Amazon's new AWS charge for using public IPv4 addresses could yield up to $1B per year

Amazon has initiated a new pricing plan for public IPv4 addresses in AWS, following a warning issued six months ago. Effective February 1, 2024, a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour is applicable to all public IPv4 addresses, irrespective of whether they are attached to a service.

Amazon justified the change by citing the increasing scarcity of IPv4 addresses and the 300% rise in cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address over the past five years. The new charge is intended to reflect Amazon's own costs and to encourage users to economize their use of public IPv4 addresses. The company also recommends accelerating the adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure.

The new pricing applies to all AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and other AWS services that can have a public IPv4 address allocated and attached, across all AWS regions.

The Border0 blog has highlighted the financial implications of this change, estimating that Amazon could generate between $400 Million to $1 Billion a year from this new IPv4 charge, given the 132 million IPv4 addresses managed by AWS.