Is an "active profile" required to send Transactional Messages with ACS?

[siverd]

Hi, 

As I understand it, I can send transactional messages by "event" or "profile". When sending by "event", I pass the message information in the body of the API call. In my case that would be the user's email and the message content. 

What are the cost or cost/1000 emails sent to do this for ~2M messages per month?

Is the correct process to:

1. Call the Profile API to determine if the user has an "active profile"; and then
2. Call the ACS messaging API with either an Event or Profile type transactional message

Or, can the ACS messaging API determine if the user has an active profile and dynamically decide to use that profile since it already exists?

My goal is to understand the benefit of using ACS for transactional messages over a similar service like AWS SES that likely cost much less than having an "active profile" for every user, even those that don't actively use the website or mobile apps.

Thanks!

[Amit_Kumar · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As you would have seen the documentation:

https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/campaign-standard/using/communication-channels/transactional-...

and 

https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/campaign-standard/using/communication-channels/transactional-...

Both types of Transaction emails different purposes.

1. Profile type should be used when you have a unique key with you when a certain event happens and you know that user already exists i.e. order confirmation, password reset, order despatch. etc

event type should be used when you are not sure if a given profile exists or not i.e subscription email, welcome emails etc.

Amazon SES is a simple email sending service which comes with very limited functionality for email templating ort personalisation.

SES is mostly used when you are broadcasting a same message to all users.

For the cost, I would recommend you should reach out to your account manager. if you already an Adobe campaign customer then it shouldn't be very expensive for you.

Regards,

Amit