Looking for an Amazon SES alternative that runs on Cloudflare, not AWS?
Self-hosted on Cloudflare, billed in your Cloudflare account — no separate AWS relationship. SES is excellent at volume; Flowmails is what you ship when you want email on the same control plane as the rest of your Cloudflare stack.
Amazon SES is a great product — it's where most teams land the first time they need transactional email that "just works." But as your stack matures, the calculus often shifts: data residency requirements, predictable cost at higher volumes, and the desire to keep the email control plane on the same host as the rest of your infrastructure.
Flowmails is what you ship when those are the things you've started to care about. It runs on Cloudflare — the same one your Workers, R2 buckets, and Pages deployments already live in — and stores your inbox, outbox, and routing rules in your own D1. There is no per-email fee on top of Cloudflare's own pricing; the platform subscription is what you see on the /price page.
SES charges per email sent (typically $0.10 per 1,000 from EC2, $0.12 per 1,000 from the API). Flowmails' Base plan is $0; Pro is $9.9 / month. Cloudflare's own outbound pricing applies above the free tier.
SES lives inside AWS — IAM / SNS / SNS notifications, sandbox mode for new accounts, DKIM via Route 53 or external DNS. Flowmails deploys into your Cloudflare account and uses Email Routing + Email Services.
SES: teams already on AWS that want email under the same IAM / VPC story. Flowmails: teams that want email on the same Cloudflare account as their Worker, R2, D1, and Pages deployments.
SES exposes SMTP, an HTTP API, and the AWS SDK. Flowmails is REST-only. SDK-wise, the Surface area is smaller (send + receive + stats) but covers what most apps actually call.
Highlights
What Flowmails does differently
Data residency
Your D1 in your Cloudflare account
Inbound mailbox
Stored in your D1
SMTP relay
No
Dedicated IP
No (Cloudflare-managed shared IPs)
IAM / role-based access
Single account per Cloudflare zone
Per-email pricing
No
Migration
How to migrate from Amazon SES to Flowmails
Confirm you're not blocked by AWS-internal requirements
If your team depends on SES-specific features (IAM cross-account access, VPC endpoints, SNS-driven fan-out), map those before you migrate. SES's breadth is a real advantage when you need it.
Move the domain to Cloudflare
Same prerequisite: zone must be on Cloudflare. Most teams already have a Cloudflare account for Workers / Pages / R2 — this just adds Email Routing and Email Services to it.
Replace SES SDK calls
Replace AWS SDK SES calls with Flowmails SDK calls. Templates and message bodies are plain — no SES-specific features to migrate. Repoint any SNS subscriptions on inbound to your Flowmails webhook.
FAQ
Common questions about switching from Amazon SES
Other alternatives