Samva vs Amazon SES.
Amazon SES is the lowest-cost way to move email at volume, and the most assembly-required: events, inbound parsing, and suppression flows are yours to wire. Samva is a product layer with hosted templates, conversation threading, signed webhooks, and a dashboard on top of established email infrastructure.
Pricing verified July 24, 2026. Sources at the end of this page.
Published plans, side by side.
Samva
| Plan | Price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 3,000 emails/mo |
| Starter | $5/mo | 15,000 emails/mo |
| Growth | $19/mo | 50,000 emails/mo |
| Scale | $99/mo | 300,000 emails/mo |
Sending, templates, inbound, and webhooks ship on every plan. On paid plans, extra emails past the allowance cost $0.50 per 1,000, under a $50 monthly spend limit you control. Free stops at its allowance.
Amazon SES
| Plan | Price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| À la carte | $0.10 per 1,000 | Pay as you go |
| Essentials | $0.16 per 1,000 | Pay as you go |
| Pro | $105/mo + $0.22 per 1,000 | Managed dedicated IPs |
| Enterprise | $500/mo + $0.23 per 1,000 | Custom |
Per-1,000 rates step down past 10M and 100M emails a month. Attachment data transfer bills at $0.12/GB. Dedicated IPs are $24.95/mo each on standard plans. New AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits; there is no standing free email allowance.
What each one ships.
| Capability | Samva | Amazon SES |
|---|---|---|
| Send API | Typed REST, POST /v1/messages, with an OpenAPI 3.0 spec | SES v2 API and SMTP; requires an AWS account, IAM, and a production-access request |
| Templates | Versioned templates with rollback and publish history | Basic API templates; no visual editor |
| Inbound email | Inbound parsing with conversation threading per recipient | Receipt rules deliver raw mail to S3, SNS, or Lambda; region-limited; parsing is yours to build |
| Webhooks | Delivery events signed with HMAC-SHA256 | No native HTTP webhooks; events publish through SNS topics you configure |
| Open and click telemetry | Per-message timeline of provider-observed opens and clicks | Open and click events via event publishing you configure |
| Deliverability | SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on your domain; bounces and complaints suppressed automatically | Easy DKIM, configuration sets, account-level suppression list, reputation dashboard |
| SDKs | TypeScript SDK plus an Effect-native SDK | AWS SDKs across all supported languages |
| Agent tooling | Hosted MCP server and a CLI with device-flow login | — |
| Free tier | 3,000 emails a month; 1,000 a day with a card on file, 100 without | Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts |
| Past the allowance | Metered at $0.50 per 1,000, under a spend limit you set | Pure usage-based; every email bills |
Cost per email at volume outweighs everything else, you already run on AWS with IAM and event plumbing in place, and your team is comfortable assembling delivery, inbound, and suppression flows from primitives.
You want the product layer included: hosted versioned templates, threading on inbound mail, signed webhooks without SNS wiring, and a dashboard your whole team can read. Typed TypeScript and Effect SDKs and a hosted MCP server come with it.
The honest framing: SES is a component, Samva is a product. Teams that thrive on SES treat email as an engineering domain and staff it, wiring SNS topics to queues, building suppression sync, and maintaining their own send dashboards. If that describes your team, the per-email price is hard to beat.
The cost comparison also depends on what your time is worth. The SES bill for 50,000 emails is about $5 à la carte; the difference to a Samva plan buys hosted templates, threading, signed webhooks, and a dashboard you didn't have to build or maintain.
Asked before switching.
Isn't SES cheaper?
Per email, yes: à la carte SES is $0.10 per 1,000. The difference is what you build and operate yourself. Event handling, inbound parsing, suppression wiring, template workflow, and dashboards are your responsibility on SES; on Samva they're the product.
How do the free tiers compare?
SES has no standing free email allowance; new AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits valid for six months. Samva's free plan includes 3,000 emails a month, ongoing, capped at 1,000 a day with a card on file and 100 a day without one.
How does inbound email differ?
SES receipt rules hand you raw MIME in S3 or an SNS notification, in supported regions, and you build the parser. Samva parses inbound mail and threads it into per-recipient conversations your product reads through the API.
Send your first email in minutes.
The free plan includes 3,000 emails a month, no card required.
Sources, verified July 24, 2026