It's not comparable. You will lose your AS and PA if your sourcing-LIR goes out of business or increases prices against you. It's ab big difference to become a LIR or just a downstream customer.
You shouldn't lose an ASN or PI block, they are registered to you at RIPE, only managed by the LIR and can be transferred to another LIR in exceptional or routine circumstances. I think you'll have to pay another fee though.
A PA block is just part of a LIR's block that they give you permission to use, so I doubt you could keep that if they went out of business, but maybe RIPE has a procedure for it.
I don't want to blame anyone for using this setup except RIPE for their fee schedule. For example, I don't have IPv6 because that would double my running costs just for RIPE.
Ok, for reference, I'm paying my LIR about 150 EU/year. That includes the ASN, IPv6 /44 block, and a BGP VPS. I have a legacy IPv4 /24 block that doesn't cost me anything. I do miss out on RPKI for it because of that.
Outside of that, I have another couple of VPSes I use for experimenting with routing and fail over that are closer to my location. The VPSes are connected to my home network and each other over Wireguard.
€75 per assignment / sponsored resource
€50 per ASN assignment
So in your case it's only €50 for the AS-object but your LIR needs to allocate their LIR base fee costs (which includes the IPv6 PA that they assigned to you), also infrastructure, the VM, support.
I really like the couple of LIRs that are very active in supporting one-person-multihoming setups, but IMHO RIPE should directly do that at a low entry fee. RIPE has also education/training offerings for LIRs and that would increase the knowhow and reach of RIPE. Most home lab enthusiasts will apply the gained knowledge in their job, at customers and bring new customers to RIPE.
You're not wrong about the sustainability, but we don't know if it's their only business. I'm not sure how many BGP / multihome hobbyists there are out there, but I'm guessing it's not a huge number. My guess is the LIR stuff is an add on for their colocation and hosting services.
When I first made the ARIN or RIPE LIR decision a few years back, ARIN required a $500 registration fee for an ASN. That was a few years of LIR fees right there. I felt it was worth the risk for the savings with a hobbyist setup.
