Amazon SES is usually the lowest unit rate in a transactional comparison — and the easiest vendor to quote wrong.
Per recipient, not per message
A-la-carte outbound in the Tools.Town card is $0.10 per 1,000 recipients (as of 2026-08-18; AWS SES pricing wins if that moved). If you send one MIME message to three people, SES counts three. The AWS SES Cost Calculator treats the volume field as recipients so you do not have to remember that after the fact.
Free tier is opt-in here
AWS has advertised a first-12-months allowance (3,000 messages / month in many accounts) and a legacy 62,000/month figure tied to EC2 in the same region. Calculators that default the 62k number produce a $0 SES line that will not survive a real invoice. Tools.Town defaults to none. Turn on first-12-months or legacy EC2 in advanced options only after you have confirmed the allowance on the account.
Attachments
Outbound attachment data is modeled at $0.12 / GB. Leave it at 0 if you send plain text or tiny HTML.
What v1 does not model
SES bundled Essentials / Pro / Enterprise plans, dedicated IPs, Virtual Deliverability Manager, inbound, and data-transfer oddities. If your architecture uses those, the a-la-carte row is a floor, not the bill.
Worked job: Estimate an SES bill at 10k emails. Compare the same volume to ESPs with plan floors in the Email Cost Calculator.