Looking for an Amazon SES alternative that also handles inbound mail?
No separate AWS relationship — SES is excellent at volume; Flowmails is what you ship when you want inbound mail, route tables and an agent-usable API on the same connection as the rest of your 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 own the whole mail surface — inbox, route table, events and outbound — behind one API instead of three vendors.
Flowmails is what you ship when those are the things you've started to care about. It connects to your domain provider over OAuth and runs one shared mail worker for every tenant, so your inbox, outbox, and route table live in one place, scoped to your domain. There is no per-email fee on top of your provider'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 and Enterprise is $39.9 / month. Your chosen outbound provider's own pricing applies above its free tier.
SES lives inside AWS — IAM / SNS notifications, sandbox mode for new accounts, DKIM via Route 53 or external DNS. Flowmails connects your domain provider over OAuth and provisions Email Routing plus your choice of outbound provider.
SES: teams already on AWS that want email under the same IAM / VPC story. Flowmails: teams that want inbound mail and route tables next to their outbound, without adding an AWS relationship.
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
Flowmails' own storage, scoped by domain id
Inbound mailbox
Stored in Flowmails' own storage
SMTP relay
No
Dedicated IP
No (Cloudflare-managed shared IPs)
IAM / role-based access
Per-account roles, per-domain API keys
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.
Connect the domain's provider
Same prerequisite: the zone must be on a supported routing provider. Cloudflare is the one we support today, with the provider SPI open to others.
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