What are you overpaying
for email?
Most email platforms bill you for how many people are on your list. Amazon SES bills you for emails actually sent. This works out the difference over a year, using public list prices.
- Mailchimp today
- $145/mo · $1,740/yr
- Selva Mail license
- $497 once
- Your AWS bill
- ≈$5/mo
- Payback on the license
- ~3.5 months
How this is calculated
Your current cost comes from each provider's public list price at the contact count you entered, verified for 2026. Marketing platforms are billed per contact, so the figure steps up as your list grows. Transactional providers are billed per email, so it tracks your send volume instead.
The AWS line is Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails, plus roughly $0.02 per 1,000 for the Lambda functions, the SQS FIFO queue and EventBridge that move each message. That works out to about $6 a month at 50,000 emails, $60 at 500,000, and $240 at two million. Your database is the only always-on cost, and free tiers cover getting started.
Payback is the one-time license divided by what you save each month. It is deliberately conservative: it counts the AWS bill against you from day one, and it does not count the time you spend running anything.
What this does not model: your own hours, the cost of migrating templates, or anything a provider gives you that Selva Mail does not — Klaviyo's ecommerce attribution and beehiiv's referral tooling are real value, and no arithmetic here captures them. If the saving is small, the honest answer is to stay where you are.
Why the two models diverge
A per-contact bill grows every time your list does, whether or not you send more email. Some platforms count contacts who already unsubscribed until you remove them by hand; others bill on a high-watermark basis, so a single import spike sets your price for the whole month.
A per-email bill only grows when you actually send. That is the entire structural argument, and it is why the gap widens rather than closes as you grow.
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