The SNDR alternative to Amazon SES.

Amazon SES is the cheapest per-message email infrastructure on the planet — once you've built the surrounding system: an SNS topic per event type, a Lambda or SQS consumer for bounces and complaints, a suppression list you own, a reputation dashboard you build, an IP-pool rotation strategy you implement, and the IAM matrix to keep the whole thing safe. SNDR ships all of that out of the box on top of comparable upstream delivery. The trade-off is per-message price for engineer hours.

Drawn from public documentation and pricing as of build time. We try to keep this fair — file an issue if anything is wrong.

1. 1

   Install the SDK

   Add @rkiza/sndr alongside @aws-sdk/client-ses. Both can run in parallel during cutover.

   pnpm add @rkiza/sndr

2. 2

   Replace the send call

   SES SendEmailCommand maps cleanly. The SNDR call is shorter because Destination/Message/Body are flattened.

   // before
   import { SESClient, SendEmailCommand } from '@aws-sdk/client-ses';
   const ses = new SESClient({ region: 'us-east-1' });
   await ses.send(new SendEmailCommand({
     Source: 'me@yourdomain.com',
     Destination: { ToAddresses: ['a@b.com'] },
     Message: { Subject: { Data: 'hi' }, Body: { Html: { Data: '<p>hi</p>' } } },
   }));
   
   // after
   import { Sndr } from '@rkiza/sndr';
   const sndr = new Sndr(process.env.SNDR_API_KEY!);
   await sndr.emails.send({
     from: 'me@yourdomain.com', to: 'a@b.com', subject: 'hi', html: '<p>hi</p>',
   });

3. 3

   Retire your SNS → SQS → Lambda pipeline

   The whole bounce/complaint plumbing collapses into a single webhook handler. Verify the signature and switch on event.type.

   import { verifyWebhookSignature } from '@rkiza/sndr';
   
   app.post('/webhooks/sndr', express.raw({ type: 'application/json' }), (req, res) => {
     if (!verifyWebhookSignature(req.body, req.header('x-sndr-signature') ?? '', process.env.SNDR_WEBHOOK_SECRET!)) {
       return res.status(400).send('bad signature');
     }
     const event = JSON.parse(req.body.toString('utf8'));
     if (event.type === 'email.bounced') {
       // No SNS, no SQS — just the payload, signed.
     }
     res.status(200).send('ok');
   });

4. 4

   Migrate your suppression list

   Export from SES (ListSuppressedDestinations) and import via the SNDR dashboard or API. Customer-domain suppressions persist; account-level retain their reason metadata.

5. 5

   Reuse your DNS, drop unused SES regions

   SPF can keep the SES include during cutover. DKIM keys can co-exist (selectors are independent). After the cutover, remove SES include + delete unused regional configurations.