Amazon SES vs Plunk for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Amazon SES Overview

Amazon Simple Email Service is the cheapest way to send email at scale. At $0.10 per 1,000 emails, you get AWS-grade infrastructure for pennies. SES is battle-tested, handling massive volumes for companies of every size, and it integrates natively with the broader AWS ecosystem.

The catch is that SES is infrastructure, not a product. You get an API that sends email. Everything else, bounce handling, complaint management, suppression lists, template management, deliverability monitoring, is your responsibility. AWS provides the raw components (SNS for notifications, CloudWatch for metrics, S3 for receiving email), but you wire them together yourself.

Getting started requires creating an AWS account, navigating to SES, verifying your domain, requesting production access (sandbox mode only sends to verified addresses), configuring IAM permissions, and setting up SNS topics for bounces and complaints. If you have used AWS before, this takes a couple of hours. If you have not, plan for a full day.

Plunk Overview

Plunk is an open-source email platform that wraps a friendly interface and useful features around the basic act of sending email. It handles transactional email, event-triggered automations, and broadcast campaigns. You can self-host it for free or use the managed cloud version.

The interesting part for budget-conscious developers is that self-hosted Plunk typically connects to Amazon SES for actual email delivery. So you get SES pricing with a real product on top. Instead of building your own bounce handling, template system, and automation logic, Plunk provides all of that through a dashboard and API.

The automation system lets you define events (user_signup, trial_ending, payment_failed) and trigger email sequences automatically. Contact management includes properties and segments for targeted messaging. The API is clean and well-documented, making integration straightforward for developers who want to get email working without deep infrastructure knowledge.

Key Differences

Plunk is essentially a product layer on top of SES. When you self-host Plunk with SES as the delivery provider, you pay SES rates for sending but get a dashboard, automation, contact management, and analytics on top. This is the key insight: you are not really choosing between these tools. You can use both together.

Management overhead. With raw SES, you manage everything: bounce processing, complaint handling, suppression lists, template storage, and sending logic. With Plunk (even self-hosted), the platform handles bounce processing, provides a template system, and manages contacts for you. The overhead shifts from email infrastructure management to Plunk application maintenance.

Automation. SES has no automation concept. It sends what you tell it to send. Plunk has event-triggered automations where you define user events and the platform sends the right emails at the right times with configurable delays. Building this with raw SES means writing a worker queue system, scheduling logic, and state tracking in your own application.

Dashboard and analytics. Plunk gives you a visual dashboard showing delivery stats, open rates, click rates, and contact activity. SES provides metrics through CloudWatch, which means navigating AWS dashboards and building custom queries. For a quick overview of your email performance, Plunk is far more accessible.

Scalability ceiling. SES scales to essentially unlimited volume. Plunk's self-hosted version handles whatever your server can manage, but the dashboard and contact management may slow at very large scales (hundreds of thousands of contacts). For solo developer volumes, both are more than adequate.

Vendor lock-in. Self-hosted Plunk gives you full control. You own the data, the infrastructure, and the code. SES locks you into AWS. If you want to switch delivery providers with Plunk, you change the SMTP configuration. If you build directly on SES, migrating means rewriting your integration.

When to Choose Amazon SES

• You want raw email infrastructure with complete control
• You are already deep in the AWS ecosystem with IAM, CloudWatch, and SNS experience
• You plan to build custom email tooling tailored to your specific needs
• Cost is the absolute priority and you do not want any platform overhead
• You send at massive volumes where every fraction of a cent matters

When to Choose Plunk

• You want a real email product with dashboard, analytics, and automation
• You prefer to self-host for cost savings but do not want to build everything from scratch
• Event-triggered automations are important for onboarding and engagement emails
• Contact management with segments and properties helps your email strategy
• You want SES pricing with a better developer experience on top

The Verdict

For most solo developers, Plunk is the smarter choice, especially self-hosted Plunk with SES delivery. You get the cost benefits of SES with a real product on top that handles the tedious parts: bounce management, templates, automation, analytics, and contact tracking.

Raw SES only makes sense if you have very specific requirements that Plunk does not meet, or if you genuinely enjoy building email infrastructure. For the vast majority of projects, the time you save with Plunk's dashboard and automation features is worth far more than the marginal server cost of running it.

My recommendation: self-host Plunk on whatever VPS you are already running, connect it to SES for delivery, and get the best of both worlds. You pay SES rates for sending (pennies), get a proper email platform with automation and analytics, and maintain full control over your data. It is one of the best value propositions in the email space for solo developers who are comfortable with basic server management.