I use Amazon SES, along with SNS for event notifications, but not EC2 or S3. My bill contains two line items that seem to represent the same outbound traffic: an SES charge for attachment data and a separate Data Transfer Out charge under the monthly global free tier. The quantities are very similar on both lines.
AWS documentation says data-transfer tiers are calculated using aggregate usage across services such as EC2, S3, RDS, SES, and SNS, so SES traffic appears to count toward the shared 100 GB monthly allowance. What I cannot determine is whether SES-originated attachment bytes are charged again on the generic Data Transfer Out line after the account exceeds that allowance, in addition to the SES-specific attachment charge.
The documentation is not clear, and automated support could not confirm the behavior. Has anyone exceeded 100 GB primarily through SES traffic and verified the result on an actual bill?
2 Answers
The SES pricing page explicitly charges for attachment data, but that does not by itself answer whether the same bytes also enter the account-wide Data Transfer Out calculation. The note about possible extra transfer charges is often written in the context of EC2, and EC2 is not involved in this setup. The safest conclusion from the documentation alone is that the billing behavior is ambiguous rather than assuming the traffic is definitely charged twice.
Using a different delivery design, such as storing files in object storage and sending recipients a temporary download link, may avoid SES attachment charges and can make the transfer path easier to identify. However, that is an architectural suggestion, not an answer to whether SES attachment bytes are duplicated on the generic Data Transfer line. Attachments can still be a legitimate requirement, so the billing detail needs to be confirmed separately.
Agreed that links are useful in some cases, but many services and ticketing workflows intentionally deliver documents as attachments. The key question here is still how the existing SES traffic is categorized on the bill.
That is my concern too. Since the messages originate outside AWS and I am not using EC2, I am looking for someone who has confirmed the treatment from a real invoice.