European AWS SES alternative

A region is a location. It isn’t a jurisdiction.

Running SES in eu-central-1 or eu-west-1 is a sensible thing to do, and it genuinely settles the data-location half of the GDPR question: the bytes are in Frankfurt or Dublin.

What it doesn’t change is that the processor is Amazon Web Services, a US-incorporated company. Under the US CLOUD Act, a US provider can be compelled to produce data under its control wherever it is physically stored. That is why a transfer impact assessment for SES-in-Europe is still a document you write, revisit, and defend — the region narrows the exposure rather than removing the question. Choosing a processor established in the EEA is what removes it.

The plumbing you stop operating

This is usually the bigger practical win, and it is the thing SES pricing doesn’t show you. A production SES setup is never just SES — it is SES plus a small distributed system you wrote and now maintain.

The code change is a flattening

SESv2’s nested Destination / Content / Simple structure collapses into plain fields, and IAM credentials become an API key:

- import { SESv2Client, SendEmailCommand } from '@aws-sdk/client-sesv2'
- const ses = new SESv2Client({ region: 'eu-central-1' })
+ import { Eusend } from '@eusend_dev/sdk'
+ const eusend = new Eusend(process.env.EUSEND_API_KEY)

- await ses.send(new SendEmailCommand({
-   FromEmailAddress: 'Acme <hello@acme.com>',
-   Destination: { ToAddresses: ['user@example.com'] },
-   Content: { Simple: {
-     Subject: { Data: 'Your receipt' },
-     Body: { Html: { Data: html } },
-   } },
-   ConfigurationSetName: 'tracking-and-events',
- }))
+ await eusend.emails.send({
+   from: 'Acme <hello@acme.com>',
+   to: 'user@example.com',
+   subject: 'Your receipt',
+   html,
+ })

• If you go through nodemailer, there’s no code change at all. Plenty of SES setups point nodemailer at the SES SMTP endpoint. Swap the transport to smtp.eusend.dev on port 465 with implicit TLS and delete the IAM SMTP credential derivation.
• No more hand-built MIME for attachments. If you reached for SendRawEmailCommand only to attach a PDF invoice, that becomes an attachments array with base64 content — up to 20 files, 10 MB combined.
• Errors are values. Calls return { data, error } with stable machine-readable codes instead of throwing AWS SDK exception types you match on by name.

The full field mapping, including templates and the SNS-to-webhook translation, is in the SES migration guide.

Where SES is genuinely the better answer

Worth saying plainly, because the alternative is you finding out after migrating. SES wins on raw price and it is not close. If you send very high volume of low-sensitivity mail, you already have the bounce and suppression plumbing working, and nobody is asking you questions about the processor’s jurisdiction, then SES is doing its job and this page is not for you.

The trade is worth it when the plumbing is costing engineering time, when you want delivery problems to be someone’s actual job rather than your on-call rotation, or when “who is the processor” has started appearing in security questionnaires. The pricing page has the numbers to run that comparison honestly.

Common questions