(Email noob here) I'm writing a very low traffic web app, and I was thinking about SES, mostly because it's free for small volumes. What's wrong with it? Would you recommend sendgrid (or something else) instead?
I recently set up SES for my own projects so some this info is fresh in my mind. I’m not an SES power user so ymmv.
My only real, big issue with SES is with email templates as in I don’t know of any way to view templates in SES.
So, if you create an email template and want to preview it, you’ll have to do it locally/off-SES. If you need to handle hundreds of templates, this can get tedious.
The other minor tech issue is that SES needs you to work out of one of three regions - US east, west, and EU (if I recall correctly).
If, for legal or hygiene purposes you need your data anywhere else in the world, you’re SOL.
Other than these two, SES has been amazing. It costs pennies and I host all my email, both transactional and personal, with them. Worth noting that my transactional email is in the order of a few hundred per month, if that.
I’m a little biased (being the CEO) but check out EmailOctopus. We connect to Amazon SES and if you've got fewer than 2,500 contacts/subscribers you'll be on our free tier.
My only real, big issue with SES is with email templates as in I don’t know of any way to view templates in SES.
So, if you create an email template and want to preview it, you’ll have to do it locally/off-SES. If you need to handle hundreds of templates, this can get tedious.
The other minor tech issue is that SES needs you to work out of one of three regions - US east, west, and EU (if I recall correctly).
If, for legal or hygiene purposes you need your data anywhere else in the world, you’re SOL.
Other than these two, SES has been amazing. It costs pennies and I host all my email, both transactional and personal, with them. Worth noting that my transactional email is in the order of a few hundred per month, if that.