Amazon SES email templates your whole team can edit
Keep Amazon SES for low-cost delivery. Your team writes, tests and publishes your app's email templates in CommuniQueue, and CommuniQueue sends each finished email through your SES account.
What Amazon SES does well
- Pay-as-you-go pricing with no contract and no upfront commitment.
- Deliverability tools: Virtual Deliverability Manager, plus standard and managed dedicated IPs.
- It runs in your own AWS account, next to the rest of your infrastructure.
Amazon SES's own templates
SES stores templates that you create through its API or the AWS CLI, which is the workflow its documentation describes. Placeholders follow Handlebars, with conditionals, loops and partials, and the TestRenderEmailTemplate API previews a template with sample data. The documentation describes no version history. Each Region holds up to 20,000 templates of up to 500 KB each. (From the Amazon SES Developer Guide, November 2026.)
What CommuniQueue adds on top
Your whole team can edit
Anyone on the workspace except read-only members writes and publishes templates, in a visual editor or in HTML. No API calls and no deploys.
Drafts, test sends and publishing
Each template has a draft that saves as you type. Preview it with sample details, send a test to your own inbox, and publish when it is right.
Versions with notes
Every publish is kept with a note on what changed. To go back, restore an older version as a draft and publish it.
Templates that are not tied to Amazon SES
CommuniQueue fills in each template and hands Amazon SES the finished email, so your templates stay put if you ever change providers.
One request from your app
Your code sends a template id and the customer's details. It never carries HTML, so changing an email never touches your code.
What SES costs now
AWS changed SES pricing in 2026. New accounts start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails, and you can switch to the older pay-as-you-go rate of $0.10 per 1,000. (From aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing, November 2026.)
Read our SES pricing guideConnect Amazon SES
- In AWS, create an IAM user for CommuniQueue that can send email (ses:SendEmail). The connection check also needs ses:GetConfigurationSetEventDestinations and sns:ListSubscriptionsByTopic.
- In CommuniQueue, open your workspace's Settings, go to the Email sending tab and choose Connect provider. Workspace owners and admins see this.
- Pick Amazon SES and enter the access key ID, the secret access key and your Region.
- For delivery reports, set up once in AWS: an SNS topic, a configuration set with an event destination that publishes Bounce, Complaint and Delivery events to that topic, and a subscription from the topic to CommuniQueue. Enter the configuration set name and the topic ARN in CommuniQueue. The connection check tells you what is still missing.
- Save, then send a test email.
Good to know
- Until the configuration set and SNS topic are in place, SES sends your email, but delivery reports and automatic suppression stay off.
- Verify your sending domain or address in SES.
- Open and click tracking follow your configuration set's event destination.
What it costs
You keep paying Amazon SES at its own rates for sending. CommuniQueue plans start at $12/month, with a 7-day free trial on every plan, for your first subscription. See pricing
Questions
- Do I still pay AWS for sending?
- Yes. SES still delivers your email and AWS bills you for it at its own rates. CommuniQueue handles the templates.
- Do I need the configuration set and SNS topic?
- Only for delivery reports and automatic suppression of bounces and complaints. Without them, SES still sends your email.
- Can I bring my existing SES templates?
- Yes, by hand. Paste each template's HTML into the code view of a new CommuniQueue template, then check the placeholders. SES placeholders follow Handlebars too, so most carry over. There is no automatic import from SES.