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Comment by gbil | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago ARIN increased their fees considerably - way higher than fees paid to RIPE for way less resources - and had a call with their management to express my frustration, not because I was paying from my pocket but because of the high discrepancy of the what they wanted to get and the quantity/quality of their services. Now I can see that their backbone services haven't really improved while their income for sure has.

On a sidenote, what I appreciate in both RIPE and ARIN is that you can have at least a proper discussion when you have valid arguments with their support teams.

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Now ARIN is much cheaper than RIPE for small entities.

fee schedules FYI

- ARIN 2026 PDF: https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/images/2026feeschedule.p...

- RIPE 2026 : https://www.ripe.net/membership/payment/

Enthusiasts, trainees and small orgs are paying a lot more with RIPE.

Not necessarily. Many have their RIPE registrations through an existing, “sponsoring” LIR. They’re not paying that 1800 Euro, the LIR is.

A single AS resource and a single PI assignment cost more than the ARIN fee.

Are you sure? For RIPE I see a 50 ASN plus 75 euro PI fee. ARIN is $275. Maybe I’m looking at it wrong.

It’s cheaper as a hobbyist to use a RIPE LIR. Even in the US. That’s what I’ve been doing for years.

afaik that's +VAT and also for LIRs only. LIRs apply markup, see https://www.lir.services/lir-sponsoring/ they charge 200€ per resource, so ASN + PI would be at last 400€/year that's way above the price of ARIN and you have a middleman.

You must have a sponsoring LIR for your resources or become a LIR yourself. The only exception is LEGACY resources (IPv4, no ASN) but that's a different story.

There are more competitive LIRs out there. Example: https://lagrange.cloud/products/lir

It’s also cheaper for me because I have legacy ARIN space. All I really needed was an ASN. The LIR gives me some PA v6 space for cheap, too.

Okay, but that is not enough to operate independently. PA v6 is another dependency. With ARIN you get your personal IPv6 assignment.

For a hobbyist, the difference is academic. You can announce PA space with your own ASN, which is what I do. If I change LIRs I’ll have to renumber my IPv6 space.

Companies offering LIR services to hobbyists are probably not going to stay in business forever, as many of them are 1 person companies, too. Also keep in mind that they may change pricing. I understand, that with IPv6 the numbering strategy is almost always automatic and a renumbering can be done in a couple of hours, but it's still an inconvenience, especially when you have to update a lot of AAAA records.

I really think that when you start to operate an AS that you should have a direct RIR membership. And as mentioned above, RIPE has a higher financial entry barrier. I remember they had an object volume based pricing scheme 15 years ago, just like ARIN still has.

None of us know what will happen in the future. All I can say is that currently, it is cheaper for a hobbyist to use a RIPE LIR than to use ARIN. If this changes in the future, I'll move to ARIN.

ARIN is lowering their costs gradually. When I first made the RIPE LIR or ARIN decision several years ago, ARIN wanted $500 just to register an ASN, on top of the yearly fees. I see they have removed that requirement.

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