Executive Summary: A deep architectural comparison of AWS SES and SendGrid for handling 1M+ emails per day.
When building **Solidrix Send**, our bulk email marketing platform, we needed an SMTP backbone that was cost-effective, hyper-scalable, and offered granular IP reputation management.
### The Cost Factor
AWS SES is exponentially cheaper than SendGrid at high volumes. While SendGrid offers an excellent out-of-the-box UI, SES provides the raw API power we needed to build our own multi-tenant analytics dashboard.
### Configuration Sets & IP Warmup
SES allows defining **Configuration Sets** to route bounce and complaint metrics directly to SNS topics. This enabled us to build an automated suppression list manager:
- If an email hard-bounces, the SNS webhook triggers a serverless Lambda or Laravel API route.
- The email is immediately marked as 'Bounced' in our database.
- Future campaigns automatically exclude this email to protect domain reputation.
Ultimately, SES gave us the architectural control necessary to build an enterprise-grade Email Service Provider (ESP).