Reloop vs AWS SES
Amazon SES is cheap per email—but rarely cheap in total. This page compares raw SES delivery to Reloop as a full email platform.
SES wins spreadsheet comparisons at millions of messages per month. What spreadsheets miss is everything around SES: SNS wiring for bounces, CloudWatch dashboards, template storage, campaign UI, support contacts, and the engineering time to glue it together.
Reloop is the opposite trade: a complete email product with APIs, campaigns, analytics, and webhooks—hosted by Reloop Labs or self-hosted on your AWS account if you want SES-adjacent control without assembling fifteen services.
Total cost of ownership
SES line item vs platform line item.
AWS SES stack (typical)
- SES send charges + data transfer
- SNS topics + Lambda consumers for events
- S3 for template assets or logs
- Custom admin UI or spreadsheet ops
- Separate tool for marketing campaigns
- Engineering maintenance ongoing
Reloop stack
- Tiered platform pricing or self-host infra only
- Built-in webhooks and delivery analytics
- Template editor and campaign builder included
- Agent inbox for support and AI workflows
- Single dashboard for ops and developers
- Open-source—extend instead of fork-lifting glue code
SES vs Reloop capabilities
| Feature | Reloop | AWS SES |
|---|---|---|
| Open-source platform | Yes (Apache 2.0) | — |
| Self-host on your AWS account | SES only | |
| Marketing campaigns UI | No (DIY) | |
| Transactional API | ||
| Built-in delivery dashboard | CloudWatch / DIY | |
| Webhooks | Native | SNS configuration |
| Template management | Limited | |
| Agent inbox | — | |
| Per-email list price | Tier bundles | Very low at scale |
Running Reloop on AWS
Keep data in your account without building the product yourself.
Many SES teams already run on AWS. Reloop deploys via Docker Compose, EKS, or ECS—see our self-hosting guide for wiring Postgres, Redis, and outbound SMTP alongside your existing VPC patterns.
FAQ
AWS SES vs Reloop FAQ
SES raw sending is often cheaper at extreme volume. Reloop competes on platform TCO—engineering time, campaign tooling, support, and unified ops—not on being the cheapest SMTP pipe.
Yes. Replace AWS SDK send calls with Reloop REST or SMTP. Map SNS bounce notifications to Reloop webhook endpoints.
Not usually. Self-hosted Reloop includes outbound delivery. Some teams keep SES as an MTA backend during transition—that is an advanced integration, not the default path.
More comparisons