AWS Pinpoint Alternative
Amazon Web Services always had the features to send Emails (SES), SMS (via SNS), and Push Notifications (also via SNS). But AWS never had a straight forward way to send messages and track deliveries. You had to deal with multiple services within AWS and wrangle with their API’s. In the case of SMS, you have send SMS through their SNS service and track deliveries via CloudWatch or CSV log files written to S3.
AWS seems to have recognized that ‘messaging’ is as important a service as any other. They have launched a service called AWS Pinpoint which enables AWS customers to effectively communicate with their end users across multiple channels including Email, Text Messaging (SMS) and Mobile Push Notifications. Before Pinpoint you had to achieve this by integrating your app with multiple AWS services like SES, SNS, SMS, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, etc.
Sadly, AWS has rolled out Pinpoint with an altogether different set of monsters to deal with. First, Pinpoint can get needlessly expensive as it charges $0.0012 per customer tracked. Second, the Pinpoint Delivery Dashboard (a sort of UI to see things like delivery metrics, bounce notifications, etc.) costs $1,250 per month — SERIOUSLY — a huge charge for something that should have been a basic requirement. This rules out Pinpoint for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB’s).
Send With SES is a surefire alternative to AWS Pinpoint if you do not want to directly deal with multiple AWS services and wrangle with their API’s. Send With SES also costs a lot lesser than AWS Pinpoint.
Send With SES does all the grunt work of integrating with various AWS services to get you seamless message (Emails, SMS, Push Notifications) delivery. Send With SES reduces everything to a simple API call. So if you wish to send an Email or SMS, you just make an API call to the respective URLs;
https://api.sendwithses.com/send-email or https://api.sendwithses.com/send-sms
The Send With SES dashboard comes with a full fledged Contacts management module. You can add a Contact manually or via the API. You can attach ‘tags’ to Contacts and filter Contacts using these tags to send targeted messages. Every message (Emails, SMS, Push Notification) is tracked to give you individual message level statistics as well as aggregate campaign level metrics (sent, delivered, opened, clicked, spam, etc.).
Send With SES has a free plan. Pricing details are available here.
Thanks to 'elevatordings' for the original post.
