The Linear Scaling Trap
Why sending 1M emails costs 10x more than 100k on legacy providers. And why that makes no sense.
Email sending is a commodity that costs AWS $0.10 per 1,000 emails at any volume. Legacy providers charge 5-10x more and increase prices as you scale, punishing your success.
- AWS SES costs $0.10/1k emails whether you send 10k or 10M.
- SendGrid, Resend, Mailgun charge $0.50-$1.00/1k at scale.
- Switching costs (IP warmup, templates) keep you locked in.
- Transmit passes through AWS costs. No success tax.
The Economics of Email
Sending email is remarkably cheap at the infrastructure level. AWS SES charges a flat $0.10 per 1,000 emails regardless of volume. Whether you send 10,000 or 10,000,000 emails, the per-unit cost stays the same.
This makes sense. Email is bandwidth + compute + IP reputation. These costs scale linearly and cheaply.
But legacy email providers don't use cost-plus pricing. They use value-based pricing. They charge based on what they think email is worth to your business, not what it costs them to deliver.
The Trap in Action
Here's how the trap works:
| Volume | AWS SES | Typical Provider | Markup |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10k/mo | $1 | $20 | 20x |
| 100k/mo | $10 | $80 | 8x |
| 1M/mo | $100 | $700 | 7x |
| 10M/mo | $1,000 | $5,000+ | 5x+ |
At 10k emails, nobody cares about a $20 bill. But at 10M emails, you're paying $4,000+ per month more than necessary. That's a junior engineer's salary. Every month. Forever. And that's before overage fees hit.
Why You Stay Trapped
The providers know this math. They also know that by the time you're sending 1M+ emails, you're locked in:
- IP Reputation: Your domain has built reputation on their IPs. Starting fresh means deliverability drops. (And good luck getting a dedicated IP without paying 4x markup.)
- Templates: You've built dozens of email templates in their system.
- Integrations: Your codebase has their API calls everywhere.
- Inertia: "It works, why change it?"
This is the trap. They hook you at low volume, then extract maximum value as you scale.
Escape the Trap
Transmit passes through AWS costs directly. No markup on the metal. Pay a flat platform fee for the features you need.