Amazon SES vs Loops for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Amazon SES Overview

Amazon SES is email infrastructure stripped down to the essentials. It sends emails for $0.10 per 1,000 messages. That is its pitch, and that pitch works when volume is high and budget is tight.

You get an API for sending, SNS integration for delivery notifications, CloudWatch for metrics, and basic templating. Everything beyond that, automation sequences, contact management, analytics dashboards, suppression list maintenance, is something you build or configure yourself using other AWS services or custom code.

Setting up SES means creating an AWS account, configuring IAM policies, verifying your domain, requesting production access out of the sandbox (which can take a day), and wiring up SNS topics for bounce and complaint handling. If you skip the bounce handling part, AWS can suspend your sending privileges when your bounce rate exceeds their threshold.

Loops Overview

Loops is purpose-built for SaaS companies that want to manage their entire email strategy in one platform. It handles transactional email, product announcements, onboarding sequences, and re-engagement campaigns through a visual interface designed for speed.

The automation builder is the standout feature. You create flows triggered by user events: signup, trial start, feature activation, plan upgrade, inactivity. Each flow has steps with delays, conditions, and branching logic. You build a complete onboarding email sequence in an afternoon without touching your backend code.

Contact management tracks user properties and lets you create segments. You can target emails based on plan type, last login date, feature usage, or any custom property you send through the API. The dashboard shows open rates, click rates, and flow performance in clean, readable charts.

Loops starts free for up to 1,000 contacts. The paid tier at $49/month supports 5,000 contacts with unlimited sends.

Key Differences

These are fundamentally different categories of tool. SES is a pipe that carries email from your server to an inbox. Loops is a platform that decides which emails to send, when to send them, and tracks how recipients engage. Comparing them is like comparing a delivery truck to a logistics company.

Time to value. With Loops, you sign up, connect your domain, build an onboarding flow in the visual editor, and start sending automated emails within a few hours. With SES, you spend those same hours just getting out of the sandbox and configuring bounce handling. The actual email logic, the part that drives user engagement and conversion, still needs to be built in your application code.

Automation is the defining gap. Loops has a visual flow builder for multi-step email sequences with conditions and delays. SES has nothing. To replicate Loops' automation with SES, you need a task queue (like Celery or BullMQ), a database to track user states and email history, scheduling logic for delays, and conditional branching code. That is days of development work for what Loops offers out of the box.

Contact management. Loops tracks every user with properties, events, and engagement history. You can segment your audience and send targeted emails. SES does not store contacts. It sends individual emails to addresses you provide. Any user tracking or segmentation requires your own database and application logic.

Cost structure. SES charges per email. At moderate SaaS volumes (10,000 emails/month), SES costs about $1. Loops at 3,000 contacts costs $49/month. The price gap is real. But the development time to build Loops-equivalent features on top of SES, automation, contact tracking, analytics, segmentation, easily costs hundreds of hours. The $49/month pays for itself in the first week.

Analytics and insights. Loops shows you which flows convert, which emails get opened, and which users are engaged. SES gives you delivery metrics through CloudWatch, open and click tracking requires additional configuration with configuration sets and event destinations. Understanding user engagement with raw SES data requires significant custom analytics work.

When to Choose Amazon SES

• You have specific infrastructure requirements that need raw email API access
• You are already invested in AWS and want to keep everything in one ecosystem
• You are building custom email tooling for very specific use cases
• Volume is extremely high and every dollar of email cost matters
• You have engineering time to build automation, analytics, and contact management

When to Choose Loops

• You are building a SaaS product and want email automation without custom code
• Onboarding sequences, trial conversion emails, and re-engagement campaigns are important
• You want contact management with segmentation and user property tracking
• Speed of implementation matters more than saving a few dollars on email delivery
• You prefer a visual builder over writing backend email scheduling logic

The Verdict

If you are a solo developer building a SaaS product, Loops is the clear winner. The automation features alone save you weeks of development time compared to building equivalent functionality on SES. You will ship onboarding emails, conversion flows, and product updates in hours instead of days.

SES makes sense in narrow scenarios: you are already deep in AWS, you have very specific infrastructure requirements, or your email volumes are so high that the cost difference is material. For a solo SaaS developer sending thousands (not millions) of emails per month, the cost savings of SES do not come close to justifying the development time you would invest.

My advice: use Loops for everything user-facing, the onboarding flows, the product updates, the re-engagement campaigns. If you later hit a scale where SES pricing makes a meaningful difference, you can migrate the high-volume transactional sends to SES while keeping Loops for the automation and marketing side. But most solo developers never reach that threshold.