvurularımı yaptım ve onay aldım - SES’i kendi alan adımla kurdum - 2.200 aboneyi taşıdım, ölü adresleri ayıkladım Salı günü ilk bültenim gitti: 2.223 gönderildi, 2.172 tanesi ulaştı. Toplam maliyet sadece 22 sent 🥹 Sonra aynı faturayı ödeyen çok kişi olduğunu gördüm. Aracı herkesin kullanabileceği hale getirdim. Neler yapıyor: - Bülten ve otomasyon - Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor MCP desteği - Ayda 9 dolara 20.000 mail - Sipariş onayı, üye giriş linki gibi linkler Ürün her şeyiyle hazır ancak henüz lansmanını yapmadım. Sizde ödediğiniz faturalardan muzdaripseniz linki aşağıya bırakıyorum 👇
Even with a 10-year-old domain and a fully verified registered business entity, AWS SES Support has firmly denied our production access request with the direct statement: 'We won't give you access.' We must now focus on alternative infrastructure.
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Pain points· 23 posts· written 27 Oct
What do people complain about with Amazon SES?
The complaint people raise most is that SES does not manage delivery or reputation for you: 7 people say warm-up, domain reputation and SPF/DKIM/DMARC are the sender's job. Close behind comes the setup itself — console, complexity, upkeep — from 6.
The reputation point is made in the strongest terms: SES is "notorious for poor email deliverability out of the box", you need "a complicated rating system" to send at scale, and delivery depends on "a domain reputation, good content and proper AWS SES configuration problem" rather than a platform's secret sauce. Practical detail people add: Gmail will throttle a domain that never sent at that volume, so warm up gradually, day by day, and for steady high volume they recommend a dedicated IP over the shared AWS pool — which some say they cannot get.
On upkeep, the AWS console is called a "terrible UX" and the UI "painful to watch"; one person jokes that switching from a $99/mo SaaS to a dollar-a-month SES will "ruin my life", and another who self-hosted found "so many issues that don't come up with email marketing software".
Production access and the sandbox follow with 5: a cap of 200 emails a day until you apply, rejections with no reason given, and a verified business turned away.
- Deliverability and reputation work7
- Clunky setup and upkeep6
- Production access and sandbox limits5
- Outages and account pauses3
- Not cheap at scale2
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All good, but if you go this route with email tools, please, people, for the love of god (or whatever entity you believe in), DO NOT vibe code your email sending infrastructure. Also, AWS SES (what Marc uses to send) is notorious for poor email deliverability out of the box - you have to manage, warm up, and grow your reputation on your own. So good luck with that. There's a whole lot more than UI that goes into SaaS behind the scenes.
many people are laughing on marc behind his back because they think he doesn't understand that AWS SES has a reputation system. and you need a complicated rating system to be sending emails at scale through AWS SES I think that marc is smart and it's just part of his plan to go super viral. I'm pretty sure once people start complaining about mailcheap, he will pull an ace up of his sleeve and make another million $$$ - like he did with shipfast
não mande kkkkkkkk brincadeiras à parte, é mais simples do que parece: se forem emails marketing, vc obviamente precisa ter o consentimento de toda essa galera pra isso se o domínio que estiver enviando nunca enviou tanto email assim antes, é comum o próprio gmail "frear" os emails e eles ficam pendentes até que o gmail os aceite e claro, se o domínio nunca teve um volume alto assim, as chances de vc ir pro spam são extremamente altas, então seria necessário um warmup antes, isto é, enviar um pouco por dia e ir aumentando o volume gradativamente e para volumes constantemente altos, o recomendo é até ter um IP dedicado ao invés de usar o pool de ips da aws ses - e não temos suporte à IP dedicado na millionsend ainda
emails bros explaining how switching from $99/mo saas to $1/mo aws ses will ruin my life
interested but also get nervous about figuring out how to setup AWS SES because of the terrible UX AWS has
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Alternatives· 35 posts from 28 people· written 27 Oct
What are the alternatives to Amazon SES?
Resend is what SES gets weighed against most, by 6 people, then self-hosted Listmonk at 4. Cloudflare Email Service and PostShiba come next, level at 3 and 3, and behind them a long tail of platforms people leave over subscriber-based bills.
Resend is described as "an AWS SES wrapper with a better user experience" or "an AWS reseller", and the common move is resend → aws ses when the bill bites — one agency cut a founder's stack from $300 a month to $10 that way, another replaced roughly $90 a month with about $5.
Listmonk is the self-hosted front end people pair with SES: free, open source, connected over SMTP or run on Coolify and Railway, and the answer to "stop paying for pretty ui".
Cloudflare Email Service is called cheaper than SES by one person and much faster to set up by another, but its policy allows transactional mail only; someone who left Cloudflare's sending went back to SES because support could not compare. PostShiba draws people on responsive support and design, and pricing that one person says beats SES past high volume.
Sendy, Plunk and Transmit appear as one-payment or bring-your-own-SES middle grounds. Loops, Klaviyo, Brevo, SendGrid, Mailgun and Beehiiv are each named by a few people as platforms they left or weighed.
- Resend7
- Listmonk7
- Cloudflare Email Service3
- PostShiba3
- Sendy2
- Plunk2
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Some indie hackers are claiming: "Software is dead" "You can vibe code any alternative" Let me share a story... A founder came to us with a SaaS he vibe coded himself. A fitness app. It worked. 100+ users. The bill didn't. $300/mo across Resend, Vercel and Supabase. We moved it: - resend → aws ses - vercel → hetzner + coolify - supabase storage → cloudflare r2 Then we found the app making third party API calls it didn't need. On every request. New bill: $10/mo. Took us 3 weeks. He didn't need someone to write code. AI does that now. He needed someone who's shipped 25+ of these and knows where the money leaks. You can't vibe code that. Software isn't dead. Shipping it alone just got more expensive.
Resend is actually an AWS SES wrapper with a better user experience.
Just use Listmonk, it's free, open-source, and has been around forever (first commit 2018). You just need to set it up once with AWS SES, and you pay $ 0.10 for 1000 emails. link
€130/mo → €13/mo stop paying for pretty ui and self host my stack: - resend (€80/mo) → aws ses + listmonk - supabase (€25/mo) → hetzner + postgresql - vercel (€25/mo) → hetzner + coolify - auth → better-auth (free) - storage → cloudflare r2 (zero egress) steal it if you want to cut down costs
- 被 Cloudflare D1 背刺过，最后迁移到了 @supabase - 被 Cloudflare Email Send 背刺过，最后回退到了 AWS SES - 被 Cloudflare RealtimeKit 背刺过，最后重新了产品代码，扯皮浪费了一个月时间 Cloudflare 的技术可以，但是他们的 billing 系统，support 完全没法和 AWS 比，一旦出问题大概率被坑
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Questions· 16 posts from 15 people· written 27 Oct
What do people ask about Amazon SES?
Two questions come up level, at 4 people each: why use SES directly instead of a paid tool on top or a rival, and whether it can carry the volume and win production approval. 3 ask whether SES is not simply cheaper, and 2 whether their mail will land at all.
The why-SES question is often aimed at the layer above: "Why listmonk instead AWS SES?", "why not use AWS ses directly?" for transactional mail, and why a builder picked SES over Cloudflare or Resend. It is asked both ways — why pick SES, and why pay someone else when SES is underneath.
The volume questions are about approval and caps: whether production access came through on the first request, how to get it at all — one person offers a trick by direct message to anyone refused — whether SES suits sending newsletters in bulk, and where the "hard limits" sit. Someone who had put the same question to an AI called running it "a continuous job for something as critical as the ability to send emails".
Cheaper is its own recurring question, put to Resend directly ("now you can compete with AWS SES on price ?") and about SES versus a named sending tool. Delivery is asked plainly too: is SES "not famous for its high delivery rate", and does it just handle a bad email IP for you?
- Why SES and not something else?4
- Can SES handle my sending volume?4
- Isn't SES cheaper?3
- Does this tool send through SES?3
- Will my mail land, and does SES handle reputation?2
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Why listmonk instand AWS SES ?
Seems like it's for only transactional emails, if so why not use AWS ses directly?
That’s very good. Why did you choose AWS SES, not other like Cloudflare or Resend?
Did you get aws ses production access on your first request?
yes it is possible and you have build one but operating it is a continuous job for something as critical ability to send emails btw you could build your own stripe and bank too but would you? @grok is aws ses a good option for sending mewsletters in bulk?
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Wishes· 3 posts· written 27 Oct
What do people want from Amazon SES?
Only 3 people ask for anything here, each with a different wish: a one-click framework integration for SES (1), a sender that is not tied to SES so it can run on a cheap VPS (1), and a lightweight open-source sender to sit in front of it (1).
The three wishes point in different directions. One person expected a framework to partner with SES the way it does with a cache or a database: connecting "a few env variables doesn't mean much to me" — they wanted it "in one click" so they would not need a third-party subscription.
Another asked a SES-based project whether it plans not to depend on SES, so it could be hosted on any infrastructure — a cheap VPS, for instance — rather than specifically on AWS.
The third wants a memory-efficient open-source alternative to Resend, in Go, Rust or Zig with htmx, and names SES as the sending layer in their "ideal stack" alongside Postgres and RiverQueue.
That is the whole of the wishing on the page: too few posts to call any of it a pattern, so each wish is told as its own.
- One-click framework integration1
- Don't tie it to SES1
- Open-source sender to pair with SES1
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Connecting a few env variables doesn’t mean much to me. I expected Laravel to partner with Cloudflare or AWS SES and give it to me in one click, just like cache, database, and instance. This way we have to have a third-party subscription.
Muito foda! Meus parabéns, mas uma dúvida, pode soar muito besta, mas já você tem algum plano pra não depender do AWS SES? Ou esse projeto foi feito para ele mesmo e acabou. Seria interessante permitir que seja hospedado em qualquer infraestrutura e não especificamente no AWS SES visto que uma pessoa pegar uma VPS baratinha e hospedar isso, seria muito bacana e acredito que iria ajudar muita gente.
Is there a memory-efficient open-source alternative to Resend? Preferably written in #Go, #Rust, or #Zig + #htmx? My ideal stack would be: #htmx + (Go, Rust, Zig) + #Postgres (with RiverQueue) + #AWS #SES
In their words
How do people talk about Amazon SES?
The phrases people use most, counted once per person.
- 1“transactional emails”3
- 2“aws ses wrapper”2
- 3“resend aws ses”2
- 4“production access”2
- 5“email day cap”2
- 6“newsletter platform”2
- 7“self host”2
- 8“smtp server”2
- 9“free tier”2
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Also in Transactional email APIs
- Resend−37%Resend draws wide enthusiasm — 28 of 82 people here love it, recommend it or show what they built — with AWS and SES the comparison that leads (9 people) and complaints thin.211 posts / 7d
- SendGrid−41%Talk about SendGrid is led by people leaving: 9 are migrating, weighing a move or objecting to the dependence, against 5 who say it simply sends their mail.143 posts / 7d
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