Search "cheapest residential proxies" and you get a wall of listicles, most of them ranking whoever pays the best affiliate commission, and most of them quoting a per-GB number that is either a deep-volume rate you will never reach or a promo that expires in three months. We run a proxy network and track every competitor's price in it, so this is the version we would want to read: real prices, verified against each provider's own page in July 2026, including the two places where someone is cheaper than us. If honesty is going to mean anything on a page like this, it has to survive our own pricing.
What are the cheapest residential proxies in 2026?
Three providers sit at the genuine budget end of the residential market: Evomi at $0.49/GB (on a 100 GB plan), HProxy at $0.65/GB pay as you go, and DataImpulse at $1/GB. Everyone else we can verify starts higher, and the mainstream and enterprise names start several times higher. Here is the whole field, cheapest first:
The chart shows what a new customer actually pays to start, with each provider's advertised "from" price in the note beside it. The gap between the two is the whole game: most of these providers dangle a low headline rate that needs a big commitment, and the real entry price is a thin budget tier at the bottom with a wall of $3.50 to $7.35 above it. The distance from $0.49 to $7.35 is fifteen times, for traffic that is physically the same. Understanding why the advertised number is not the one you pay is how you shop it.
The honest budget shortlist, provider by provider
Numbers without context mislead, so here is what each cheap option actually is, catches included.
Evomi, $0.49/GB. The lowest verified sticker in the market, and we are not going to hide that it is below ours. The asterisk: that $0.49 is on a 100 GB plan at $49.99 a month, so it is a volume rate with a minimum, not a pay-as-you-go price you hit buying 5 GB. If you reliably burn 100 GB a month, Evomi's headline rate is real and it is genuinely cheaper than us. If your usage is bursty or small, the effective price is different, and the minimum is the thing to check.
HProxy, $0.65/GB. Ours. Pay as you go, no minimum, no monthly commitment, no KYC, and a balance that never expires. It is not the lowest sticker on the page, it is the lowest with none of those strings attached. More on where we honestly sit below.
DataImpulse, $1.00/GB. A clean budget option with a low 5 GB minimum, and the rate drops to about $0.80/GB at a terabyte. Traffic does not expire. Third-cheapest verified, and a reasonable pick, especially at volume.
Webshare, $3.50/GB entry. Often listed as "cheap," and it can be, but the cheap number has conditions. The entry residential rate is $3.50/GB, falling to $1.40/GB only at 3 TB a month. If you are not moving multiple terabytes, you are paying the entry rate, which is well above the true budget tier. Webshare's real bargain is its datacenter and ISP pricing, not its residential.
IPRoyal, "$1.75/GB." This is the number the listicles quote, and it is misleading without the tier. IPRoyal's actual pay-as-you-go residential rate is $7.35/GB; the $1.75 appears only at large bulk volume, with 50 GB on pay as you go still about $5.15/GB. Traffic does not expire, which is a genuine plus, but on a straight pay-as-you-go basis IPRoyal is one of the pricier options here, not one of the cheapest. We are cheaper than IPRoyal at every tier that matters.
The pattern across all five: the sticker number is the start of the conversation, and the tier, the minimum, and the commitment are the rest of it.
The starting-price trap
Those five are a preview of a marketwide pattern, and it is the main reason "cheapest" lists mislead. The per-GB number a provider prints on its homepage is almost always its deepest-commitment rate, not the price a new customer pays. We checked all twelve providers in the chart against their own pricing pages in July 2026, and the advertised "from" price sat below the real entry price at eight of them, by as much as thirteen times:
- Infatica advertises $0.30/GB. A new customer pays $4/GB, and the cheapest tier you can actually buy bottoms out around $2.08/GB, which needs a 12,000 GB a month plan (roughly $24,960 a month). The $0.30 corresponds to nothing on the page.
- Rayobyte advertises $0.50/GB. That rate needs a 5,000 GB enterprise contract; the starter rate is $3.50/GB.
- SOAX advertises $0.85/GB. That needs a $3,000-a-month plan; the entry rate is $5/GB.
- IPRoyal advertises $1.75/GB. That needs large bulk volume; pay as you go is $7.35/GB, and even 50 GB is about $5.15/GB.
Rank the twelve by what a new customer actually pays instead of by the homepage teaser, and the order scrambles. The providers that look cheapest (Infatica, Rayobyte, SOAX) are mid-pack or expensive to start, and the three whose advertised price equals their real price (DataImpulse, Evomi, and us) rise to the top. Our $0.65/GB is $0.65/GB whether you buy 1 GB or 1,000, because we have no commitment tier to advertise a fake floor from. The only genuinely lower real entry price in the field is Evomi's $0.49, and that one needs a 100 GB plan.
Why "cheapest per GB" is usually the wrong question
Here is the idea that saves people the most money, and almost no pricing page mentions it. What you actually pay for is not a gigabyte, it is a successful result: a page scraped, a price read, a login held. The right metric is cost per successful request, and on a defended target it can invert the sticker ranking completely.
Run the arithmetic. Suppose a $0.49/GB pool gets blocked 40% of the time on your target, while a $0.65/GB pool succeeds 95% of the time. On the cheaper pool you send roughly 1.7 requests for every success, and each failed attempt still pulls bandwidth you paid for, so your real cost per useful result climbs past the pool that "costs more." Add the engineering time to manage all those retries and the risk that retrying trips a rate limit, and the cheap sticker has quietly become the expensive choice. The cheapest proxy that does not succeed on your target is not cheap, it is money spent for nothing.
This is why we do something specific with our own billing: blocked or errored requests cost nothing. You pay for successful results, not for the failures, which removes the hidden retry multiplier from the equation entirely. When you compare any providers on this page, do the math on your own success rate against your own target, not on the headline. A slightly higher rate with a high success rate and no charge for failures usually wins the number that actually hits your card.
The hidden costs that make "cheap" expensive
Beyond success rate, four strings turn a low sticker into a high bill. Check each before you buy on price alone:
- Commitments and minimums. A per-GB rate that requires a monthly plan means paying for gigabytes you never pull in a quiet month. Pay as you go with no minimum only charges you for what you use.
- Expiring traffic or balance. If unused gigabytes vanish at the end of the month, a paused project torches prepaid credit. A non-expiring balance does not. (DataImpulse, IPRoyal, and we all keep traffic or balance alive; some providers do not.)
- KYC and onboarding friction. Some providers gate residential access behind a verification process or a sales call. That is not a dollar cost, but it is a real cost in time and access, and it is why we stay self-serve.
- Promo cliffs. A headline rate propped up by a new-customer discount is a countdown, not a price. Bright Data's entry rate, for instance, leans on a standing 50% promo that reverts after three months, as we detail in HProxy vs Bright Data. Price the rate you will pay in month four, not month one.
Where HProxy honestly sits
Since this is our blog, you are owed the straight version. We are not the single cheapest residential proxy on the market. Evomi's $0.49/GB undercuts our $0.65/GB on the sticker, and at high, steady volume its plan rate can beat ours. If pure lowest-number-per-gigabyte is your only criterion and you burn 100 GB a month like clockwork, we will point you there ourselves.
What we are is the cheapest residential proxy with no commitment, no KYC, and a balance that never expires, and one of only three genuine budget pools in the whole field. For the large majority of buyers, whose usage is bursty rather than a flat 100 GB every month, and who would rather not sign a plan, verify an identity, or watch prepaid gigabytes expire, that combination lands cheaper in practice than a lower sticker with strings. Add that we do not charge for blocked or errored requests, and the price per successful request, the number that actually matters, is extremely hard to beat. That is the honest pitch: not "cheapest," but "cheapest with nothing attached, and cheapest per result that works."
We sell the same residential IPs the enterprise names do (real, ethically sourced ISP addresses, which we explain the sourcing of in what is a residential proxy), without the enterprise wrapper or the enterprise bill.
How to actually pick the cheapest for your job
Four steps, in order:
- Estimate your real monthly volume and pattern. Steady and high (100 GB+ every month) favors a volume plan like Evomi's. Bursty, small, or unpredictable favors pure pay as you go like ours, where you never pay for a quiet month.
- Shortlist on verified pay-as-you-go rates, not promos or deep-volume floors. From the chart above, the genuine budget tier is Evomi, us, and DataImpulse. Treat the "$1.75" and "$1.40" style numbers as commitment rates and price them as such.
- Test cost per successful request on your target. Point two or three shortlisted providers at your actual site, measure the success rate, and divide cost by successes. This is the only comparison that predicts your real bill. Our free proxy list and proxy checker let you sanity-check IPs before you spend a cent.
- Read the strings. Minimums, expiry, KYC, promo cliffs. The cheapest sticker with four strings often loses to the second-cheapest with none.
Do that and you will buy the cheapest residential proxy for your job, which is not always the cheapest residential proxy in the abstract. When pay-as-you-go with no commitment and no expiry is what fits, our residential proxies are $0.65/GB with exactly that, and the full menu is on our pricing page. If you want the wider cost picture across datacenter, ISP, and mobile too, how much do proxies cost is the companion to this guide.
Sources and further reading
- Evomi pricing, DataImpulse pricing, IPRoyal residential proxies, and Webshare pricing, for the budget-tier per-GB rates and their tier conditions, accessed July 2026.
- AIMultiple, "Proxy pricing comparison", for the overall market range and cross-provider context. The individual provider rates above are cross-checked against each provider's own pricing page, verified July 17, 2026.