The Amazon SES alternative
that is a full platform

Use raw SES if you have an existing email platform and only need a delivery layer, or if your engineering team wants full control over every part of the stack and has the capacity to build contact management, unsubscribe handling, bounce processing, and analytics themselves. Plunk is built on SES — when you self-host Plunk, you get the full platform at near-SES prices.

SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails ($0.0001/email) on à la carte pricing, or $0.16 per 1,000 on the Essentials plan new accounts start on, for delivery alone. Plunk's managed service is $0.001/email — 10x more, but that includes contact management, campaigns, automation, segmentation, bounce/complaint handling, an admin dashboard, and unsubscribe management. If you self-host Plunk on your own infrastructure, you pay SES rates directly plus your hosting costs.

Yes. Plunk uses AWS SES for email delivery. That means you get the same deliverability infrastructure as SES, plus the full platform layer on top. When you self-host Plunk, your SES account handles delivery directly — giving you SES pricing with Plunk functionality.

If you're currently sending through SES directly, migrating to Plunk means switching your sending code to use Plunk's API instead of the SES SDK. On Plunk Cloud you verify your domain again in the dashboard; if you self-host Plunk on your own AWS account, your existing SES identities stay where they are. The benefit: you immediately gain contact management, bounce handling, unsubscribe lists, campaign tools, and a dashboard — without building any of that yourself.