Loops's paid plan starts at $49 per month for 5,000 contacts (Loops, 2026). Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, with no minimum and no per-contact fee (AWS, 2026). For a 5,000-contact list sent weekly, that's roughly $2 per month on SES versus $49 on Loops - a 24x premium for the managed product-email platform. The cost gap is real, persistent, and structural: Loops bills on stored contacts, SES bills on emails sent.
The question this post answers is not "which is cheaper" - Amazon SES wins that comparison at almost every volume - but "which is the right call for your specific situation." Cost is one variable. Developer experience, product-event integration, workflow tooling, and team composition all matter. This post walks through the tradeoffs with current published pricing.
What Loops actually offers
Loops is a unified platform for product, marketing, and transactional email aimed at software companies, priced per stored contact rather than per email sent and offering a free tier of 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends per month (Loops, 2026). Its self-description is "the simplest way to send product, marketing, and transactional email, from waitlist to IPO" (Loops, 2026). The product combines a visual workflow builder with triggers and branching, an API for contacts and events, a visual email editor, and analytics that tie email to revenue.
The defining feature is the unified data model. You sync contacts and fire events from your app (signup, upgrade, churn) and Loops uses those events as triggers in lifecycle workflows. Marketing and product can share the same segments because they're defined against the same event stream. Loops integrates with platforms like Stripe, Clerk, and Supabase, and it positions transactional sending as included at no additional cost (Loops, 2026).
What Loops is not: a bare SMTP relay, a raw email API like SES, or a high-volume marketing tool. It's a product-led growth platform that happens to send email.
Pricing math: Loops contacts vs SES emails
Loops's free plan covers up to 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends per month with Loops branding on emails; the first paid step is $49 per month for 5,000 contacts (Loops, 2026). Loops charges nothing extra for email sends, team seats, or transactional email - the contact count is the only meter. Higher tiers continue up the slider toward custom plans for enterprise volumes.
Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, period, with no contact storage fee (AWS, 2026). To compare like-for-like, you need to convert "stored contacts" into "emails sent." For a SaaS sending one weekly newsletter plus two lifecycle emails per active user per month, a 5,000-contact list generates roughly 30,000 emails per month - about $3 of SES spend.
| List size and usage | Monthly emails sent | Amazon SES | Loops |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 contacts, weekly send | ~4,000 | $0.40 | $0 (free) |
| 5,000 contacts, weekly + lifecycle | ~30,000 | $3.00 | $49 |
| 25,000 contacts, weekly + lifecycle | ~150,000 | $15.00 | Slider tier (custom) |
| 100,000 contacts, weekly + lifecycle | ~600,000 | $60.00 | Slider tier (custom) |
| 25,000 contacts via Mailblast + SES | ~150,000 | $15.00 SES + Mailblast subscription | Slider tier (custom) |
The takeaway is structural. Because Loops meters on stored contacts and SES meters on emails sent, a large but lightly-mailed list is dramatically more expensive on Loops than on SES. A small list with heavy lifecycle automation narrows the gap, but SES still wins on raw send economics at every tier we tested.
Developer experience: Loops UI and API vs raw SES
Loops offers an API for contacts and events, a typed npm package, a visual workflow builder with triggers and branching, a visual email editor, and integrations with common SaaS tools like Stripe, Clerk, and Supabase (Loops, 2026). The pitch is that once a developer understands the four primitives (contacts, properties, events, event properties), they can hand most lifecycle work off to marketing without writing more code.
Raw Amazon SES is the opposite. You get a sending API, IAM, CloudWatch metrics, and SNS event hooks for bounces and complaints. There is no workflow builder, no contact store, no segmentation, no visual editor, and no UI for marketers. You build all of that yourself, or you pair SES with a management layer that adds those pieces.
For a small product team that wants to ship welcome sequences, trial-expiration nudges, and a monthly newsletter without standing up its own email tooling, Loops is genuinely faster. For a team that already has the right primitives and just needs raw sending, SES is leaner. The decision often comes down to how much of your engineering bandwidth you want to spend on email infrastructure.
Deliverability and infrastructure
Loops manages its own sending infrastructure: shared IP pools, warmup, suppression handling, and reputation monitoring on your behalf. You don't see the IPs and you don't tune them; you trust Loops to keep them healthy. Amazon SES gives you the AWS-managed shared pool by default and lets you provision dedicated IPs as a paid add-on. SES exposes sender reputation metrics through CloudWatch and the SES console, including bounce rate, complaint rate, and the account-level reputation dashboard (AWS, 2026).
The practical difference: with Loops, deliverability is a vendor SLA conversation. With raw SES, deliverability is your operations problem. You're responsible for SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce processing, complaint handling, and ramping new IPs. SES gives you the tools; it does not run the operations for you. If you don't have someone on your team who can read a bounce rate chart and act on it, Loops's managed approach has real value.
For a deeper comparison of managed vs raw SES tradeoffs in the same category, see Amazon SES vs Resend.
When Loops is the right call
Loops fits early-stage SaaS, marketing-engineering teams of one or two, and any product where the lifecycle is the product. If your goals look like the list below, Loops is likely worth the per-contact premium:
- You want product, marketing, and transactional email in one tool and one bill.
- Your marketing team wants to ship lifecycle workflows without filing engineering tickets.
- Your event stream from product to email is the most important integration in your stack.
- You're under 5,000 contacts and the free or first paid tier covers you for the next 12 months.
- Engineering time is the bottleneck, not email spend.
The Loops bet is that a unified product-email platform saves more in engineering time and marketing throughput than it costs in subscription fees. For early-stage SaaS with the right product, that bet pays.
When raw Amazon SES is the right call
Raw SES fits high-volume marketing senders, AWS-native infrastructure, and teams with email operations skill. Pick SES if you recognize this list:
- You send more than 100,000 emails per month and the per-1,000 economics matter.
- You're already deep in AWS (Lambda, EC2, EventBridge, RDS) and want IAM-native sending.
- You have a large list with a low send-per-contact ratio (newsletter-heavy, not lifecycle-heavy).
- You want predictable $0.10 per 1,000 pricing that does not grow with stored contacts.
- You have or are willing to hire someone who can operate SES: bounces, complaints, IP warming, DMARC.
For a full breakdown of SES per-1,000 economics, see Amazon SES pricing.
Where Mailblast fits
Mailblast is a hosted management layer for your own Amazon SES account, aimed at traditional marketing email (newsletters, broadcasts, segmented campaigns, automations) rather than the product-led growth angle Loops focuses on. You bring AWS credentials, AWS bills the $0.10 per 1,000 directly, and Mailblast adds the list management, drag-and-drop editor, automation builder, and analytics dashboard.
For context, more than 1 billion marketing emails have been sent through Amazon SES via Mailblast, so the model is well-proven at scale for newsletter and broadcast senders. If your use case is product email driven by event streams from your app, Loops is the better fit. If your use case is marketing email at SES economics with a polished management UI, Mailblast is built for exactly that workflow.
The opinionated recommendation
If you're an early-stage SaaS where engineering time is the bottleneck and product email is the core integration, choose Loops and pay the premium. The unified contacts-plus-events model is genuinely useful and the workflow builder will save your team real hours.
If you send marketing email at any meaningful volume - more than 25,000 emails per month - and you care about predictable per-1,000 pricing, raw SES wins on economics by an order of magnitude. Pair it with a management layer (Mailblast for marketing email, your own tooling for product email) and you get the cost advantage without rebuilding the dashboard from scratch.
The wrong move is using Loops as a high-volume marketing engine for a large lightly-mailed list. That is the exact case where contact-based pricing punishes you and SES economics win cleanly.
FAQ
Is Loops cheaper than Amazon SES?
No. Loops's paid plan starts at $49 per month for 5,000 contacts, while Amazon SES charges about $3 to send 30,000 emails to that same list at its $0.10 per 1,000 rate (Loops, 2026; AWS, 2026). The gap widens at higher subscriber counts because Loops bills on contacts and SES bills on emails sent. You pay Loops for the workflow builder, dashboard, and product-event integrations, not for cheaper sending.
Is Loops built on top of Amazon SES?
Loops operates its own managed sending infrastructure and is not a thin wrapper over Amazon SES. The two are distinct providers with separate MTAs, IP pools, and reputations. Choosing between them is a choice between two independent email platforms with different pricing models: Loops charges per stored contact, SES charges per email sent.
Which has better developer experience: Amazon SES or Loops?
Loops is purpose-built for product-led growth teams: an API for contacts and events, an npm package, a visual workflow builder with triggers and branching, and a unified UI for transactional and marketing email (Loops, 2026). Amazon SES is a general-purpose AWS service that requires you to build your own templating, lifecycle workflows, and dashboard. For shipping product email quickly, Loops wins. For raw infrastructure, SES wins.
When should I use Amazon SES instead of Loops?
Choose Amazon SES when per-email cost matters at scale, when you're already inside AWS (Lambda, EC2, SQS, EventBridge), when your marketing list is large and your contact-to-send ratio is high, or when you want predictable $0.10 per 1,000 economics that don't grow with stored contacts. SES is the right answer for high-volume newsletter and marketing sending where contact-based pricing becomes expensive.
When should I use Loops instead of Amazon SES?
Choose Loops when you're an early-stage SaaS that needs product, transactional, and marketing email in one tool, when your marketing team wants to ship lifecycle sequences without engineering work, or when developer experience and time-to-first-email matter more than infrastructure cost. Loops's value is the unified workflow builder and event-driven API, which can easily justify the price premium when engineering time is the real bottleneck.
Disclosure: Mailblast is a hosted management UI for your own Amazon SES account. We compete with Sendy, Mailwizz, and Mautic in the BYO-SES category for traditional marketing email; Loops competes in a different category (developer-friendly product email with managed infrastructure). We have a commercial interest in SES being a viable choice for marketing senders, and we've tried to keep the comparison above grounded in published pricing and product documentation.