Amazon SES Is Powerful — But It Wasn’t Built for SaaS Teams
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a powerful foundation for email delivery — low-cost, reliable, and scalable.
But if you’re a product or engineering team at a SaaS company, you’ll quickly hit limits that SES wasn’t built to solve. From missing dashboards to multi-user isolation headaches, SES is great infra but terrible UX.
In this post, we’ll break down the biggest pain points of using SES in a SaaS context — and how isend.ai adds the product layer you’ve been missing.
Why Developers Love SES
Let’s give Amazon credit — SES has rock-solid fundamentals:
- Scalable: Send millions of emails reliably.
- Cheap: Around $0.10 per 1,000 emails.
- Trusted: Backed by Amazon’s infra.
- Flexible: Deep integrations with S3, Lambda, CloudWatch, etc.
For devs working close to the metal, SES is gold.
But for SaaS product teams? Not so much.
😬 Where SES Fails for SaaS
Here are the five biggest gaps when using SES for a SaaS product.
1. No Template UI
You’re stuck managing templates via JSON or raw HTML.
No preview, no version history, no drag-and-drop — just APIs.
Your product team deserves better than
CreateTemplate.
2. No Multi-Tenant Support
SES doesn’t recognize user-level activity. Everything is at the account level.
- No per-user analytics
- No customer-specific delivery logs
- No scoped unsubscribe handling
That means you have to build tenant isolation, logging, and privacy safeguards yourself.
3. No Dashboard for Non-Devs
There’s no UI for:
- Viewing sent emails
- Tracking opens, clicks, bounces
- Managing templates
- Resending failed messages
So you build internal tools... and then maintain them forever.
4. Clunky Event Tracking
Want delivery events? SES sends them via SNS → SQS → Lambda → custom logic.
You have to parse JSON, log events, and alert manually — making deliverability someone’s DevOps job, not a product feature.
5. SES Sandbox = Friction
You start in sandbox mode, with rate limits and recipient restrictions.
Moving to production requires manual approval — which can block your team from testing email flows on day one.
Enter isend.ai — SES, Reimagined for SaaS
We built isend.ai as a modern product layer on top of SES.
| Feature | SES | isend.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Template management | ❌ Code-only | Drag-and-drop or HTML |
| Per-user analytics | ❌ None | Tenant-level logs |
| Unsubscribe handling | ❌ Manual setup | Built-in + suppression list |
| Delivery events | ❌ SNS + SQS + code | Clean webhook + dashboard |
| Team-friendly dashboard | ❌ No UI | Designed for PMs & Support |
| Sandbox bypass | ❌ Manual | Auto-setup + domain verify |
Final Thoughts
SES is an incredible engine. But engines need dashboards, controls, and analytics — especially in SaaS.
If you’re:
- Hacking templates with raw HTML
- Building user-layer infra from scratch
- Managing delivery events with cloud plumbing
- Explaining SNS to your support team...
…it’s time to rethink your stack.
isend.ai gives you everything SES doesn’t — without losing the power of SES itself.
🔗 Try isend.ai
Build email workflows your team will love — powered by SES, but product-friendly.
Banner Image Attribution
Banner photo by Growtika on Unsplash