SendGrid vs Amazon SES for Solo Developers

This is one of the most common email infrastructure decisions developers face. SendGrid offers a polished, feature-rich platform with a great free tier. Amazon SES offers the lowest per-email cost in the industry but requires more work to set up and manage. For solo developers, the choice comes down to how much convenience is worth versus how much you value raw cost savings.

SendGrid Overview

SendGrid is a full-featured email platform owned by Twilio. It handles transactional email, marketing campaigns, contact management, and email validation. The API is mature, SDKs cover every major language, and the dashboard provides clear analytics for delivery, engagement, and reputation.

The free tier gives you 100 emails per day with no credit card and no time limit. That is enough to run transactional email for an early-stage product at zero cost. Paid plans start at $19.95/month for 50,000 emails with the Essentials plan.

SendGrid is a managed service. You sign up, verify a domain, and start sending. Deliverability is handled for you on shared IPs (with dedicated IPs available on higher plans). Bounce handling, suppression lists, and compliance features are built in.

Amazon SES Overview

Amazon Simple Email Service is AWS's email sending platform. It provides raw email infrastructure at the lowest cost available: $0.10 per 1,000 emails. If you are running on EC2, the first 62,000 emails per month are free.

SES is infrastructure, not a product. It sends email reliably at scale, but everything around it is your responsibility. You configure bounce handling through SNS topics, monitor deliverability through CloudWatch, manage suppression lists manually, and handle complaint processing yourself.

Getting started requires navigating the AWS ecosystem: creating IAM users with the right permissions, verifying your domain, requesting production access (new accounts start in a sandbox that only sends to verified addresses), and configuring DKIM/SPF. The setup can take an hour or more if you are not already familiar with AWS.

Comparison Table

When to Pick SendGrid

SendGrid is the right choice when you want a complete email platform with minimal operational overhead:

• You want to send production email within 15 minutes of signing up.
• Marketing campaigns and transactional email from the same platform simplifies your stack.
• Built-in bounce handling, suppression lists, and compliance tools save you from building these yourself.
• A visual dashboard for analytics is more practical than digging through CloudWatch.
• You are not on AWS or do not want to couple your email infrastructure to the AWS ecosystem.
• The free tier (100/day) is sufficient for your current needs.

For solo developers not already on AWS, SendGrid is almost always the better choice. The time saved on setup and ongoing management is worth the price premium.

When to Pick Amazon SES

Amazon SES makes sense when cost optimization at scale is your priority:

• You are already running on AWS and comfortable with IAM, SNS, and CloudWatch.
• Your email volume is high enough (50K+ per month) that the cost difference is meaningful.
• You are running on EC2 and want the 62,000 free emails per month.
• You are building infrastructure where you want granular control over every aspect of email delivery.
• You plan to build (or already have) your own bounce handling, suppression management, and analytics.

At 100,000 emails per month, SendGrid costs roughly $20 while SES costs $10. At a million emails, the gap widens significantly. If you are at that scale and on AWS, SES savings are substantial.

Verdict

SendGrid wins for solo developers in the vast majority of cases. The setup is faster, the free tier requires no credit card, the platform includes everything you need out of the box, and the managed experience means you are not building email infrastructure tooling instead of your product. The cost difference at typical solo developer volumes (under 50K emails/month) is negligible.

Amazon SES wins when you are already deep in AWS and sending at high volumes. If your application is on EC2, the 62K free emails are compelling. At 100K+ emails monthly, the cost savings add up. But be honest about the hidden costs: the time you spend configuring IAM policies, setting up SNS for bounce handling, building dashboards in CloudWatch, and managing suppression lists is time you are not building features.

Start with SendGrid. If your email bill ever becomes a meaningful line item and you are on AWS, migrate to SES at that point. You will have a much better understanding of your email needs by then.