Dedicated IPs on Amazon SES: who needs one, and who's wasting money
A dedicated IP on SES costs $24.95 a month and starts with zero reputation. Below a volume threshold it costs more than it helps. Here's the test.
A standard dedicated IP on Amazon SES costs $24.95 a month, the same as the à la carte rate would charge for about 249,500 emails. Below roughly that volume, the IP costs more than the mail it carries. That’s the cheap half of the answer. The expensive half is that a new dedicated IP starts with no reputation at all, while the shared pool you’d be leaving already has one, so at low volume you’re paying to make your deliverability worse.
Key Takeaways
- A dedicated IP has no history with mailbox providers until you build one. AWS’s own guidance: providers are “less likely to accept mail from new IP addresses that have little or no history.”
- Standard dedicated IPs auto-warm over 45 days regardless of your volume, and providers typically take two to six weeks to trust one, so a light or irregular sender never finishes the process.
- One standard dedicated IP is $24.95 a month with no minimum. The managed option is $15 a month plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails, and it’s cheaper than standard at every volume under 10 million emails a month.
- Bring Your Own IP exists, but its 256-address minimum sets a floor around $6,387 a month, which puts it out of reach for nearly everyone reading this.
What an IP’s reputation actually is
Mailbox providers score every sending IP on its own history: how consistent the volume is, how often recipients complain, how many bounces it generates, whether it hits a spam trap. AWS’s own documentation is blunt about what a new address starts with: “Email providers are less likely to accept mail from new IP addresses that have little or no history. Email sent from IP addresses with little or no history might end up in recipients’ junk mail folders, or might be blocked altogether.”
That history belongs to the IP, not to you or your domain. Switch to a dedicated IP and you leave behind whatever reputation your sending had built up elsewhere, and you start this one at zero.
Why the shared pool already has what you’d be building
Amazon’s shared IP pool sends on behalf of a huge number of SES customers at once, and AWS manages that combined traffic to keep the pool’s reputation good. AWS’s guidance on choosing between shared and dedicated IPs is equally direct: “If you don’t plan to send large volumes of email on a regular and predictable basis, we recommend that you use shared IP addresses.”
A dedicated IP inherits none of that. It isolates you from the shared pool’s reputation on purpose, which is the whole feature when you want it and the whole problem when you don’t have the volume to replace what you gave up.
What building a reputation actually takes
Standard dedicated IPs come with automatic warm-up on by default. AWS spreads your sending between the shared pool and your new IP over 45 days, and that clock runs on time, not on your volume: “Automatic IP warmup is a time-based process. The warmup percentage steadily increases over 45 days, independently from your sending volume.” Finishing the 45 days doesn’t mean a provider trusts the address yet. Per AWS: “For some email providers, you can establish a positive reputation in around two weeks, while for others it may take up to six weeks.”
After that, the reputation needs upkeep, not just a one-time ramp. AWS’s own volume guidance for choosing a dedicated IP at all: “For each ISP with which you want to cultivate a reputation, you should send several hundred emails within a 24-hour period at least once per month.” Miss that, at any provider, and the reputation you built there starts to fade.
Put together, a dedicated IP asks for weeks of gradually increasing mail, then a floor of a few hundred messages a day to every major provider, indefinitely. A sender who mails a few thousand contacts once or twice a month never reaches that floor, so the address never really warms.
The price, in emails
Every figure below is Amazon’s own current pricing. Outbound à la carte email is $0.10 per 1,000. One standard dedicated IP is $24.95 a month, with no minimum commitment. The managed option is $15 a month per account plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails up to 10 million a month.
| Emails per month | À la carte only | + one standard dedicated IP | + managed dedicated IP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20,000 | $2.00 | $26.95 | $16.60 |
| 100,000 | $10.00 | $34.95 | $23.00 |
| 500,000 | $50.00 | $74.95 | $55.00 |
| 1,000,000 | $100.00 | $124.95 | $95.00 |
| 5,000,000 | $500.00 | $524.95 | $415.00 |
Two things fall out of that table. Managed beats standard at every volume shown, and stays cheaper all the way to the 10-million tier, because its fixed fee is lower ($15 versus $24.95) and its marginal rate is lower too ($0.08 per 1,000 versus the $0.10 à la carte rate standard rides on top of). And the standard IP’s fixed fee only shrinks to a rounding error at real scale: it stays above 10% of the total bill until you’re sending roughly 2.25 million emails a month (the fee is 10% of the total once the underlying mail bill reaches nine times the fee, $224.55, which is 2,245,500 emails at $0.10 per 1,000).
What Amazon SES actually costs covers the rest of the SES bill, including how these fees interact with the plan tiers AWS switched new accounts onto in July 2026.
Standard and managed aren’t the same tool
Standard dedicated IPs are addresses you request, warm, and place into pools yourself. AWS’s guidance calls them a fit for “customers with continuous, predictable sending patterns.” Managed dedicated IPs are provisioned automatically, warm up per provider with an adaptive strategy, and scale the pool up or down as your volume changes. AWS recommends managed specifically for irregular volume: “If you want to use dedicated IP addresses in situations where your sending patterns are highly irregular, using Dedicated IPs (managed) is the better option.”
So the choice isn’t just about the lower managed price. A sender whose volume swings hard is a worse fit for standard even before the cost comparison, because standard expects the steady pattern that keeps a manually managed reputation intact.
Where a dedicated IP genuinely earns its place
Three real cases, all in AWS’s own framing of what dedicated IPs are for:
- Sustained, predictable, large volume. The floor above, several hundred emails a day to every provider you care about, is trivial to clear at hundreds of thousands of emails a month and hard to clear under a few thousand.
- Isolating reputation by program. Dedicated IP pools let you separate, say, transactional mail from marketing mail, so a bad marketing send can’t drag down password resets. That’s a real reason to pay even below the raw cost-per-email breakeven, if the isolation itself is worth something to you. SES tracks that reputation mostly through bounces and complaints either way, the same mechanics covered in bounces, complaints and suppression in SES.
- A receiving system that allowlists by IP rather than by reputation. Some corporate mail servers accept or reject strictly by a known IP list. A dedicated IP gives you a fixed address to hand them; a shared pool’s addresses can change.
Outside those, the shared pool is the better technical choice, not just the cheaper one.
Bring Your Own IP, briefly
SES also lets you bring IP addresses you already own and have your own reputation history for, at the same $24.95 per address per month as a standard dedicated IP. The catch is the minimum: Amazon requires at least 256 addresses, which puts the floor at $24.95 × 256, or $6,387.20 a month, before a single email goes out. That’s a tool for senders operating their own IP ranges at a scale most newsletters and SaaS products never reach, not a smaller option to consider alongside standard and managed.
The test
Divide $24.95 by $0.10 and multiply by 1,000: that’s 249,500 emails, the rough point where a standard dedicated IP’s fee stops dwarfing your sending cost. Then check whether you can clear several hundred emails a day to every provider you mail, every month, without a break. If both are true, a dedicated IP is worth pricing out properly. If either is false, the shared pool isn’t a compromise, it’s the correct answer, and it’s the one you’re already using.
Whether running your own SES account is worth the complexity at all, dedicated IP or not, is a question with its own threshold: when BYOS is the wrong choice.
Dedicated IPs are one of several add-ons that sit outside SES’s base rate; the complete guide to Amazon SES for email marketing covers the rest of what a front end on SES does and doesn’t give you.
On BYOS, a dedicated IP is a setting in your own AWS account, entirely independent of EmailFig: whichever you choose, EmailFig sends through it the same way. If you’re bringing up a new sending domain rather than a new IP, the mechanics are similar but the tool is different: see warming up a new sending domain and, for how EmailFig paces sending against your account’s SES limits either way, your SES sending quota and send rate.