• April 26, 2026
The Rising Cost of IPv4: How Cloud Providers Are Passing the Buck

For most of the Internet’s history, an IPv4 address was essentially free. If you needed one, you asked your ISP or your cloud provider, and they handed it over—no line item, no monthly fee. That era is over. Today, public IPv4 addresses have become a scarce, tradeable commodity, and cloud providers are increasingly passing the cost directly to their customers. What was once a rounding error in your cloud bill is now a noticeable line item, and for startups, serverless workloads, and large-scale architectures, the math is starting to favor IPv6 in ways that few expected just a few years ago.