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Developer email infrastructure

Resend vs Amazon SES

Choose Amazon SES if your product already runs on AWS, you send hundreds of thousands of emails a month or more, and someone on your team will own bounce handling and sender reputation. Choose Resend if you want a first email out this afternoon, templates written as React components and a flat monthly price. At 100,000 emails a month, list prices work out to about $16 on SES Essentials against $35 on Resend Pro or $90 on Scale. Check Resend's pricing page for slider volumes without a published readout.

Prices checked 7 October 2026 on Resend's pricing page and AWS's SES pricing page. Both vendors change plans without notice, so confirm before you commit.

Decision table

What each one costs

The two vendors bill in different shapes. Resend sells monthly plans with an email allowance and charges overage on top. SES charges per thousand emails and, since mid-2026, offers three plans built around deliverability tooling.

Resend plans

• Free, $0: 3,000 emails a month with a cap of 100 a day, 3 domains and 1 webhook endpoint.
• Pro, $20 a month: 50,000 emails, 10 domains, no daily limit, 5 webhook endpoints. Extra emails cost $0.90 per 1,000.
• Scale, $90 a month: 100,000 emails, 1,000 domains, 10 webhook endpoints, a dedicated Slack channel and the option to add a dedicated IP.
• Enterprise: custom pricing with a 99.99% uptime SLA, guaranteed response times and a dedicated customer success manager.

Add-ons listed on the same page: 100 extra domains for $20 a month, a dedicated IP for $30 a month (offered to Scale customers sending more than 3,000 emails a day) and single sign-on for $150 a month. Resend states it only sells monthly plans, so there is no annual discount to model.

Amazon SES plans

• Essentials: $0.16 per 1,000 emails up to 10M a month, $0.14 from 10M to 100M, $0.11 beyond. No monthly fee.
• Pro: $0.22 per 1,000 emails plus $105 per account per region per month. Includes managed dedicated IPs, email validation and global deliverability insights.
• Enterprise: $0.23 per 1,000 plus $500 per account per region per month, adding Global Endpoints and Tenants.
• À la carte: $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails with each extra feature billed separately.

AWS says new accounts start on Essentials from 21 July 2026 unless you choose another plan, and you can switch to à la carte at any time. Eligible new AWS customers also get up to $200 in credits and a free plan for the first six months. Rates are charged per recipient, and attachments add $0.12 per GB of data sent. If you send from EC2, AWS notes you may also see data transfer charges.

Monthly cost at three volumes

Arithmetic below uses list rates only, with Resend overage enabled and SES Essentials against à la carte. It leaves out attachment data, EC2 transfer and any add-ons.

AWS's own worked example agrees with the Essentials column: 250,000 emails of 32KB each come to $40.96 once the $0.96 of message data is added. Resend's pricing page also carries a volume slider that runs from 3,000 up to 3,000,000+, so a plan between Pro and Enterprise may beat plain overage at 250,000 and above. Check the slider before you budget for a million emails. The Scale plan only wins on price when you need its extras, such as more webhook endpoints, 1,000 domains or the dedicated IP option.

Costs the table does not show

• Resend free plan limits: 100 emails a day and 30-day data retention mean the free tier suits development and tiny products, not a launch day with a spike.
• SES Pro and Enterprise fixed fees: $105 and $500 a month are charged per account per region, so two regions double the base fee.
• SES dedicated IPs: standard IPs are $24.95 a month each and you do the warm-up. Managed IPs are $15 a month per account plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails up to 10M, with AWS handling warm-up.
• SES deliverability tooling: Virtual Deliverability Manager is included for SES-sent mail on all three plans. À la carte it is $0.07 per 1,000 emails plus query fees, and the global version is $1,250 a month.
• Engineering time: SES leaves bounce handling, suppression and alerting to you. That is a one-off build plus ongoing attention, and it rarely shows up on the invoice.

Setup: from signup to a real send

Resend

Resend sends from a domain you own, so step one is adding and verifying a domain through DNS records. Its domain documentation recommends a subdomain such as updates.example.com so your transactional reputation stays separate from your root domain. Then create an API key and call the SDK. The quickstart on the Resend Node.js docs uses Resend's onboarding sender and its delivered@resend.dev test address, so you can exercise the API before your own domain is ready, though production sending needs the verified domain. The sample below follows that quickstart and adds the idempotency option described in Resend's idempotency keys guide.

import { Resend } from 'resend';

const resend = new Resend(process.env.RESEND_API_KEY);

const { data, error } = await resend.emails.send(
  {
    from: 'Acme <onboarding@resend.dev>',
    to: ['delivered@resend.dev'],
    subject: 'Hello World',
    html: '<strong>It works!</strong>',
  },
  {
    idempotencyKey: 'welcome-user/123456789',
  },
);

if (error) {
  console.error({ error });
}

That guide says a key can be up to 256 characters, is remembered for 24 hours and makes a retried request send only once. It suggests keys shaped like welcome-user/123456789. For a B2B product this matters on invite and receipt emails, where a retry after a timeout should not email a customer twice.

Amazon SES

AWS's production access guide explains that every new account starts in a sandbox, separately for each AWS Region. In the sandbox you can only send to verified addresses and domains or to the mailbox simulator, up to 200 messages in 24 hours and 1 message per second. To leave it you submit a request in the console and acknowledge that you have a process for bounce and complaint notifications. AWS Support gives an initial response within 24 hours and may ask for more information, which takes longer. The guide adds that verifying your domain first helps the request get approved faster.

After approval you still verify every identity you send from, create credentials and call the API. The SES API v2 sample in the AWS code examples for Python (Boto3) boils down to this, shown here without the surrounding class and error handling:

import boto3

sesv2_client = boto3.client("sesv2")

response = sesv2_client.send_email(
    FromEmailAddress=from_address,
    Destination={"ToAddresses": to_addresses},
    Content={
        "Simple": {
            "Subject": {"Data": subject},
            "Body": {
                "Html": {"Data": html_body},
                "Text": {"Data": text_body},
            },
        }
    },
)
message_id = response["MessageId"]

For comparison, the same task with Resend's Python SDK, taken from the idempotency guide linked above, is shorter because the SDK is aimed at email alone:

import resend

resend.api_key = "re_xxxxxxxxx"

params: resend.Emails.SendParams = {
  "from": "Acme <onboarding@resend.dev>",
  "to": ["delivered@resend.dev"],
  "subject": "hello world",
  "html": "<p>it works!</p>"
}

resend.Emails.send(params)

Deliverability and reputation

Both services send from shared IP pools by default and both offer dedicated IPs, but they split the work differently. Resend lists pristine shared IPs, an automatic suppression list, bounce details, deliverability insights and DKIM, SPF and DMARC authentication on its pricing page, and its domain docs add DMARC, BIMI, a custom Return-Path and a choice of sending region. SES gives you the same authentication building blocks and expects you to run the rest.

AWS's dedicated IP overview is blunt about shared pools: SES controls your reputation on shared IPs, and it cannot be isolated from other senders on them. Standard dedicated IPs isolate it, but you warm them up by raising volume each day and then keep sending at a steady pace. Managed dedicated IPs warm up automatically and scale per mailbox provider. AWS says most providers only track an IP's reputation if they receive a meaningful volume from it, and suggests sending several hundred messages to each provider within a day at least once a month. At 100,000 emails a month that is rarely worth the $24.95 an IP costs; at several million it usually is.

Resend's dedicated IP is a $30 a month add-on, offered on Scale and Enterprise and aimed at senders above 3,000 emails a day. Resend says it warms the IP up, monitors it and scales it with your usage, so the work lands on its side. If your product sends both transactional and marketing mail, SES dedicated IP pools let you split them across IP groups; on Resend the equivalent is separate subdomains, as the domain docs suggest.

Virtual Deliverability Manager is the SES tool to know about. AWS includes its SES-deliverability insights on all three plans, covering delivery rates, engagement and reputation problems for mail sent through SES. The wider version, with inbox placement tests and blocklist monitoring beyond SES, is a paid add-on on Essentials and included on Pro and Enterprise.

Events, webhooks and multi-tenant sending

Resend delivers events by webhook and signs each request. Its webhook verification guide shows how to check the signing secret with the Resend SDK or with Svix libraries against the raw request body. The number of endpoints rises with the plan: 1 on Free, 5 on Pro, 10 on Scale. SES hooks into other AWS services such as SNS and CloudWatch, so how you receive bounces and complaints is something you design inside your AWS account. That is flexible for a team that already runs queues and alarms, and extra work for one that does not.

For B2B products that send on behalf of customers, the structures differ. Resend Scale allows 1,000 domains, with 100 more available for $20 a month, so each customer can get a verified domain. SES Enterprise includes Tenants, described by AWS as isolated containers that separate identities, configuration and reputation so one sender's issues do not affect others. The page lists 1,000 tenants per account per region, with extras at $0.005 a month each. If your customers' sending quality varies and you need to contain a bad actor, that isolation is the most relevant difference in this whole comparison.

Specs side by side

How the features behave in practice

Strengths and limits

Four scenarios, worked through

Switching notes

From Resend to SES

Budget for the sandbox exit first, since nothing else can be tested against real recipients until it clears. Replace the SDK call, rebuild templates as plain HTML or SES templates because React Email will no longer render for you, and build bounce and complaint handling before you move traffic. Warm up new dedicated IPs or stay on the shared pool until volume justifies them. Keep Resend running in parallel for a few days so you can compare results.

From SES to Resend

Verify the sending domain in Resend (or a fresh subdomain), swap the AWS client for the Resend SDK and replace SNS event consumers with signed webhooks. Remove IAM keys and any Lambda glue once traffic has moved. Two things to check first: that your volume fits a Resend plan once overage is counted, and that nothing else in your account relies on SES inbound routing.

Pick Resend if, pick SES if

Both services can send marketing email, but neither replaces a CRM or a customer-success tool. If your next step is campaigns for a sales or CS team, look at our B2B email marketing guide and the B2B SaaS tool stack, then compare these two against Resend vs SendGrid, Resend vs Postmark, SendGrid vs Amazon SES or Mailgun vs Amazon SES.

Frequently asked questions