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Pharos vs Amazon SES
Amazon SES costs less than Pharos at every volume priced below, $5 against $29 for 50,000 emails a month at its à la carte rate, and it adds 29 AWS Regions, inbound email, IAM access control and AWS audit reports. Pharos sends transactional email only, its docs list three steps to a first send (a verified domain, an API key and one HTTP call), and it keeps 120 days of per-message events in a dashboard, an API and signed webhooks, with email support on every plan.
Prices and features checked 17 September 2026.
The short answer.
Pick Amazon SES if the price per email decides it, if your application already runs on AWS and sending should sit under the same IAM policies and audit reports, or if you need inbound email, a choice of Region or published rates past 100 million emails a month.
Pick Pharos if you send only transactional email and want a first send in the three steps its docs list, 120 days of per-message events without building an event pipeline, and email support on every plan.
What decides most cases is how much of the system around sending you want to build and run. At 150,000 emails a month SES charges $15 against Pharos’s $79. The SES figure covers sending. Leaving the sandbox in each Region you use, publishing events through a configuration set to SNS, Data Firehose or EventBridge, and consuming them are steps you take yourself.
Side by side.
Transactional sending only. Where a row says "not offered", that is the plain answer, not a gap in the research.
| Amazon SES | Pharos | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per email, with no minimum. À la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails plus $0.12 per GB of attachments. The Essentials, Pro and Enterprise plans charge more per email and bundle deliverability features. | Monthly plans by volume up to 500,000. On a paid plan, going over moves you to the next plan for that month, with an email telling you. |
| Free tier | No free email allowance. New AWS customers get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits that can be spent on SES. | 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, every feature, no card, no expiry |
| Before the first real send | New accounts start in a sandbox in each AWS Region: verified recipients only, 200 emails a day, 1 a second. Leaving it takes a production access request, with an initial response within 24 hours. | The Pharos docs list three steps: verify a sending domain, create an API key on it, send. The free plan caps sending at 100 a day. |
| REST API | SES API v2, with an endpoint in each Region and access controlled by IAM policies. SendBulkEmail sends one template to many destinations in a single call. | Yes, with idempotency keys |
| SMTP relay | Ports 25, 587 and 2587 with STARTTLS, or 465 and 2465 with TLS Wrapper. SMTP credentials are created through IAM and are separate for each Region. | Yes, on port 587 with STARTTLS. Same events and log as the API. |
| SDKs | The AWS SDKs, including JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Kotlin, Swift and C++, plus the AWS CLI | None. Plain HTTP and SMTP, nothing to install. |
| Templates | Stored templates, up to 20,000 per Region and 500 KB each, or inline templates passed in the send call | Versioned, with variables and conditionals, on every plan |
| Event delivery | Through other AWS services. A configuration set publishes events to Amazon SNS, Data Firehose, EventBridge, CloudWatch or Pinpoint, and an SNS topic can POST them to an HTTPS endpoint. | Signed webhooks, retried with backoff until your endpoint returns 2xx. Separate per domain. |
| Event history | The console’s account dashboard charts counts and rates for up to 14 days. Virtual Deliverability Manager adds per-message history, searchable over the last 30 days. | 120 days on every plan, in the dashboard and through GET /v1/events |
| Suppression | An account-level list in each Region, on by default for accounts that started after 25 November 2019, for hard bounces and complaints. Gmail does not provide complaint data to SES. | Hard bounces and complaints added automatically, per account, visible and exportable |
| Inbound email | Receipt rules deliver incoming mail to S3, SNS, Lambda or WorkMail, in 22 Regions. Mail Manager adds ingress endpoints, traffic policies, rule sets and archiving. | Not offered |
| Sending IPs | Shared with other SES customers by default. Dedicated IPs, standard or managed, at extra cost. | Shared between Pharos customers, all sending transactional mail only under the acceptable use policy. Never a public pool. An isolated IP on request. |
| Data regions | Choose from 29 AWS Regions, two of them GovCloud. Identities, sandbox status, quotas, suppression lists and SMTP credentials are separate in each. | No region choice and no guaranteed data residency |
| Certifications | Assessed within AWS compliance programmes including SOC, PCI, FedRAMP and HIPAA, with the reports downloadable from AWS Artifact | None held |
| Support | AWS Basic Support: customer service, documentation and re:Post. Technical support cases by phone, web, chat or email come with Business Support+ and higher plans. | Email support on every plan. A person replies within 24 hours on working days. |
What it costs.
The cheapest published way to send each monthly volume, billed monthly, in US dollars. Amazon SES is pay as you go, $0.10 per 1,000 emails at the à la carte rate. It has no free email allowance. New AWS customers get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits. Pharos: on the Starter, Growth and Scale plans, going past the allowance moves you to the next plan for that month, with an email telling you. The free plan stops at 3,000. For more than 500,000 emails a month, talk to us.
| Emails a month | Amazon SES | Pharos |
|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $1 À la carte, 10,000 × $0.10 per 1,000 | $9 Starter, 10,000 included |
| 50,000 | $5 À la carte, 50,000 × $0.10 per 1,000 | $29 Growth, 50,000 included |
| 150,000 | $15 À la carte, 150,000 × $0.10 per 1,000 | $79 Scale, 150,000 included |
| 500,000 | $50 À la carte, 500,000 × $0.10 per 1,000 | $199 Volume, 500,000 included |
Outbound sending at the à la carte rate, the cheapest published option. Attachments add $0.12 per GB, and dedicated IPs and deliverability tools are billed separately. From 21 July 2026, new SES accounts, and account and Region pairs with no metered SES use since 1 June 2025, start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 and can switch to à la carte at any time.
Source: Amazon SES pricing, read on 17 September 2026. Pharos's full ladder is on the pricing page.
Where Amazon SES is better.
A lower price at every paid volume
At the à la carte rate of $0.10 per 1,000, SES costs $1 for 10,000 emails a month against Pharos’s $9, $5 against $29 at 50,000, $15 against $79 at 150,000 and $50 against $199 at 500,000. New accounts start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000, which is still below Pharos at each of those volumes, and can switch to à la carte at any time. Attachments add $0.12 per GB.
29 Regions, and inbound mail in 22 of them
The SES API runs in 29 AWS Regions, two of them GovCloud, so an application can send from the Region it already runs in. SES receives mail in 22 of them, and receipt rules pass incoming messages to S3, SNS, Lambda or WorkMail. Each Region keeps its own identities, sandbox status, quotas and suppression list. Pharos has no region option and does not receive mail.
IAM, and the rest of AWS
IAM policies decide which users, groups and roles may call which SES actions, and can restrict the From, recipient and Return-Path addresses each one may use. Sending events flow into SNS, Data Firehose, EventBridge or CloudWatch, where the rest of an AWS stack can act on them. Pharos uses its own credentials instead: one active API key per sending domain, and SMTP credentials created on that domain.
Audit reports from AWS Artifact
The SES developer guide says third-party auditors assess SES within AWS compliance programmes including SOC, PCI, FedRAMP and HIPAA, and SES appears on the AWS list of HIPAA eligible services. The audit reports can be downloaded from AWS Artifact. Pharos holds no certification, as its security page states.
Volume, and the tools around it
SES publishes per-email rates past 100 million emails a month, and sending quotas rise through a case in AWS Support Center. Virtual Deliverability Manager adds a dashboard by ISP, sending identity and configuration set, and an advisor that flags configuration problems in your sending domain, IP space and authentication records. Email Validation checks addresses before you send. Pharos publishes plans up to 500,000 emails a month and a conversation above that.
Marketing mail with lists and unsubscribe handling
SES accepts marketing as well as transactional mail. Its list management keeps a contact list with up to 20 topics, and subscription management adds unsubscribe links and a List-Unsubscribe header, then stops sending to a contact for the topic or list they left. Pharos accepts transactional mail only, under its acceptable use policy.
Where Pharos is better.
Three documented steps to a first send
SES places every new account in a sandbox, separately in each Region, where it can send only to verified addresses and domains, 200 emails a day at 1 a second. Leaving it means a production access request that AWS reviews, with an initial response within 24 hours and longer if more information is needed. The Pharos docs list three steps before a first send: verify a sending domain, create an API key on it and make one HTTP call. The free plan then caps sending at 100 a day.
120 days of per-message events, without an event pipeline
Every Pharos plan keeps 120 days of events, readable in the dashboard, through GET /v1/events by message, event type or date, and as signed webhooks retried until your endpoint returns 2xx. On SES, the console’s account dashboard charts counts and rates for up to 14 days. Per-message detail comes from Virtual Deliverability Manager, whose Messages table searches the last 30 days and which à la carte pricing bills per email, or from a configuration set that publishes each event to SNS, Data Firehose, EventBridge or CloudWatch for you to consume and store.
Email support on every plan
Pharos includes email support on every plan, the free one too, and a person replies within 24 hours on working days. AWS Basic Support, which every AWS customer has, covers customer service, documentation, whitepapers and AWS re:Post. Technical support cases by phone, web, chat or email come with the Business Support+ plan and above, which is billed on top of SES.
Switching from Amazon SES.
Both can sign for one domain while traffic moves. Keep SES’s Easy DKIM CNAME records and custom MAIL FROM records, and add the Pharos records next to them. Replace the SendEmail call with a POST to /v1/send (the send reference), or swap the SES SMTP credentials in your mailer for Pharos ones. Then retire the SNS, Firehose or EventBridge consumers: Delivery, a permanent Bounce and Complaint arrive as Pharos webhooks named delivered, failed and complained, listed in the events reference.
Questions.
Is Amazon SES cheaper than Pharos?
Yes, at every volume compared here, as of 17 September 2026. At its à la carte rate SES costs $1 for 10,000 emails a month against Pharos’s $9, $5 against $29 at 50,000, $15 against $79 at 150,000 and $50 against $199 at 500,000. New SES accounts start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000, still below Pharos, and can switch to à la carte at any time. SES bills attachments at $0.12 per GB and dedicated IPs separately.
Is Pharos built on Amazon SES?
No. Pharos sends on Pharos infrastructure. Its sending IPs are dedicated to Pharos and shared between Pharos accounts, and every account may send transactional mail only, under its acceptable use policy.
Can I send through Amazon SES and Pharos at the same time?
Yes. SES signs with the Easy DKIM CNAME records it generated for your domain and Pharos with its own ph1 selector, and one DMARC record covers both. Check the return path: Pharos uses a CNAME on bounce.yourdomain.com, so if your SES custom MAIL FROM domain is that same subdomain, move SES to another one first. Export the account-level suppression list from each SES Region you send from with ListSuppressedDestinations, and import it into Pharos before its first send.
Does Amazon SES have a dashboard for email events?
Yes, as of 17 September 2026. The SES console’s account dashboard charts sends, rejects, bounces and complaints for up to the last 14 days. Virtual Deliverability Manager adds a Messages table with each message’s event history over the last 30 days, billed per email on à la carte pricing and included in the Essentials, Pro and Enterprise plans. Pharos shows 120 days of events in its dashboard and through GET /v1/events.
Try it next to Amazon SES.
3,000 emails a month free, every feature included, no card. Enough to verify a domain and send alongside whatever you run today.
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