The Impending Paid Era for IPv4 and the Challenges of Migrating to IPv6

IPv4 address space has been fully allocated worldwide, leading providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fly.io to start charging for public IPv4 usage (e.g., $0.005 per hour per address on AWS, about $4 per month on Fly.io). Supabase also plans a $4/month IPv4 add‑on.

These charges aim to encourage more frugal IPv4 consumption and to accelerate IPv6 adoption, but the transition is hampered by incompatibilities between IPv4 and IPv6 headers and a lack of ready‑made tooling.

Three mitigation strategies were outlined by Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone:

Pass the cost to customers. Providers like AWS and Fly.io are already billing customers directly for IPv4 addresses (approximately $43.80 per year per address on AWS).

Provide workarounds such as proxies. IPv4‑to‑IPv6 proxy services, NAT, and port‑sharing can reduce direct IPv4 demand.

Offer IPv6‑only services. This eliminates IPv4 costs but requires full IPv6 support across the stack.

Adopting IPv6 faces two major hurdles:

Insufficient ISP support. Many ISPs lack the hardware, software, and willingness to route IPv6 traffic, making the transition costly.

Lack of toolchain support. Common development tools and platforms (Docker, VPC, Airflow, etc.) often lack IPv6 configuration out of the box.

Examples of required configuration changes include enabling IPv6 in Docker:

"ipv6": true,
"fixed-cidr-v6": "fd00:ffff::/80",
"ip6tables": true,
"experimental": true

and updating docker-compose.yaml to enable IPv6 networking:

# enable IPv6 to default network
networks:
default:
enable_ipv6: true
ipam:
config:
- subnet: fd00:c16a:601e::/80
gateway: fd00:c16a:601e::1

Real‑world experiences illustrate the difficulty: DevOps engineer Mathew Duggan reported that SSH access, GitHub interactions, and Datadog installation all failed under IPv6‑only setups, often requiring fallback to IPv4 proxies or NAT64 services.

Overall, while IPv6 offers a vastly larger address space (≈3.4×10³⁸ addresses) and technical benefits, the ecosystem’s readiness is still lacking, making the migration a complex, costly, and time‑consuming process for many organizations.