Sendy with AWS SES: a newsletter stack you pay for once
How I send newsletters and transactional email through AWS SES with a self-hosted Sendy, what it costs compared with email platforms, and what to set up first.
Marcin Fratczak · updated Nov 15, 2026
Email platforms charge by the size of the list. That is fine at 200 subscribers and painful at 20,000, and the price goes up exactly when the list starts to work.
My setup avoids that. All my mail goes out through AWS SES: newsletters from Sendy, and transactional mail straight from the apps.
The parts
- Sendy is a newsletter app you install on your own server. You buy the licence once; I paid $69 for mine.
- AWS SES does the actual sending. You pay per email, and one email costs a small fraction of a cent.
- My own server runs Sendy next to my products, deployed through Coolify.
What it costs
The shape of the bill is the point. A platform charges for subscribers you have. SES charges for emails you send. If you write twice a month, most of the month costs nothing.
Transactional email goes the same way
My apps do not use an email API product. They send through SES over SMTP with a small mailer module and a shared template: login links, receipts, notifications.
The sender domain is already verified, so a new product can send mail on its first day without a new account anywhere.
What to set up first
If you start from zero, do it in this order:
- Verify your domain in SES and add the DKIM records it gives you. Without them your mail lands in spam.
- Ask AWS to take your account out of the sandbox. A new SES account can only send to addresses you verified yourself. The request is a short form where you describe what you send and how people subscribed.
- Install Sendy and give it SES credentials. It sets up bounce and complaint handling for you.
- Keep lists apart by consent. I use separate lists for people who agreed to different things, so I never have to guess whom I am allowed to write to.
Who this is for
If you have a small list and you want to write, not to administer, use a hosted newsletter tool. The signup form on this site still goes through one.
If your list is growing, or you run several products that all need to send mail, SES with Sendy is the cheapest setup I know that I still fully control.