For receiving they only get 1,000 free, and for both after that it's $0.10/1,000 emails, which isn't very much at all.

> SES charges $0.09 per 1000 mail “chunks”, where a chunk is 256 Kb of data. This is on top of the base SES fee and S3 operation and storage fees.

> But it only charges for each complete chunk. So < 256KB is free, 256KB is $0.09/1000, etc.

Others elsewhere here have stated otherwise - haven't looked for the small print on AWS' page myself yet, though.

what if you get 10 billion unwanted messages? 900k bill?

It's 62,000 free only if the emails are being sent from an EC2 instance, else it is $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send.