Emailing service SQS + Lambda + SES question

Im looking to create an email service. Would I need two separate lambas if I wanted to have a cron that reads from my database and sends the relevant email data to SQS, then have another lamba that polls from SQS and send an email with SES? If so would I be able to deploy all of this (2 lambas, 1 cron, SQS queue, SES config) all at once using something like a Cloudformation template?

Kinda seems like a lot of work and configuration. Maybe I should just host my own express server with node-cron that reads from my DB and sends emails directly with SES. What would the downside of this be? Probably less scalable since there is no queue, plus higher server costs since I'm not going serverless?

I'm looking to send a couple thousand emails a day