Mailblast

Mailblast is a hosted email marketing platform built on Amazon's Simple Email Service. Its home page puts the idea in one line: "Mailblast makes sending emails simple and affordable using Amazon's Simple Email Service." You connect your own Amazon SES account, and Mailblast provides everything SES itself lacks: subscriber lists, a campaign builder with a drag-and-drop editor, automation, signup forms and per-campaign reports. Delivery runs through your AWS account and AWS bills you for it directly, while Mailblast charges for the software. The company's own blog calls it "a hosted management layer for your own Amazon SES account", and the home page names three audiences: solo creators and bloggers, startups and SaaS teams, and agencies and developers.

How the model works

The FAQ explains the split. Mailblast "routes your campaigns through your own Amazon SES account, so you pay AWS directly at their rates (~$0.10 per 1,000 emails) with no markup from us." The page also points out that AWS includes a free tier of its own: 62,000 emails a month when sending from an EC2 instance, or 3,000 a month from anywhere else. Mailblast's charge covers the platform; the sending bill is AWS's.

Because SES does the sending, Mailblast leans on its infrastructure for deliverability. The home page describes SES as the same infrastructure behind Amazon's own transactional and marketing email, with strict bounce and complaint thresholds and real-time delivery feedback through SNS notifications. Mailblast processes those notifications automatically, suppressing hard bounces and complaints from future sends, so a sender's reputation stays healthy without manual work. Its blog adds that the platform also handles unsubscribe suppression and SES reputation monitoring as part of the hosted service.

What a sender gets

The home page lists five features.

• List management. Upload and manage subscriber lists online, with filters and import functions.
• Send campaigns. Create, test and schedule campaigns in a step-by-step wizard, preview them, then schedule or send immediately.
• Detailed reports. Reports on every campaign, with bounces and complaints filtered out of future campaigns automatically. Open, click, bounce and complaint rates are tracked per campaign in real time.
• Marketing automation. Scheduled automated emails to people who sign up to your list.
• Signup forms. Forms you embed on your website to bring subscribers onto your list.

The company's guide to email tools for Amazon SES fills in more detail about its own product. The drag-and-drop editor is powered by BeeFree, with Liquid templating for personalization. Lists support segmentation and engagement-based targeting. Campaign scheduling is available on every plan, and automation workflows are listed from $10 a month. The analytics dashboard shows open, click and unsubscribe rates and tracks clicks per link. The same guide is frank about what the product leaves out: it has no landing pages and no A/B testing, and it needs an AWS account with SES production access.

A comparison post on the company blog describes the automation engine as covering welcome sequences, drip campaigns and list-based triggers. The home page's startup section mentions onboarding sequences, product announcements and re-engagement campaigns.

Setup and migration

The home page describes three steps. First, connect Amazon SES: verify your domain in AWS and paste your SES credentials into Mailblast; the page says setup takes under five minutes. The SES guide explains the connection in more detail: you create a small IAM user with SES and a few SNS permissions, generate an access key and paste it into Mailblast's AWS settings, with no SMTP credentials and no manual SNS topic subscription. Second, import subscribers by uploading a CSV or pasting a list; Mailblast removes duplicates, stores unsubscribes and keeps bounces and complaints out of future sends. Third, build the email in the campaign wizard and send or schedule it.

For a sender moving from another provider, the FAQ says a CSV import brings in name and email, removes duplicates and respects any unsubscribes you flag, and that you can also upload a suppression list from your previous provider so earlier bounces and complaints do not follow you. The blog's migration guide notes that verified identities, dedicated IPs and warm-up history live in the AWS account, so they stay with you when you change the management layer; templates and campaigns have to be recreated.

Plans and prices

The free plan covers 1,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, needs no credit card, and requires an Amazon SES account. The home page labels it "All features included." Free-plan emails carry a Mailblast footer; according to the SES guide, paid plans from $10 a month send with no platform branding, so recipients see only your domain.

Paid plans start at $10 a month for 1,000 contacts and step up to $255 a month for 500,000 contacts, according to the guide. The FAQ gives one point in between: at 15,000 contacts the platform costs $25 a month. SES sending costs are billed separately by AWS in every case, and the FAQ adds "no feature gating."

For agencies, the home page says you can white-label the platform for your clients, with each account connected to its own SES credentials so client data stays isolated. The same comparison post explains the billing: multiple brands run as sub-accounts, each with its own AWS keys, lists and optional independent white-label branding, and each sub-account is billed as its own subscription.

Support and resources

The home page says the support team responds within 24 hours, and the footer lists a contact address, a help center, API docs, a blog and an About page. The blog publishes guides on Amazon SES email marketing, setup walkthroughs and comparisons.

Customer quotes on the home page come mostly from developers and founders. David J., a developer, says the team imported 70k subscribers without a hitch and had the first campaign out the same day. Erdem A., a full-stack developer, praises support that handled requests and features faster than expected. Craig H., who runs a marketing agency, says the AWS backbone gives him confidence in deliverability and the automation is solid. Lee M. says the automation sequences save hours every week, and Sarah K., an e-commerce marketing manager, says setup took 20 minutes.

Who it suits

Mailblast fits a sender who is willing to open an AWS account in exchange for SES sending rates: a blogger or creator with a growing list, a startup or SaaS team running onboarding and announcement emails, or a developer who already uses AWS. The free plan is large enough to grow a real list before paying, and paid plans price the software separately from delivery. Agencies can run one sub-account per client with its own SES keys.

It asks more of the buyer than an all-inclusive service, because AWS setup and SES production access come first. Teams that need landing pages or A/B testing will find the company says plainly that it does not offer them.