Amazon SES vs Mailcow
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Amazon SES and Mailcow.
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
Amazon SES
0 reviews
4.1/5
Mailcow
0 reviews
Mailcow is rated higher (4.1 vs 4.0). New accounts get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits with a 6-month free plan; the old 62,000/month EC2 allowance is no longer listed on the pricing page Mailcow is a free, open source email server suite running on Docker. Complete mail server with anti-spam, anti-virus, webmail, SOGo, and admin panel. Self-host on any VPS.
 Amazon SES Cheapest bulk email API — $0.10 per 1,000 emails | Mailcow Self-hosted email server with Docker | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | pay-as-you-go | free |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best for | Engineering teams on AWS sending transactional or bulk email at volume who want the lowest per-email cost and can own deliverability operations. | Sysadmins and small organisations who want self-hosted, sovereign email on their own server with full groupware, and who can operate a Docker-based mail stack |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 1 vCPU |
| RAM | — | 6 GB |
| Storage | — | 20 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | — | — |
| Data-center count | — | — |
| €/vCPU/mo | — | €0.00 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | — | €0.00 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | Not applicable — self-hosted; managed mailcow runs in Germany |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter | free tieropen sourceself hostable |
| Visit Amazon SES → | Visit Mailcow → | |
Amazon SES
Pros
- + Lowest published per-email rate: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, no plan required
- + Same-region integration with EC2, Lambda, IAM, and CloudWatch
- + Transparent pricing page covering add-ons and plan bands
- + Global Endpoints for multi-region sending resilience
- + Scales to very high volume without provisioning infrastructure
Cons
- - Sandbox start (200 messages/day to verified recipients) with an opaque production-access review
- - No marketing tooling, templates, or dashboards — it is a pipe, not a suite
- - Dedicated IPs, attachments, and deliverability add-ons inflate the real bill
- - Deliverability and IP warm-up are your responsibility
Mailcow
Pros
- + Free GPLv3 suite with the full mail stack (groupware, ActiveSync, Rspamd, ClamAV) — no seats, no volume caps
- + Specific, credible hardware requirements and detailed ops documentation
- + Active monthly release train with prompt security patches (e.g. CVE-2026-33278 fix in May 2026, forced 2FA in March 2026)
- + Vendor-backed escape hatches: shared mailcow from EUR 8.90/mo and managed mailcow from EUR 54.90/mo in Germany
Cons
- - Needs real server management skills (Docker, DNS, PTR, firewall chains, updates)
- - 6 GiB RAM minimum rules out the cheapest VPS tiers
- - IP reputation and deliverability are entirely self-managed on the free tier
- - Community-only support with no SLA behind the open-source software
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