Good news, Docker Hub supports IPv6.

https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-hub-registry-ipv6-support...

Hopefully they have IPv6. Plenty of ISPs will happily put you behind CGNAT and have no IPv6 available.

If you use IPv6, the limit is per /64 subnet.

I don't know enough about IPv6, is this potentially its own problem?

A 64 subnet is generally the size allocated to a residential customer.

Docker Personal is free unless I am missing something?

Authentication and automation don't mix well.

Works for

LetsEncrypt AWS Azure GCP Github Actions

Failing to see how they don't mix well.

That isn't true at all. Service accounts exist and aren't hard to set up.

> All I can do

You could also, you know, pay Docker for the resources you're using.

He could also hit the limit downloading a single image, if I'm understanding his situation.

If I'm an infrequent tinkerer that occasionally needs docker images, I'm not going to pay a monthly cost to download e.g. 1 image/month that happens to be hosted on Docker's registry.

(It sounds like you can create an account and do authenticated pulls; which is fine and pretty workable for a large subset of my above scenario; I'm just pointing out a reason paying dollars for occasional one-off downloads is unpopular)