Run Amazon SES yourself
You, the AWS console, and a week
- What it is good at
- Cheapest by an order of magnitude — $0.10 per 1,000 emails à la carte, $0.16 on the Essentials plan new accounts default to. You own the account, the domain reputation, and the data. No third party sits in the send path, and there is nothing to migrate, ever.
- What it costs you
- Sandboxed by default, and production access is an AWS approval that can be refused. You own bounce and complaint handling, and AWS pauses accounts that get it wrong. There is no dashboard, no templates, no event pipeline, no suppression UI and no message search until you build them.
Pick this if: Your sending is simple enough that one SendEmail call covers it, and you would rather own a hundred lines than a dependency.

