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’.
