On 27 May 2026, at 13:30, Brandon Butterworth wrote:
A tiered model is supposed to distribute expenses evenly across members in proportion to their size, and consumer size is reasonably well estimated by the size of the IPv4 space in use - that, and only that, is why IPv4 sizing is relevant to this discussion. That is bad logic, there are many where IPv4 size is not a reasonable proxy for organisation size and financial situation.
Given the finite amount of resources being made avaialble via this membership (i.e. in particular IPv4 resources), this is still very much relevant. There are a lot of organizations (especially universities, government, etc) that sits on wast amounts of IPv4 space that they don’t really use (or even if they use it, they don’t really need it). With the current flat-price model, they have no incentive to do anything about this (“it just works, and it barely cost us anything, and if we had to use RFC1918 address space, it would cost a lot to transition”). With a membership fee that reflects the indirect value the resources gives you (aka pay more for more resources), these organizations would have an incentive to return adresses to the pool (aka pay less), which would be a double-win in the sense that the resources would be better distributed to those that actually has a need for them (rather than “hoarding” just because they were lucky to get them a long time ago). I also agree with a lot of the other things that Mihail mentions. Personally my company joined RIPE back in 2014. Back-then it cost us about €1200 per year including some independent resources (sponsoring LIR). The same amount of resources cost us about €2300 for 2026. That’s about 92% increase of cost (inflation in the same period accounts for about 30% of that). For the same “service”. While I agree with the good intentions a lot of the “extra” services RIPE provides (Atlas, Stats, training/etc), these are not of value to us. Thus, we have to pay for a service we need (RIPE resources), but have no “say” in the cost for these “other” services (aka we have no opt-out, other than a futile attempt at voting at the GMs). In that sense, with a flat-fee model there’s absolutely a point to be made about “focus on cost” (i.e. RIPE should focus on what they are needed for, vs. “nice to have”). Or if they want to provide other services, charge extra for them and keep them out of the membership cost base. -- Joachim