Cheap VPS mail feels free until it's spamA $5 box and a real delivery engine solve different problems.

A cheap VPS with Postfix or a modern stack like Stalwart is a real, working mail server, and the monthly line item is genuinely small: $5 to $20 for a box that can send and receive mail all day. The pitch is honest as far as it goes. What it leaves out is that running the software was never the hard part of email. Getting a message into someone else's inbox is a reputation problem, and reputation is exactly the thing a brand-new server does not have.

This page is the direct comparison against Amazon SES, at real cost. For the broader case on why self-hosting is not actually free, see The reality of a free self-hosted mail server, which covers the general argument this page applies specifically to a cheap VPS.

A brand-new IP address is not a blank slate on a discount cloud provider. AWS's own guidance on the subject is direct: an email provider might block cloud IP ranges outright, independent of anything you personally do, because those ranges have carried spam traffic from previous tenants before you ever rented the instance. You inherit that history the moment the IP is assigned to your account, and there is no setup step that clears it.

Outbound port 25, the port mail servers use to send to each other directly, compounds this. AWS blocks it by default on every EC2 instance, and most other cloud and VPS providers apply a similar default restriction, precisely because unrestricted port 25 access from cheap, disposable compute is one of the largest sources of spam on the internet. Getting it unblocked means filing a request and waiting on a review, not flipping a setting.

None of the following shows up on the VPS bill, and all of it is real, ongoing work.

• Requesting and waiting on the port 25 exception, then repeating that process if you ever move providers or regions.
• Building and maintaining SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reverse DNS by hand, correctly, and keeping them correct through every key rotation and server migration.
• Parsing your own bounces and complaints, registering for feedback loops where mailbox providers offer them, and manually suppressing anyone who complains, permanently.
• Checking Spamhaus and similar blocklists yourself, and filing delisting requests when your IP inevitably lands on one.
• Ramping volume gradually and backing off on deferrals, since a fresh server sending at full volume from day one is the fastest way to get blocked.
• Being the person who gets paged when a blocklisting happens on a weekend, because on a self-run server that person is always you.

Individually, none of these is difficult. Together, sustained over months, they are a part-time job that a $5 to $20 invoice does not remotely reflect.

Amazon SES's list price is roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails, which is what produces the numbers in the right-hand column. The VPS column is not padded; it is simply what the box costs before any of the reputation work in the previous section is counted, and that work is where a VPS mail server's real price actually lives.

• You want a personal mailbox on your own domain, mostly to send and receive mail with people who already know you, not to reach strangers at volume. Reputation problems are almost entirely a strangers-at-scale problem.
• You are learning how mail delivery actually works, and running your own server with your own bounce logs is a better teacher than any article, this one included.
• You enjoy running infrastructure as a hobby and treat the reputation work in the section above as part of the fun rather than a cost.

None of those three describes sending a newsletter to a few thousand people or a transactional stream to every customer of an app. Those are stranger-at-volume problems, and they are the case Amazon SES is priced and built for.

SendBunny sits on top of Amazon SES rather than replacing it: contacts, templates, campaigns, a transactional API and a shared inbox, all deployed into your own AWS account with one CloudFormation click. It surfaces your SES sending status on the dashboard and walks you through the production access request; AWS makes the actual decision. License is $199 once, with optional $99 a year updates, sending at Amazon SES's own rates. It is not for you if you will not run an AWS account, or if a personal mailbox on a VPS already covers what you actually need to send.