AWS has unveiled a significant pricing change, announcing it will begin charging for public IPv4 addresses.

IPv4 addresses are becoming increasingly hard to come by, as the allotment of them ran out several years. As a result, demand has increased substantially, which AWS blames for the change in policy.

The company announced the change in a blog post:

As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure.

AWS says the new policy goes into effect on February 1, 2024, at which point “there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not (there is already a charge for public IPv4 addresses you allocate in your account but don’t attach to an EC2 instance).”