Compare · verified 4 Nov 2026

LoopNow vs Amazon SES for Indian senders

Amazon SES is the cheapest raw email infrastructure. LoopNow is a managed layer with campaigns, consent, WhatsApp, voice and support — at a higher per-email price.

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Verdict

One runtime vs point tool

LoopNow bundles email, WhatsApp, voice, workflow and GEO. If you only need one of those, the competitor may be cheaper.

Criterion	LoopNow	Amazon SES
Raw price	₹0.03/email overage	Very low per-email
Campaign builder	Included	No
Consent/DPDP	Consent ledger	Build it yourself
WhatsApp/voice	Included	No
Support	Included	AWS support plan
Ops burden	Managed	You run it

Competitor details checked 4 Nov 2026. Prices are exclusive of taxes; convert at ₹88/US$ where relevant.

When they win

We are not the right fit for everyone.

You have an engineering team and only need raw SMTP/API at the lowest cost.
You already run AWS infrastructure and want to own the sending stack.
You do not need campaigns, consent workflows or support.

When LoopNow wins

You want one bill for email, WhatsApp, voice, workflow and GEO; Indian-language support; DPDP consent records; and AWS Mumbai residency.

Compare plans

Two paper swatches on a cream surface, one warm, one cool.

The short version

Amazon SES is raw email infrastructure with a very low per-email price. LoopNow is a managed layer that adds campaigns, consent, WhatsApp, voice, workflow and support.
If you have engineers, already run on AWS and only need SMTP or an API, SES is the cheaper and more flexible answer. That is not a close call.
LoopNow charges ₹0.03 per delivered email in overage, which is higher than raw SES pricing and includes the parts SES leaves to you.
The real comparison is not per-email cost. It is per-email cost plus the engineer weeks needed to build sending, consent, suppression and reporting around it.
This comparison is written by LoopNow and was checked on 4 November 2026. AWS prices change without notice, so confirm them on the AWS pricing page.

Two different jobs behind the word email

Amazon SES sends email. It accepts a message over SMTP or an API call, hands it to Amazon’s mail transfer agents and reports what happened. Everything above that layer, including who is allowed to receive the message, whether they consented, which template applies, how the audience was built and what the campaign achieved, is your problem to solve. That is not a criticism. It is the product: infrastructure priced like infrastructure, with the control that engineering teams usually want and the operational burden they usually accept.

LoopNow’s email product is a managed layer over the same kind of plumbing. It includes a campaign builder, templates, audience and consent state, suppression handling, delivery reporting and a transactional path over SMTP and the API, with WhatsApp and voice sharing the same contact record. It is a smaller amount of control and a larger amount of finished product. Which one you want depends entirely on whether the missing layer is work you would rather buy or work you would rather own.

Figure 1. Same plumbing at the bottom, different amount of product on top. SES stops at the sending API; LoopNow starts there and adds the layer above.

The per-email price, read honestly

SES wins the unit-price comparison by a wide margin, and our own table says so: very low per-email against LoopNow’s ₹0.03 overage rate. At volume, that difference is not cosmetic. A sender pushing several hundred thousand messages a month can save real money on raw sending, and no amount of feature comparison changes the arithmetic. If the only line in your business case is cost per thousand emails, the answer is SES and the rest of this page is context.

The honest caveat is that ₹0.03 is an overage rate, not the price of the product. Emails inside a LoopNow plan are already paid for by the plan fee, so the marginal cost of a campaign is zero until the allowance is used. Starter includes 25,000 emails, Growth 1,00,000 and Scale 5,00,000. The comparison that matters is the total bill at your volume, not the cost of the last email, and a team sending 20,000 messages a month may find the managed plan cheaper than SES plus the engineering time to operate it.

Figure 2. Email included per month on LoopNow plans. Overage beyond the allowance is ₹0.03 per delivered email, against a materially lower raw rate at AWS.

What you inherit when you run SES yourself

Running SES is not difficult in the way that running a database cluster is difficult. It is difficult in the way that a hundred small operational decisions are difficult, because each one is individually reasonable and collectively a part-time job. You need domain authentication, a bounce and complaint handling path that actually updates your suppression list, a warm-up plan for a new domain or IP, per-tenant sending limits, retry logic and a log pipeline that lets you answer whether a specific message arrived. None of that is exotic. All of it has to be built and then maintained by someone.

The maintenance is the part that surprises teams. Deliverability drifts when a list goes stale, complaint rates rise after a bad import, and a DNS record changes during an unrelated migration. A managed platform absorbs some of that by watching the account and slowing down when reputation dips. It does not remove the need for good list hygiene, and any vendor implying otherwise is overselling. It removes the need to build the monitoring yourself, which is a different and more defensible claim.

Figure 3. The steps between an idea and a delivered email. With SES you own every box except the sending itself; with LoopNow the middle boxes are the product.

Campaigns and the layer SES does not sell

AWS does not offer a campaign builder for SES, and that is a product decision rather than an omission. The assumption is that you have a marketing platform, a CRM or your own application to compose and schedule. Many teams do, which is why SES fits neatly underneath an existing stack: the CRM composes, SES delivers, and nobody needs a second campaign tool. If that describes you, adding LoopNow is adding a layer you already have.

The gap appears when there is no such layer, or when the one you have is a spreadsheet and a BCC field. LoopNow gives a marketing team a builder, a template library, scheduling, segments and reporting without opening a ticket. For an organisation where email is one of five jobs a small team handles, that is the difference between running campaigns and not running them. For an organisation with a mature marketing platform, it is duplication, and we would rather say that plainly than argue for a replacement.

Figure 4. The campaign layer SES does not include: audience, template, schedule and the consent check that runs before the send is allowed.

Deliverability is shared work either way

Neither product can promise that your email lands in the inbox. Deliverability is a function of domain reputation, list quality, complaint rates, authentication and content, and no vendor controls all of those. What a vendor controls is how quickly you learn that something is wrong and how much of the recovery is automated. SES exposes reputation metrics and event data, and building on them is straightforward if you have an engineer watching. LoopNow surfaces bounce and complaint handling inside the product and slows sending when the account looks unhealthy, which helps a team without a dedicated email operator.

The shared responsibility is worth stating because it changes the buying question. Do not ask which vendor has better deliverability. Ask which one gives your team the visibility to notice a problem on Tuesday rather than at the end of the month, and who is expected to act when the numbers move. With SES the answer is your team. With LoopNow it is a shared queue with support included. Both are defensible. Only one of them matches a company without an email operations function.

Figure 6. Inbox placement is decided by factors the vendor only partly controls. The useful question is who notices a problem first.

Support and the two in the morning problem

SES support arrives through an AWS support plan, which means the quality of your escalation depends on the tier you bought and the severity definitions attached to it. That works when the person raising the ticket is an engineer who can describe the failure in the vocabulary of the service. It works less well when the person is a marketing manager whose campaign did not go out and who needs someone to check a suppression rule. LoopNow includes support on every paid plan, with a four-hour response target on Growth and 24/7 cover with a one-hour target on Scale.

Response targets are not uptime guarantees, and we are not going to dress them up as one. What they change is the shape of the failure. With a relay you own, a bad send is an engineering incident. With a managed platform, it is a support ticket with a named queue, and your engineer can stay on the product work that actually differentiates the business. For a ten-person company, that reallocation is often worth more than the per-email difference, and for a hundred-engineer company it is worth almost nothing.

Figure 7. The same incident on two operating models. The delta is not the fix time for the bug; it is who spends the first hour diagnosing it.

One AWS bill against one INR invoice

SES is billed by AWS, in dollars, on the card attached to the account, and the line item sits among compute, storage and everything else. For an engineering-led company this is not a problem: the bill already exists, finance already reconciles it, and the marginal administrative cost of one more service is zero. Indian entities still need to handle GST treatment on the import of services, which is a familiar process if you already buy AWS, and a new one if you do not.

LoopNow bills in rupees with a GST invoice on every payment and accepts UPI, cards, netbanking and NEFT for annual plans. Prices are exclusive of 18% GST and the spend cap is on by default. For a finance team, the practical difference is reconciliation: a marketing expense that arrives as a rupee invoice with a GSTIN is easier to book than a dollar line inside a cloud bill, especially when someone asks which campaign the spend belongs to. Neither model is more correct. They suit different accounting departments.

Figure 8. Billing questions that appear after the technical decision. An AWS-native team will answer them easily; a marketing-owned budget often will not.

Channels beyond email

SES does not send WhatsApp messages and does not place voice calls. That is not a gap in the product, it is the boundary of the product. If your revenue motion is email-first and your customers respond by email, the boundary is irrelevant. If a customer replies to a campaign and expects a WhatsApp message or a call in Hindi, SES will hand that message to your application and your application will need somewhere to send it, which means another vendor and another integration.

LoopNow bundles WhatsApp on the official Business API and voice agents in fourteen Indian languages on the same runtime, with 250 WhatsApp messages and 100 voice minutes on the free plan, 5,000 messages and 1,500 minutes on Growth. That is useful if the second channel is genuinely part of the journey. It is expensive if it is not, because the plan fee carries capacity you will never draw on. A team that sends transactional email and nothing else should not buy a multi-channel runtime to get a campaign builder.

Figure 9. The rows that survive once the per-email price is set aside. Each row is a piece of work that moves from your team to the vendor, or does not.

Lock-in, portability and the exit you already have

SMTP is the least locked-in interface in software. A message composed as MIME and handed to a relay can be handed to a different relay next week, and SES is therefore easy to leave in the technical sense. That portability is worth something, and it is the strongest structural argument for owning the sending layer. If a vendor raises prices or changes terms, an engineering team can move the relay without touching the application, provided the DNS and reputation work travels with it.

LoopNow’s portability is different. The SMTP and API path means transactional sending can move to another relay, and the export includes contacts with consent state, templates, workflow and agent definitions as JSON. What does not travel is the managed behaviour: the consent enforcement, the deliverability monitoring and the shared reporting. Leaving is possible, but you would be rebuilding a layer rather than swapping a provider. That is a real cost of ownership and it belongs in the comparison next to the price.

Figure 10. Leaving a relay is a configuration change. Leaving a managed layer is a rebuild of the layer, which is why the export format matters more than the exit clause.

When SES is the better engineering decision

Choose SES if you have at least one engineer who owns email as part of a platform role, if you already run production workloads on AWS, and if your sending is mostly transactional or triggered by your product. Choose it if your marketing platform already composes campaigns and only needs a reliable relay underneath. Choose it if the volume is large enough that the per-email difference pays for the engineering time several times over, which is true for most senders above a few hundred thousand messages a month.

Choose it, above all, if you want to own the sending stack and the data path. There is a legitimate strategic argument for keeping customer communication inside infrastructure you control, especially when the messages are security-sensitive or tied to a regulated product. That argument does not need a feature comparison to justify itself. It needs an engineer, a runbook and someone on call, and if you have those, SES is the right tool.

Figure 11. The three buying patterns we see. The hybrid path is the most common: SES underneath a product, a managed layer for marketing.

When a managed layer earns its markup

Choose LoopNow if the missing layer is the actual problem: no campaign tool, no consent record, no one watching deliverability, and a second channel already queued behind email. Choose it if finance wants a rupee invoice with GST and a spend cap rather than a dollar line inside a cloud bill. Choose it if the person operating email is not an engineer and should not have to become one. These are ordinary reasons, and none of them is about per-email price.

The markup you pay is real and should be named. At ₹0.03 per delivered email over the allowance, a sender of half a million messages a month is paying meaningfully more than raw SES pricing for the managed behaviour. That is a fair trade only if the behaviour replaces work you would otherwise do. Run the two-week test, price both sides at your real volume with GST included, and include the engineer hours at your own loaded rate. If the managed layer does not win on that arithmetic, buy SES and keep the difference.

Figure 12. The decision in one place. Both columns are defensible; the failure mode is buying a managed layer and still building everything yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Is Amazon SES actually cheaper than LoopNow?

Per email, yes, by a wide margin. Our comparison records a very low per-email price for SES against ₹0.03 per delivered email in LoopNow overage. The gap is real at volume. Whether it is cheaper in total depends on the engineering hours you spend building and running the layers SES does not include, which is the number most comparisons leave out.

Can I use SES underneath LoopNow?

LoopNow runs its own sending infrastructure and exposes SMTP and an API to you; it is not a wrapper you configure to point at your SES account. If you want SES specifically underneath, the practical pattern is to keep SES for product-triggered mail and use LoopNow for campaigns, consent and the other channels. That hybrid is common and avoids forcing one tool to do both jobs.

What does SES not include that I would have to build?

Consent records, suppression logic, campaign composition, template management, bounce and complaint handling that updates your database, per-tenant sending limits, reporting and the on-call rota when delivery drops. None of it is hard in isolation. Together it is a part-time engineering role, and that is the honest cost to put beside the per-email price.

Does LoopNow cost more because it includes WhatsApp and voice?

Partly, yes. Every paid plan carries WhatsApp messages and voice minutes whether or not you use them, and that capacity is inside the fee. If you only need email, you are subsidising channels you do not run. That is the clearest case for choosing SES or an email specialist instead, and we would not argue against it.

How is GST handled on an AWS bill?

AWS bills in dollars and the Indian entity accounts for GST on the import of services under the reverse charge mechanism, which is standard practice for cloud spend and familiar to most finance teams already buying AWS. A LoopNow invoice is a domestic rupee invoice with GST charged at 18% and a GSTIN printed on it. Neither is better; they suit different accounting setups.

Which is better for transactional email like OTPs?

SES is a strong fit for OTPs and receipts: high volume, simple payloads, latency-sensitive, and usually already inside the application that triggers them. LoopNow supports transactional sending over SMTP and the API and keeps it separate from marketing consent, which matters when a dormant contact should still receive a receipt. Use the relay you can operate; use the managed layer when nobody owns the relay.

What happens to deliverability if I switch?

Reputation is tied to domain and sending IP, not to the vendor’s brand, so a careful migration keeps most of it. Expect a warm-up period, keep authentication records intact, and move volume gradually. Neither SES nor LoopNow can transplant a reputation overnight, and any migration plan that promises no dip is not describing how email works. Plan for two weeks of reduced volume.

Do I need AWS support to run SES properly?

You need someone to answer when sending fails at an inconvenient hour, which is either an AWS support plan or an engineer on call. Our comparison notes that LoopNow includes support on paid plans while SES support comes through an AWS plan, and the practical difference is who pays for that coverage and how the ticket is described.

Can I start on LoopNow and move to SES later?

Yes, and some teams do exactly that once they hire a platform engineer. Transactional sending can move to SES over SMTP while campaigns stay on LoopNow, or everything can move. The export gives you contacts with consent state and templates. Plan the DNS and warm-up work before you cut over, and keep both paths running for a fortnight.