In my experience, it’s extremely difficult to get out of the SES sandbox, for what I presume is if your account/org is under a certain amount of spend with them. While basically free under a certain amount of usage, the gatekeeping there does make the idea of self-hosting your email free/cheaply sort of a nonstarter for indie devs.
For context, getting out of the sandbox at every org I worked at was essentially a single ticket with the word please and had almost immediate approval.
For my own account for a low volume form notification tool I wrote AWS’s response was ‘We will not approve your request and we will not revisit this decision’.
I actually just did this a couple weeks ago. I'm just one data point, so I've no real idea what the difficulty is of escaping the sandbox, but I created a brand new AWS account, made it clear that I'd be using SES purely for low volume transactional emails for people who had opted in and could opt out at any time, and they approved me within a couple days.
I got approved instantly for personal mail for my domains. even though they charge for smtp they don't actually take payment for very small amounts so it has been completely free for over a year.
For context, getting out of the sandbox at every org I worked at was essentially a single ticket with the word please and had almost immediate approval.
For my own account for a low volume form notification tool I wrote AWS’s response was ‘We will not approve your request and we will not revisit this decision’.