SendBunny vs LoopsA polished SaaS subscription against a $199 license in your own AWS.

Loops is a hosted, all-in-one product for developers building lifecycle and transactional email into a SaaS product: onboarding sequences, campaigns and a send API, running entirely on Loops' own infrastructure and billed through monthly plans. Signing up gets a working product in minutes, and staying on it means paying for that convenience every month.

SendBunny is the same idea, campaigns plus a transactional API in one account, installed differently: as a one-time $199 license into your own AWS account, running on your own Amazon SES. There is no ongoing SaaS subscription for the platform itself, only Amazon's own SES charges for what is actually sent.

The install itself is the trade. Loops' signup takes minutes with nothing to configure. SendBunny's one-click CloudFormation stack takes roughly ten minutes and requires an AWS account, in exchange for the account, the list and the sending domain living somewhere administered by you rather than inside a vendor's tenancy.

Loops' polish is real: a clean product-email-focused UI, sensible defaults for lifecycle sequences, and nothing to install. SendBunny trades that initial polish for infrastructure ownership, and both products cover the same core job, campaigns plus a transactional send path for a product.

Where the two diverge most is what happens to the account when a founder moves on or a company changes vendors. A Loops account is a login on Loops' servers, tied to whichever billing details created it. A SendBunny install is a stack inside a specific AWS account, transferable the same way any other AWS resource is: by handing over account access, not by asking a vendor to move data on your behalf.

Loops prices its plans by tier rather than a flat per-email rate, and moving into a higher volume band typically means moving to a higher plan. SendBunny's cost is the $199 license amortized once, plus whatever Amazon SES bills for the emails actually sent that month, at roughly $0.10 per 1,000. The gap is largest for a team whose send volume is uneven: a quiet month still sits inside whatever plan floor Loops has set, while a quiet month on SendBunny costs close to nothing.

Pick Loops if zero infrastructure ownership is worth an ongoing subscription. Teams that want to sign up, ship product email the same day, and never think about AWS again are exactly who Loops is built for, and that convenience has real value for a small team moving fast.

Pick SendBunny if product email volume is growing and an AWS account is not a dealbreaker. The ten-minute install buys a flat license instead of a plan that climbs with volume, and the list and sending domain sit in an account only you administer.

The decision usually comes down to team shape rather than feature gaps. A two-person team shipping a first product often values Loops' speed to first send more than ownership. A team that already runs infrastructure on AWS, or expects volume to keep climbing, tends to value the flat license more the longer it stays on either platform.

The move is a contact export and an API repoint, not a rebuild of the product.

1. Export contacts from Loops.
2. Run the SendBunny install using the one-click AWS link from checkout.
3. Import the CSV, verify the domain, and reconnect transactional sends to the new API.
4. Cancel Loops once the new stack is stable and sending cleanly.