Do you need a dedicated IP for email marketing? Probably not, and here's the number that decides it

What the numbers actually are

MailerLite lists Dedicated IP* on its Enterprise plan, which the same pricing page describes as custom pricing for 200,000+ subscribers. It does not appear in the feature list for Power at $25/month, or for Comfort at $12/month.

The conditions sit on a separate help page, not on the pricing page. To be considered, an account needs:

• at least one authenticated domain
• a minimum of 50,000 emails on a weekly basis

You then contact a Customer Success Manager for a preliminary assessment. If the assessment agrees your account would benefit, MailerLite's deliverability team enables the IP and warms it up for you.

Fifty thousand emails a week is about 217,000 a month, or 2.6 million a year. For a newsletter sending one issue a week, that is a list of 50,000 active subscribers — a list most people reading a comparison page do not have and will not have soon.

One detail worth noticing: that help page was last edited in March 2022. The terms may have moved since. If a dedicated IP genuinely matters to your decision, the criteria are worth confirming rather than trusting any third-party summary of them, including this one.

Where the answer changes

Three cases where this stops being academic.

You already send at scale. If you're past 50,000 a week and your open rates are drifting, a dedicated IP gives you full control of your sender reputation instead of sharing it with everyone else on the same shared pool. At that volume it's a real lever.

You're on a transactional or hybrid stack. Product emails, receipts and password resets often move more volume than marketing campaigns do, and they're the ones that hurt most when they land in spam.

You're being asked for one. Some enterprise buyers and some regulated industries require a dedicated sending IP contractually. That's a procurement requirement, not a deliverability decision, and it puts you on the Enterprise conversation regardless of volume.

Outside those three, a dedicated IP is usually worse than a shared one. A new IP has no reputation at all, and it has to be warmed up gradually. Sending 5,000 emails a month from your own cold IP gives a mailbox provider almost nothing to judge you on. A well-managed shared pool carries the accumulated reputation of a large, established sender — which is a better starting position than an empty one.

What to do instead

If your volume is under the threshold, the things that actually move deliverability are all available on the plan you're already paying for.

• Authenticate your domain. SPF, DKIM and DMARC. This is the one item that also appears in the dedicated-IP criteria, and it costs nothing.
• Send from a subdomain you control, so your marketing reputation is separate from your transactional mail.
• Remove people who never open. Sending to a dead list is the fastest way to damage a reputation, dedicated IP or not.
• Keep a consistent cadence. Reputation is built on predictability. A dormant list that suddenly receives a big campaign looks exactly like a compromised account.

How this looks across the tools we catalogue

We catalogue 14 email marketing tools. Two of them mention a dedicated IP anywhere in their published pricing information.

That number says less about the market than it does about pricing pages. Dedicated IP terms are almost always documented in a help centre rather than on a pricing page, and where they do appear on a pricing page they carry an asterisk. The result is that this attribute travels badly into comparison tables: it gets recorded as a plan feature, at whatever price sits nearest to it, and the volume requirement — the part that actually decides whether you can have one — gets left behind.

If you see "dedicated IP" listed as a feature of a mid-tier plan on any comparison site, treat it as unverified until you've found the sending threshold that goes with it.

Common questions

Does a dedicated IP improve deliverability on its own? No. It gives you control over your own sender reputation. Whether that reputation is good depends entirely on what you send and who you send it to.

How long does warming up take? It's a gradual ramp rather than a switch, and providers run it for you when they enable the IP. MailerLite's deliverability team handles the warm-up as part of the process.

Is there an extra charge for a dedicated IP at MailerLite? The pricing page marks the Enterprise entry with an asterisk and does not publish a separate price. The help page describing the request process doesn't state a cost either. If cost matters to your decision, it's a question for their team rather than something to infer.

Can I get one on the Power plan? It is not in the Power feature list. Power at $25/month covers unlimited monthly emails, unlimited user seats and unlimited automations; the dedicated IP entry appears under Enterprise.

What if I'm just under the threshold? Then you're in the best position to do nothing. Authenticate your domain, keep your list clean, and revisit when your weekly volume is consistently past 50,000 rather than occasionally.

Which is better for a small list, shared or dedicated? Shared, almost always. A shared pool has an established reputation; a new dedicated IP starts at zero and needs volume to build one.