Choosing Transactional Email: Amazon SES vs HubSpot Add-On

Imagine you’re a small business on the verge of launching a membership platform. You’ve got a Stripe integration handling payments, an event system managing ticket purchases, and you know that customers expect instant email confirmations—receipts, password resets, onboarding instructions.

The question becomes: how do you send those emails?

The Fork in the Road: HubSpot or Amazon?

If you’re already using HubSpot for CRM and marketing, you’ll quickly find their Transactional Email Add-On. It’s polished, integrated, and promises to make automation simple. But then you notice the cost:

• HubSpot’s Transactional Email Add-On usually starts around $600/month (depending on plan and contact tiering). That’s a big commitment for a small business that might only need a few thousand transactional emails per month.

By contrast, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is built for developers:

• Pricing: ~$0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, plus minimal data transfer fees.
• No mandatory minimum spend, no marketing “contact tiers.”
• Tight integration with AWS infrastructure, which means it plugs directly into your app logic.

Suddenly the economics look stark: the same service (sending automated transactional emails) could cost tens of dollars with SES vs. hundreds or thousands with HubSpot.

Why This Matters for a Small Membership Platform

Let’s put numbers on it.

Your membership platform launches with 1,000 members. Each month, on average:

• 800 event confirmations (ticket sales, subscriptions).
• 500 password resets, account verification, and onboarding flows.
• 200 renewal or billing failure notifications.

That’s about 1,500 transactional emails per month.

• Amazon SES cost: about $0.15/month. Even with overhead (monitoring, IP warm-up, error handling), you might spend under $10/month.
• HubSpot transactional add-on: ~$600/month baseline, regardless of usage.

The gap is thousands of percent. For a bootstrapped business, the savings are critical.

Why Companies Still Choose HubSpot

Cost isn’t the whole story. Some businesses still opt for HubSpot because:

• Integration: Transactional email sits right inside the CRM, with reporting alongside marketing emails.
• Non-technical teams: Marketing or ops staff can build templates, track deliverability, and manage campaigns without touching code.
• Support: HubSpot’s customer success model appeals to teams who don’t want to manage servers or APIs.

But this convenience comes with a premium price tag.

The Case for Amazon SES

Amazon SES shines for small companies that:

• Already have developers building the product.
• Want direct API or SMTP access to send triggered messages.
• Need to scale cheaply without worrying about marketing contact thresholds.
• Value the flexibility to pair SES with other tools (e.g., templating with MJML, fronting with Postmark for UI, monitoring via CloudWatch).

For the membership platform example, SES becomes the invisible backbone—cheap, fast, and reliable.

Other Options in the Transactional Space

HubSpot and SES aren’t the only options. Other players bridge the gap:

• Postmark (by ActiveCampaign): Transactional-only focus, with excellent deliverability and simple APIs. Pricing starts at $15/month for 10k emails.
• SendGrid (by Twilio): A common choice for startups, offering both marketing and transactional tiers. Free tier covers the first 100 emails/day.
• Mailgun: Flexible developer tool, similar to SES, but with easier setup for non-AWS users.
• SparkPost (MessageBird): Enterprise-grade deliverability, pay-as-you-go pricing.

Each comes with trade-offs in cost, ease, and integration. What matters is that HubSpot is not the only option for transactional email—even if you use HubSpot for everything else.

Narrative Closing: What the Small Business Chose

Our membership platform founders looked at their options:

• HubSpot would give them one dashboard for everything, but it would eat into budget they needed for development and marketing.
• Amazon SES offered rock-bottom costs and the flexibility to tie directly into their app’s Stripe and event workflows.

They chose SES.

The first customer who bought a ticket received a crisp confirmation email within seconds. Password resets worked seamlessly. Stripe’s webhooks triggered billing notifications. And all of it cost pennies, not hundreds of dollars.

The lesson? For small businesses, transactional email doesn’t have to be tied to your marketing platform. Sometimes, the leaner choice gives you room to grow.

Key Takeaways

• HubSpot transactional email add-on = integrated but expensive (hundreds/month).
• Amazon SES = developer-oriented, rock-bottom pricing (~$0.10 per 1,000 emails).
• For a small business or membership platform, SES can handle all event-driven automation (Stripe, ticketing, password resets) for under $10/month.
• Other providers (Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun) exist as middle ground options.
• Don’t assume HubSpot is your only choice: evaluate the economics, the team’s technical ability, and the long-term scaling plan.