BGP peering for a startup: what's the minimum needed to advertise our /24?

The simplest path is to use a hosted BGP service from a colocation provider, which avoids the capital expense and expertise required for your own router hardware. You need three core components: your own ASN, a /24 prefix (which you have), and BGP sessions with at least two upstream transit providers for redundancy. A colo provider can supply the physical cross-connects, power, and rack space, while their hosted router service manages the actual BGP-speaking hardware, letting you focus on configuring your announcements. This model provides the necessary redundancy and control without the operational burden of maintaining physical routers and diverse fiber entries.

Your primary technical task is to create and submit your route object in the IRR and configure your BGP session preferences. With the hosted service, you typically configure your prefix and AS path preferences via a web portal or by providing a config snippet to the provider's engineers. The underlying concept is that you are establishing eBGP multihop sessions to their routers. A basic configuration you might provide looks like this:

router bgp YOUR_ASN

 neighbor 203.0.113.1 remote-as THEIR_ASN

 neighbor 203.0.113.1 description Upstream Provider A

 neighbor 203.0.113.1 ebgp-multihop 2

 neighbor 203.0.113.1 prefix-list ONLY-MY-PREFIX out

 !

 ip prefix-list ONLY-MY-PREFIX seq 5 permit 192.0.2.0/24

You must ensure your prefix is announced identically to both upstreams to avoid asymmetry, and you should have a written agreement with each provider covering transit and the BGP session. This approach meets the minimum viable requirement: reliable advertisement of your prefix with full control over routing policies.