Pricing of mails originating from Lambda functions

[paulbusse]

Hi,

I was just wondering how AWS is invoicing SES mails sent from Lambda functions?
SES has two types of invoices:

1. If the mail is originating from EC2 instances the first 62.000 mails are free
2. In other cases you pay $0.10 for a 1000 mails
   So, under which of the 2 cases fall mails send from Lambda functions

Regards

Paul

[nelsonic]

Hi Paul, thank you for opening this issue it will no doubt be a question others have. 👍
Our purpose with having a Lambda function to handle all our email is simple: never having to think about it.

Sadly, I can confirm that the EC2 "first 65k emails" free usage tier does not apply to AWS Lambda. 😞
Here's a screenshot of the billing on our aws-ses-lambda "test" account showing the only thing we are paying for is SES:

The first 1 Million Lambda executions and 100k SNS calls are free so the only thing we are paying for is SES.

If you are already paying for an EC2 instance, then it's worth using that for sending/receiving your email especially if you are sending tens of thousands of emails per month. If you have an established account and you are thinking of using a dedicated EC2 instance to send/receive email you will need to do the cost-benefit analysis of maintaining a server.

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing

SES is in the "Always Free" category, so if you stay below the 65k, it will always be free (from an EC2 instance).

For people signing up for a new AWS account, the EC2 Free Tier (12 Months),
t2.micro for 750h/month will be a good way to run an app and get free email.

So to recap: if you already have an EC2 instance, use it to send email.
If you don't have an EC2 instance and would have to set one up just to send email,
Lambda's ("always free tier") will be cheaper and less hassle if you only send a few thousand emails per month.

We aren't using any EC2 instances because the TCO is higher than DigitalOcean so even if we got $6.50 worth of "free" email credit per month, we would still be paying more than that for our EC2 + EBS, Elastic IP, etc.

Hope this is helpful. ☀️

[paulbusse]

That is more than I asked for :-) thanks a lot.

[nelsonic]

Hi @paulbusse, I'm very curious what you decide to do. 💭
At present our email stats aggregator https://github.com/dwyl/email is running on Heroku (Free Tier).
It might make sense to switch it over to AWS EC2 in the future.
Are you thinking of building your own email system on top of SES?