We are budgeting infrastructure for the next three years and the address space line is the one
Hello. We are budgeting infrastructure for the next three years and the address space line is the one I keep going back and forth on. Renting looks cheap on a monthly basis and terrible over thirty six months. Buying looks brutal upfront and then free. Our workload is a VPN product, so the space stays in use as long as the product exists, and reputation continuity matters to us a lot. Has anyone here run this math for a similar case and landed on a clear answer? Our finance team thinks in three year cycles, so anything beyond that horizon is hard for me to defend internally.
For a product with a long horizon and reputation sensitivity, the math usually favors buying, and your case sounds like a textbook example. Rented space can be pulled at renewal, and losing a range you have spent two years building reputation on is a real operational hit, not a theoretical one. Run the payback: monthly rate times twelve times three, compared against purchase price, and most /24 scenarios cross over inside that window. When I priced IPv4 Addresses , both ways at IPv4.online, buying won for anything we planned to keep past two years. Lease the short lived stuff, own the core. Mixed approach is fine and very common.