OpenEmail against
Amazon SES
line by line.
Their list price is $0.10 per 1,000 sends, checked in September 2026. Ours counts domains and sends, never people, so set the dials below to your own team and volume.
What they are better at
The lowest price per email anywhere, with the scale of AWS behind it.
Why people move
It is a pipe, not a product. There is no mailbox or web app, and bounces, complaints and inbound mail arrive as events your own code has to store. OpenEmail is the mailbox, the API and the dashboard for one price.
most mailboxes bill per seat; two or more needs Starter
ours steps at 1, 50 and 500; Proton, HEY, Resend, Fastmail, Postmark and Mailgun charge more
Sending APIs and Mailchimp bill by volume; mailboxes cap it per seat
unlimited on every plan of ours; Proton and Fastmail tie them to seats
Forward EmailTeam
OpenEmailStarter
FastmailBusiness Standard
Google WorkspaceBusiness Starter
SuperhumanStarter + WorkspaceMost of these sell one piece of the job: a mailbox, a sending API, a campaign tool or an app that needs a mailbox from somebody else. The OpenEmail price is the whole job, with mailboxes on your own domains, sending and receiving, the full API and the AI assistant on every plan. So this is not even a fair comparison: every other bar buys one piece, and ours buys all of it.
Line by line.
Amazon SES is not a mailbox, so it is not on this table. The table compares the places mail actually lands, which is the choice Amazon SES sits beside rather than replaces.
| Compared | OpenEmail Starter | Fastmail Business Standard | Proton Mail Mail Essentials | Google Workspace Business Starter | HEY for Domains per person | Superhuman Starter + Workspace |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you actually pay for | One plan per workspace | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person, twice |
| Five people, every month | $20 | $30 | $39.95 | $42 | $58 | $192 |
| Twentieth person costs | $0 | $6 | $7.99 | $8.40 | $12 | $38.40 |
| Hosts the mail itself | a client on top of Gmail or Outlook | |||||
| Catch-all on your own domain | yours to switch on | paid plans | via a routing rule | aliases; catch-all not documented | whatever the host does | |
| Free on your own domain | one domain, unlimited addresses | trial only | custom domains are paid | trial only | no trial on domains | trial only |
| Drafts, subjects and answers from AI | writing assistant only | Gemini | Business tier | |||
| Your own agent can work the inbox | MCP server | JMAP API | API, no MCP | |||
| End-to-end encryption | between OpenEmail mailboxes | their whole point | enterprise tiers |