Pigeonify runs on SES — why not use SES directly?

If you only need to move messages and have engineering time to spare, you should. What you would build on top is what we charge for: bounce and complaint processing, suppression, contact lists, campaigns, templates, analytics and deliverability monitoring. The honest comparison is the cost of that engineering against the price difference.

Do I need to leave the SES sandbox?

Not with us. Your account sends through infrastructure that is already out of the sandbox, so there is no production access request and no 200-a-day limit while you wait.

Comparison

Looking for a Amazon SES alternative?

SES delivery without building the platform around it.

Start free — 5,000 emails a month See pricing

Why people move from Amazon SES

SES is the cheapest way to move an email — $0.16 per thousand on Essentials — and nothing here will beat it on raw cost. What SES does not give you is a product: no dashboard worth using, no campaign builder, no contact lists, no template editor, no suppression UI, no analytics beyond CloudWatch. Teams leave when they realise they have spent three months building that themselves.

Where Amazon SES is better

Price, decisively. At high volume SES is several times cheaper per email than any platform built on top of it — including ours, since we run on SES. If you have the engineering time and want maximum control, using SES directly is a legitimate choice and we would say so.

Side by side

Pigeonify vs Amazon SES

Prices read from Amazon SES's own published pricing on 4 October 2026. We win 7 of these rows and they win 2.

	Pigeonify	Amazon SES
Cost per 1,000 emails	From $0.30	From $0.16
Dashboard and analytics	Included	CloudWatch only
Campaign builder	Included	Build it yourself
Contact lists and segments	Included	Build it yourself
Template library	70 templates included	None
Bounce and complaint handling	Automatic	Wire up SNS yourself
Suppression management	Automatic	Account-level list only
Time to first email	Minutes	Hours to days
Raw cost at 10M+/month	Contact us	Cheapest available

Migration

What the code change looks like

For a transactional integration this is usually the whole job: swap the SDK, change the key, verify the domain.

Before — Amazon SES

import { SESv2Client, SendEmailCommand } from "@aws-sdk/client-sesv2"

const ses = new SESv2Client({ region: "us-east-1" })

await ses.send(new SendEmailCommand({
  FromEmailAddress: "you@yourdomain.com",
  Destination: { ToAddresses: ["customer@example.com"] },
  Content: {
    Simple: {
      Subject: { Data: "Welcome aboard" },
      Body: { Html: { Data: "<p>Thanks for signing up.</p>" } },
    },
  },
}))

After — Pigeonify

import { Pigeonify } from "pigeonify"

const pigeonify = new Pigeonify(process.env.PIGEONIFY_API_KEY)

await pigeonify.emails.send({
  from: "you@yourdomain.com",
  to: "customer@example.com",
  subject: "Welcome aboard",
  html: "<p>Thanks for signing up.</p>",
})

You can run both providers at once while you move. Publishing our DNS records alongside your existing ones does not stop Amazon SES sending, so there is no cutover moment to get wrong.

Questions

Switching from Amazon SES

Pigeonify runs on SES — why not use SES directly?: If you only need to move messages and have engineering time to spare, you should. What you would build on top is what we charge for: bounce and complaint processing, suppression, contact lists, campaigns, templates, analytics and deliverability monitoring. The honest comparison is the cost of that engineering against the price difference.
Do I need to leave the SES sandbox?: Not with us. Your account sends through infrastructure that is already out of the sandbox, so there is no production access request and no 200-a-day limit while you wait.

Try it before you move anything

5,000 emails a month free, no card. Send a real message through both and compare what arrives.

Start free