Hunting for the last affordable /24 in the RIPE region

So I started tracking broker prices back in early 2023 because I needed a /24 for some bgp work (nothing fancy just a small anycast setup for a monitoring project) and I figured why not document everything since the market was clearly in freefall after the run-up during the pandemic years when everyone and their dog decided they needed ip space for work-from-home infrastructure (which mostly got abandoned by 2022 anyway) and I kept a spreadsheet which I know is old fashioned but I like the control and I would check the usual places every tuesday because tuesday felt right (don't ask me why tuesday it just did) and the prices I saw were honestly shocking at first because we had seen /24s going for 45-50 euro per ip in late 2021 which was absolutely bonkers if you remember the before times when 8-10 euro was standard and people though

And I was watching this thread for months and I never posted because I had nothing to add and I was waiting and waiting and my budget was tighter than yours and I was seeing the same numbers and thinking the same thoughts and I kept checking and checking and the brokers were getting more and more desperate and they would email me back same day which never happened before and I finally bought at 17 euro per ip in january and I thought I had the bottom and then I saw your 16.50 and I felt sick for a week and then I felt better because mine was from a better broker with better paperwork and I tell myself that matters and maybe it does and maybe it doesnt and the market is just strange now with all the legacy holders dying off and their estates selling space and the cloud providers hoarding what they can and the young people not caring about ipv4 at all and I wonder if we are the last genera

Gg walt nice timing my minecraft box runs on a /24 I got from some broker in 2022 and I way overpaid gg wp to me lag on the price drop tho fr fr I use it for valheim too and some cs2 servers and the lag was real when I routed wrong but fixed now with proper bgp — https://bgp.tools — my minecraft box never had lag like the market had lag going down tho lmao 16.50 is solid wp

Right then, 16.50? That's proper cheap that is. We paid 22 for our last block at Hostinger and I felt like a right mug watching this thread. Cheers lads for keeping me honest. 🦡

Section 7.3 of most broker TOS defines "clean space" differently than you might assume. I would verify the specific definition in your agreement. Some define it as "not currently listed on major blacklists at time of transfer" which is narrower than common usage suggests — check https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx to see what they track. Also acceptable use policies in RIPE region can attach to the resource holder of record, not just the operational user. Worth confirming who bears liability for historical abuse. Definitions matter.

They don't understand why we care about this. I remember when a /24 was just given to you if you asked nicely. And the routing tables were smaller. And you knew your neighbors. Now it's all automation and apis. I bought at 15 euro in december but it was dirty space. Took me three months to clean the reputation. So your 16.50 for clean space sounds about right to me. The bottom is somewhere near here. But the market will stay strange for a while. The estates keep selling. The hoarders keep hoarding. We are the last ones who remember when this was free...