Working with Amazon Web Services SES has been anything but smooth.
I’ll be blunt: if you’re a solo builder in 2026, AWS SES is not built for you. They don’t target you. They don’t prioritize you. And they definitely don’t respect your time.
This post is not theory. It’s lived experience.
The First Rejection (No Explanation)
I followed the documentation.
I submitted the production access request.
I waited.
Then: rejected.
No reason. No feedback. Nothing.
So I did what most solo founders end up doing. I posted on Reddit. Support noticed. Someone reached out. The SES team “reviewed” it again.
Same result.
Rejected.
Still no explanation.
The Second Attempt (I Did Everything Right)
At this point, I assumed I was the problem.
So I went all in.
I spent hours making the setup bulletproof.
What I implemented (properly):
Authentication & Compliance
Domain verified
SPF passing
DKIM signing
DMARC upgraded from
p=none→p=quarantine
Bounce & Complaint Handling
SES account-level suppression
Application-level suppression (Rails model)
SNS topics wired correctly
Simulator tested (bounce + complaint)
Future sends blocked automatically
Monitoring
CloudWatch dashboards
Alarms for bounce >5%, complaint >0.1%
Weekly review plan
Abuse Prevention
Cloudflare bot filtering
Cloudflare Turnstile on signup
Email verification mandatory
Dedicated abuse/contact page
24–48h response SLA
Business Clarity
Strictly transactional emails only
No marketing
No newsletters
No list buying
No scraping
MVP stage
~10 emails/day
Conservative warm-up schedule
I even attached screenshots proving simulator tests and suppression logic worked.
This is textbook SES compliance.
Probably better than most production setups.
And Then… Silence
No rejection.
No approval.
No questions.
Just… nothing.
More than a week.
A complete ghost.
Momentum stalls.
This is the part that hurts the most.
The Hard Truth About AWS SES
It is not optimized for:
Solo founders
Early-stage SaaS
Builders trying to ship fast
Developers who need predictable support
And that’s fine.
But AWS should be honest about it. They aren't. They should highlight it as requirement, instead they encourage SES users to request production access. Thus wasting their efforts and time.
Right now, the process feels opaque, arbitrary, and hostile to small builders.
What I’d Tell a Solo Builder in 2026
If you’re early-stage:
Avoid AWS SES
Use a developer-friendly email service provider
Pay a bit more
Ship faster
Sleep better
People tell me SES might make sense later. When you have scale. When you have leverage, but honestly, if the experience is so poor when you are starting out, then why would you rely on them later?
It’s not worth the time sink.
Final Thought
I don’t regret learning the internals. I regret trusting the process. I regret loosing a bit of momentum because of it.
If this post saves another solo builder a week of lost momentum, it’s done its job.
Onward.
— Rahul
PS: This isn’t the end. Part 2 covers the in depth details of the request process, escape hatch: better tools, faster setup, and how to unblock your launch without begging for approval.
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