Email is infrastructure.
We priced it like infrastructure.
In 2023 we built the dashboard AWS SES always deserved, and started giving SMBs back the 90% margin the legacy ESPs were keeping. Twelve humans. Two cities. Zero VC.
It started with a $14,400 invoice. Daniel was running a 280k-subscriber newsletter on Mailchimp, sending 4 emails a month. The bill was $1,200/mo and climbing. He looked at AWS SES — the same infrastructure Mailchimp itself runs on — and saw the same volume would cost $112 a year on AWS, raw.
The catch: AWS SES has no UI. No segments, no templates, no flow builder. To get a real product, you either pay 100x for Mailchimp, or you wire together five open-source projects and pray.
So we built a third option. SES Mailbox is a hosted dashboard that drives your AWS SES account. We never see your sending. You keep the 90% margin. We just build the UI on top.
What we believe.
Six things, written on the wall in Lisbon.
Email is infrastructure.
It should be priced like S3, not like Slack seats.
Per-contact pricing is a tax.
A subscriber who never gets emailed should never cost you anything.
Your data is yours.
Subscribers, events, templates — exportable as CSV on day one.
Boring tech wins.
Postgres, Redis, EventBridge. We're not here to chase frameworks.
Small team, fast replies.
Every support email is answered by an engineer.
Profitable, not "growing."
Cash-flow positive since month nine. We plan to stay that way.
Say hi.
Press, partnerships, or just curious — support@sesmailbox.com reaches a real person.