sendvia is a managed email platform that sends through your own Amazon SES account. You get a REST API, an SMTP relay, newsletters, open and click tracking, and DKIM, SPF, DMARC and BIMI monitoring, for a flat $19 per month. Amazon bills you for the email itself at SES rates, and sendvia adds no per-email markup.
Yes, your own account, your own credentials, your own reputation. You create an IAM user in the AWS console, allow it to send through SES, and paste the access key into sendvia. Revoke that key and sending stops the same minute.
Those credentials do three jobs: dispatching mail, reading the sending quota Amazon has granted you, and subscribing to the SNS topic that reports bounces, complaints, deferrals and rejections. Nothing else in your AWS account is touched. Amazon meters every message and bills it to you directly, which is the reason sendvia can charge one flat fee instead of a rate per email. The SES setup guide covers it screen by screen and takes about ten minutes. For the longer answer on what that layer buys you over the AWS console alone, see why sendvia instead of raw SES.
Developers and small teams already running on AWS, and anyone sending enough email that per-message pricing has started to hurt.
The arithmetic is the honest part of the answer. Amazon charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails, so 100,000 messages cost $10 and a million cost $100. sendvia adds $19 a month and nothing per message, which puts that million at $119 all in. Send 5,000 emails a month and none of this matters, so pick whichever service you find easiest to start. The gap opens somewhere around 50,000 a month, and past that it only widens. The cost calculator will do the sum for your own volume.
There is a second group: people who want the sending identity to be theirs. Reputation built on your own SES account stays with you if you leave, and so do the verified domains, the DNS records and the bounce history.
The free plan sends 250 emails a day from one domain. Premium is $19 a month for 100,000 emails a day across 10 domains, and Amazon bills the SES charges to your own account at its published rate of $0.10 per 1,000 emails.
Nothing else is metered. There is no per-seat charge, no annual contract and no surcharge for using the API rather than SMTP. Log retention is the one feature that moves with the plan: 7 days on free, 90 days on premium. When a premium subscription ends, the account returns to the free limits at the end of the billing period rather than locking you out of your data.
They own the sending infrastructure and mark up each email. sendvia does not touch the sending account.
That one difference explains most of the others. Their price climbs with your volume because the email is their cost, and ours does not, because Amazon bills the email to you. On their shared pools, deliverability is an asset you rent, so a careless neighbour in the same pool becomes your problem. On SES your sending identity is your own. In exchange, you do the AWS setup, you ask Amazon for production access, and you carry the consequences of a bad list.
They are the better choice more often than a marketing page usually admits. Postmark answers support email in under three hours on average and keeps transactional and broadcast traffic on separate infrastructure, so if you would rather somebody else owned deliverability, that is worth paying for. Resend has you sending as soon as one sending domain verifies, while sendvia additionally needs an AWS account, an IAM user and a production access request that Amazon reviews before you can send to anyone. The homepage comparison lists twelve scenarios where one of the four beats sendvia, each with the page it was checked against.
There is no dedicated IP option, no inbound email or parsing, no teams or sub-accounts, and no official SDKs.
The AWS side carries conditions of its own. You need an AWS account and you create the IAM user yourself. A new SES account starts inside Amazon's sandbox, capped at 200 emails a day to verified recipients only, until Amazon grants production access. That review usually takes 12 to 24 hours.
The API has fixed ceilings: 50 recipients per call, 500 messages per batch, and scheduling no further than 72 hours ahead. Free accounts keep 7 days of send logs and premium accounts keep 90.
Every item on that list is either a deliberate choice or a direct consequence of sending from your SES account rather than ours. If one of them rules sendvia out for you, it rules it out. Better to find that here than after a migration.