A few years ago I saw an article about IP v4 addresses and how IoT was causing us to run out of them quickly. At the time it seemed odd, because I knew that you could get them for nothing, or next to nothing, from every cloud provider.

If we were really running out, wouldn't you expect to pay something for them? Wouldn't supply and demand dictate that they couldn't be given away for free?

Earlier posts:

http://jonathanfries.net/ipv4-address-price-single-static-ip-feb-20-2017/
https://jonathanfries.net/ip-address-oct62016/
http://jonathanfries.net/ip-address-price-single-static-ip/

But perhaps this is really starting to happen now.

I just received an email from Google Cloud that, perhaps, There's No Such Thing as a Free IP Address Either (TNSTAAFIAE).

From the email:

First, we’re increasing the price for Google Compute Engine (GCE) VMs that use external IP addresses. Beginning January 1, 2020, a standard GCE instance using an external IP address will cost an additional $0.004/hr and a preemptible GCE instance using an external IP address will cost an additional $0.002/hr.

In addition, there are also price increases at Azure, though not in the classic resource deployment mode.

Here are the spot prices today for single static IP addresses (based on a 30 day month):

Aug. 20, 2019

Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/#
Google: https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#ipaddress
Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

Azure - East US

Google

Amazon - US West N. California

I would say that there is some pretty good evidence that the price of IP addresses is going up.

My second thought is that cloud pricing continues to be very complicated. I think I will write a second blog post about that.

Kudos to Amazon for continuing to keep prices low. Will they be able to do that in the long run?

If this is really supply and demand at work, then expect the price to rise.