How to Get Started With Amazon SNS

Written by Owner

Updated at August 20th, 2025

+ More

Table of Contents

Add a New Topic Create Security Credentials by Adding a New Zapier User to IAM Using a Custom Policy for the IAM User

There are two things you'll need to do to make SNS work with Zapier:

Add a new notification topic in SNS (if you already use SNS you probably already have one you want to use, if not, directions are below as well). You can also create topics via the Zapier integration as well.
Add a new Zapier user via IAM with only permission to use SNS and give those AWS Security Credentials to Zapier.

Add a New Topic

This is fairly simple! Just click the SNS logo from your AWS dashboard and click "Create New Topic" on the left hand side.

A dialog will pop up to set the topic name and a display name for the topic. Fill these out!

Create Security Credentials by Adding a New Zapier User to IAM

To add a SNS account to Zapier, you should follow these instructions. They will walk you through setting up a user in IAM and adding that account to Zapier. Remember that you want to select SNS instead of SES where applicable.

Using a Custom Policy for the IAM User

If you want to define a custom policy rather than use the default "Amazon SNS Full Access", you should define the policy with these permissions:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [{
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Action": [
            "sns:Subscribe",
            "sns:Unsubscribe",
            "sns:ListTopics",
            "sns:ListSubscriptionsByTopic",
            "sns:ConfirmSubscription"
        ],
        "Resource": [
            "arn:aws:sns:<your_region>:<your_topic_owner>:*"
        ]
    }]
}

You need to change <your_region> to the correct region (i.e. us-east-1) and <your_topic_owner> to the correct owner id (i.e. 1234567). If you plan to use the SNS actions to create topic or publish messages, you should include sns:Publish and sns:CreateTopic.

How to Get Started With Amazon SNS

Contact Us

Add a New Topic

Create Security Credentials by Adding a New Zapier User to IAM

Using a Custom Policy for the IAM User

Related Articles