The Real Cost of Cloud IPv4: A BYOIP Guide for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

The change that made IPv4 a line item

For most of the cloud era, a public IPv4 address was something you got for free as long as you attached it to something. That is over. On 1 February 2024 AWS began charging $0.005 per hour for every in-use public IPv4 address, whether it is an Elastic IP or an address auto-assigned to an instance. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud bill external IPv4 on comparable per-hour terms.

Providers adjust pricing, so treat the figures here as the shape of the problem rather than today's quote, and check the current pricing page before you build a business case on them. The direction has been consistent in one direction only.

What that adds up to

The per-hour number looks harmless. Annualised, it is not:

• $0.005 per hour
• $0.12 per day
• roughly $3.65 per month per address
• roughly $43.80 per year per address

Now scale it. A /24 is 256 addresses. If you were running that many public addresses in a single cloud account, the addressing alone would cost roughly $11,200 per year, recurring, for something that delivers no capability beyond existing.

That is the number worth sitting with, because it is pure overhead. It buys no compute, no storage and no bandwidth. And it is charged on addresses that are idle as well as busy: an Elastic IP attached to a stopped instance still bills.

Why the clouds started charging

The honest answer is that the charge reflects reality. IPv4 is genuinely scarce, the free pools are gone, and the providers are buying on the same transfer market everyone else is. Before 2024 the cost of that was absorbed and spread across other services. Now it is itemised.

There is a second motive, which the providers have been open about: a per-address charge is a nudge toward IPv6. If your workload can run dual-stack or IPv6-only, a good deal of this expense simply disappears.

What BYOIP changes

Bring Your Own IP lets you announce address space you control from inside the provider's network. The addresses stay registered to your organisation, and the cloud advertises them on your behalf.

The commercial point is straightforward: the per-address hourly charge applies to addresses the provider supplies. Address space you bring yourself is not billed the same way, which is what turns BYOIP from a technical curiosity into a cost decision. Confirm the current treatment with your provider before committing, since this is exactly the kind of term that gets revised.

Three practical constraints:

• A /24 is the floor. The major providers will not accept anything smaller, which lines up with the routing reality that most networks filter longer prefixes anyway.
• You need the paperwork in order. A Letter of Authorization and a valid RPKI ROA covering the provider's ASN are prerequisites, not optional extras.
• Onboarding is not instant. Expect provider-side verification before the space is advertised.

The part that has nothing to do with cost

Portability is the argument people forget, and over a few years it often matters more than the invoice.

Addresses issued by a cloud provider belong to that provider. Leave, and you renumber: every firewall rule your partners maintain, every allowlist, every hardcoded reference in a system nobody has touched in three years. That renumbering cost is a real switching barrier, and it is one you agreed to without noticing.

Bring your own space and the addresses move with you. Multi-cloud stops requiring a different block per provider. A migration stops requiring a change request at every customer you have. Your reputation history, which took years to build, follows you rather than being handed back.

Running the comparison

The decision comes down to comparing three things over the horizon you actually plan for:

1. What the provider charges for the public addresses you use, annualised, including idle ones.
2. What the same space costs to lease, which is a predictable annual figure with no capital outlay and no registry transfer.
3. What it costs to buy, which is capital up front and then close to nothing, plus a small sponsorship fee if you do not run your own LIR.

For a stable long-term footprint, buying usually wins outright and the addresses become an asset rather than an expense. For anything uncertain or seasonal, leasing gives you the same escape from per-hour billing without committing capital.

What rarely wins on a multi-year view is leaving it on the provider's meter. That is the one option where you pay indefinitely and own nothing at the end.

Where RTM Networks fits

We lease and sell /24s and larger, which is what BYOIP requires, across the RIPE, ARIN and APNIC regions. Leased space is usually live within 24 hours of payment, and we issue the Letter of Authorization and set up the RPKI ROA for your provider's ASN as part of the service rather than as an extra.

If you want to know whether BYOIP is worth it in your case, the useful thing to send us is your current public IPv4 count and which providers you run on. We will come back with what the equivalent space costs to lease or buy, so you can put a real number against what you are paying now. We usually reply in 1-3 business hours.