Hetzner's IPv4 price list puts a cloud primary IPv4 at $0.60 a month, excluding VAT, and lists the cloud primary IPv6 as free. Fifteen percent of a $4 plan is $0.60. A plan that calls the address included has folded that $0.60 into the $4. The customer pays the plan. The host still pays for the address.
The other way to hold the address is to buy the block. ip4.market publishes a 90-day median of $25.25 per address for a /24, from 79 disclosed sales, and prints the matching purchase cost as $6,464. That is 256 addresses. Spread over 60 months, the block is $107.73 a month. Spread over 256 VMs, one address is $0.42, and $0.42 is 10.5% of the $4 plan. The same block with 64 VMs on it is $1.68 an address, 42% of the plan. The RAM piece prices memory per sold GB, and that price moves with how full the machine is. The address does the same, once you bought the whole prefix.
What a /24 costs per IPv4 address
A /24 is 256 addresses. IPTrading's buying page calls that the smallest block most networks accept in the global table. The pricing table lists a /24 at $25 to $28 per address, a /22 at $21 to $25, a /20 at $16 to $19, and a /16 at $13 to $15. The page calls those ranges estimates, and it says the price moves with region, reputation, and the contract. The buying page, on the same site, puts a clean /24 at about $30 to $40 per address, roughly $7,700 to $10,200 for the block. The sale median in the chart is the disclosed-sales figure. The two IPTrading bands are what that broker prints on two different pages.
The blended 90-day median, every prefix mixed together, is $20.00 across 255 sales. The 30-day blend is $21.75 across 70. A /24 sits above both, at $25.34 over 30 days (26 sales) and $25.25 over 90 days (79). Larger blocks pull the blend down. IPTrading's /16 range of $13 to $15 sits beside a two-sale median of $12.62, which is as much weight as two sales can take.
$25.25 times 256 is the $6,464 on that row. IPTrading's $25 to $28 is $6,400 to $7,168 for the same 256. The buying page also says to check a block against blacklists before paying, because a listed prefix is a different product from a clean one at the same headline price. The registry object is the other public check. 1.1.1.0/24 is APNIC and Cloudflare's resolver prefix, the same range whose route object is in the prepay piece. RIPE's whois server answers with netname NON-RIPE-NCC-MANAGED-ADDRESS-BLOCK. APNIC's server answers with the /24.
whois -h whois.ripe.net \
-- 1.1.1.0/24
whois -h whois.apnic.net \
-- 1.1.1.0/24
Read inetnum, netname, status, and source on the block you are about to pay for. The buying page says a RIPE recipient is a member, or works through a sponsoring member, and that a RIPE transfer usually carries a two-year hold before resale, with exceptions for legacy space. The 36-month and 60-month figures in the next section are the cost of using the block over those months.
Monthly IPv4 cost on a $4 VPS
$25.25 divided by 60 is $0.4208, which rounds to $0.42. Divided by 36 it is $0.70, and $0.70 is 17.5% of a $4 plan. IPTrading's table, $25 to $28 over 60 months, is $0.42 to $0.47 a month. The buying page's $30 to $40 over the same 60 months is $0.50 to $0.67, which is 12.5% to 16.7% of the $4 plan. Full means 256 VMs, or 256 other uses, carrying the block. A gateway you reserve comes out of the 256, and so does any address the router keeps.
| VMs on the /24 | Per month | Share of $4 |
|---|---|---|
| 256 | $0.42 | 10.5% |
| 128 | $0.84 | 21% |
| 64 | $1.68 | 42% |
| 32 | $3.37 | 84.2% |
The monthly block charge under that table is $6,464 divided by 60, $107.73. Hetzner's cloud primary is a different bill. You pay $0.60 for a VM that has the address, and you pay it again for the next VM. The invoice grows when the next VM is ordered. A purchased /24 charges the capital on day one, full or empty.
Hetzner's dedicated primary is €1.70 and $1.90 a month, again excluding VAT. The cloud floating IPv4 on the same page is €3.00 and $3.50, which is a floating address, separate from the primary. The dedicated /24 subnet is €435.20 and $484 a month, setup €659 and $732, and the table counts 254 usable. The euro row is €1.70 times 256. The dollar row, $484 divided by 256, is $1.89, next to the $1.90 single-address price.
AWS charges $0.005 per public IPv4 per hour from 1 February 2024, whether the address is attached to a service or idle, across EC2 and the other services in the charge announcement. Over 730 hours, the month used in the IPv6-only piece and the month in the billing docs, that rate is $3.65. Addresses you bring with BYOIP stay off the charge. The free tier covers 750 of those hours a month for the first 12 months, which holds one always-on address (730 hours) on a new account. A second always-on address is past 750 hours in the same month.
| Address per month | Of a $4 plan | Of a $6 plan | Of a $12 plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0.42, full /24 over 60 months | 10.5% | 7% | 3.5% |
| $0.60, Hetzner cloud primary | 15% | 10% | 5% |
| $1.90, Hetzner dedicated primary | 47.5% | 31.7% | 15.8% |
| $3.65, AWS at $0.005 for 730 hours | 91.3% | 60.8% | 30.4% |
A plan at $12 a year is $1 of revenue in a month. The same four lines are then $0.42, $0.60, $1.90, and $3.65 of that dollar. Twelve months of a $4 plan, paid up front, is $48. Twelve months of the cloud address inside it is $7.20. The prepay piece is about whether that $48 is still with a host when the year ends. The address math here assumes the subnet is still being renewed, or the block is still yours.
Hetzner /24 rent and a purchased block
Twelve months of the dedicated /24 at $484, plus the $732 setup, is $6,540. The 90-day median purchase is $6,464. Past that year the subnet is still $484 a month, $5,808 a year, and the purchase is paid. Holding the block in your own LIR account adds the registry fee in the next section, which the Hetzner rental leaves on Hetzner's account.
At 64 customers the $484 subnet is $7.56 an address per month, above the $4 plan on its own. The subnet bills the prefix. The fill decides what each VM's share of that bill is, the same way the purchased block's $107.73 a month divides by the VMs that use it.
ip4.market's own lease rate is €0.50 per address per month, €128 for a /24, €1,536 for a year of that /24. The page leaves the lease-versus-buy payback blank. The purchases are in dollars, the lease is in euros, and the page says a conversion from a stale rate would be a worse figure than a blank cell. This comparison stays in one currency at a time. Hetzner's dollar subnet sits against the dollar purchase, and the euro lease sits against the euro registry fee.
RIPE NCC fee per address
The Charging Scheme 2026 sets the annual contribution at €1,800 per LIR account, the sign-up fee at €1,000, the independent-assignment fee at €75, and the ASN fee at €50. The €75 covers IPv4 and IPv6 PI, anycast, IXP assignments, and legacy registrations through a sponsoring LIR. A PA allocation sits on the account fee.
If that whole €1,800 is carried by one /24, the share is €1,800 divided by 256, then by 12, which comes to €0.59 per address per month. On a /22, 1,024 addresses, the same account fee is €0.15 per address per month. The sign-up fee spread across a full /24 is €3.91, once, for a new member. A second PA allocation on an account that already pays €1,800 leaves the annual contribution on that same account. The €75 line is the independent assignment, a separate product from the PA block.
€1,800 against ip4.market's €1,536 to lease a /24 for a year is the new-account case. The membership, on its own, costs more than a year of that lease, and the block purchase is extra. An LIR that already exists for other space pays the €1,800 with or without this /24. The fee you attribute to the VPS is the slice of an account you are paying anyway, or the whole account if this block is why the account exists.
What dropping IPv4 changes on the bill
On Hetzner's cloud row, leaving off the primary IPv4 removes the $0.60 and leaves the primary IPv6 at free. On the dedicated row, the same page says the primary IPv4 can be removed, which is the $1.90. What then fails for git, container registries, and a large share of visitors is counted in the IPv6-only piece. The $0.60 and the $1.90 are the savings on Hetzner's list.
NodeRings IPAM requires dual-stack guest networking. Every customer VM receives a static IPv4 and a static IPv6. Marketplace preflight wants 5 free IPv4 addresses and 10 free IPv6 addresses in the pool, or the plan stays off search. Mark the gateway, and any address the router or another customer already uses, as reserved, so the assigner leaves them alone. The 5-address floor is the listing minimum. It is a thin pool, and the per-VM cost of a purchased /24 at that kind of fill is the 32-VM and 64-VM rows, at $3.37 and $1.68.
The billing docs use $2 a month as the worked example for an additional IP, prorated by seconds across the 730-hour period. Added halfway through, the example charge is about $1. Community commission is 15% of marketplace revenue, deducted from the listed price. Customers pay the listed price plus tax. On a $4 sale the commission is $0.60, the same dollar as the cloud address, and the payout is $3.40. On the $2 example the commission is $0.30 and the payout is $1.70.
That $1.70 covers a full-block address at $0.42 and a Hetzner cloud address at $0.60. A dedicated primary is $1.90, and the AWS month is $3.65, both past the payout on that example. Stripe's pricing page lists 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful charge for domestic cards. On a $4 charge that is $0.116 plus $0.30, so $0.416, for a host charging the card on their own account. The 15% is the marketplace contract. A host pays the one attached to that checkout.
Lease rates next to purchase prices in 2026
Broker and marketplace pages through late 2026 still put clean IPv4 leases roughly in the $0.35–$0.55 (or about €0.39–€0.50) per address per month band, with a /24 as the practical BGP minimum. Long commitments can sit near €99–€128 per /24 per month depending on RIR and payment term; month-to-month RIPE offers often print higher. Purchase medians for a /24 have been reported in the mid-twenty dollars per IP in aggregated sale indexes, which is thousands of dollars cash up front for the block. A usable lease still needs an LOA your upstream accepts, route objects, and increasingly an RPKI ROA; a cheap list price without those pieces is not a routable address. Keep the per-VPS arithmetic above as the customer-facing story, and treat lease vs buy as a horizon question (short OpEx vs multi-year CapEx).