The honest answer to "how much do proxies cost" is that the question is underspecified, and the providers know it. Depending on the type, a proxy can cost under two cents a month or around eight dollars a gigabyte, a spread of several hundred times for products that all, technically, relay your traffic. Ask the price without saying the type and you will get quoted the number that flatters the seller.
We run a proxy network, so we see the whole board: what each type actually costs, why the gap between them is that large, and the one number that matters more than any sticker price. All the figures below were checked against each provider's own pricing page in July 2026, and where a number comes from a third-party comparison instead we say so. Nothing here is invented, including the places where we are not the cheapest.
How much do proxies cost?
Proxy prices split cleanly by type. Here is the market at a glance, with representative July 2026 rates:
| Proxy type | How it is billed | Typical range | What you are paying for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter | Per IP per month | ~$0.02 to ~$1 per IP | Speed and volume, cheap |
| ISP (static residential) | Per IP per month | ~$0.30 to a few dollars per IP | Residential trust on a fixed IP |
| Residential (rotating) | Per GB of traffic | ~$0.49 to ~$8 per GB | Believability and a huge IP pool |
| Mobile | Per GB, or per modem per month | ~$1.60 to $4+ per GB, or ~$50/modem | The hardest-to-block IPs |
The rest of this guide is why those ranges look the way they do, and how to land at the bottom of the one that fits your job instead of the top of one that does not.
The one concept that explains every price: the meter
Before any specific number, understand this, because it decides more of your bill than the provider you pick. Proxies are metered on two completely different axes, and comparing a per-IP price to a per-GB price head to head is how people overspend.
Per IP (datacenter and ISP). You rent a specific address for a flat monthly fee and push as much traffic through it as you want. Bandwidth is effectively free; the address is the product. This is cheap for heavy, high-volume work through a few stable identities, and it gets expensive only when you need many separate identities, because each one is another monthly rent.
Per GB (rotating residential). You draw from a shared pool through a gateway and pay for the gigabytes you pull, not for any fixed address. This is cheap when you touch many identities lightly (thousands of small requests across thousands of IPs) and expensive when you move real volume, because every gigabyte is on the meter.
So the honest question is never "which type is cheaper." It is "cheaper for what shape of work." A job that moves 500 GB through five identities is a per-IP job, and paying per gigabyte for it is how a small task becomes a large invoice. A job that touches a million pages at ten kilobytes each is a per-GB job, and no per-IP fleet you can afford has enough identities to do it. We take this trade apart in detail in datacenter vs residential proxies; for pricing, just remember that the wrong meter for your workload is the most common way to overpay.
Datacenter proxy cost: the cheap tier
Datacenter proxies are IP addresses owned by hosting companies, mass-produced in bulk, and they are the cheapest proxies by a wide margin. Because a hosting company can spin up address blocks at scale and bandwidth costs it almost nothing, the per-IP price falls to almost nothing too. Webshare, one of the larger budget providers, lists shared datacenter proxies from $0.0299 per proxy per month, dropping to $0.0179 in bulk. That is well under a nickel for an IP you can run all month.
Two honest caveats. First, prices that low are usually for shared IPs, addresses several customers use at once, so their reputation is out of your control. Dedicated datacenter IPs, yours alone, cost more: ours are $0.90 per IP per month, which buys you an address nobody else is burning. Second, some budget vendors sell datacenter capacity per gigabyte instead of per IP (DataImpulse lists datacenter from $0.50 per GB, Evomi from $0.35), which can be cheaper for light use and worse for heavy use. Read the unit before you compare.
The thing the low price cannot buy is trust. A datacenter IP announces a hosting-company ASN, and defended sites flag that on sight, as we explain in datacenter vs residential proxies. Datacenter is the right, cheap choice for lenient targets, open data, and most APIs. On a major retailer or a search engine it gets blocked, and a blocked cheap IP is not cheap at all.
ISP proxy cost: trust on a fixed IP
ISP proxies (static residential) are billed per IP per month like datacenter, because you occupy one fixed address around the clock. They cost more than datacenter because the address is registered to a consumer ISP, which is what makes a website treat it as a real home user rather than a server. You are paying for that residential classification on a stable, always-on IP.
The range is wide. Webshare lists static residential from $0.30 per IP per month in bulk; Evomi lists ISP from about $1.00 per IP; ours are $1.80 per IP per month, pay as you go on a non-expiring balance. Because bandwidth through an ISP IP is unmetered, this tier is genuinely cheap for heavy traffic on a few identities: a busy storefront pushing hundreds of gigabytes a month pays the same $1.80 as one pushing a few. It only gets expensive when you need many identities, because then you are renting many IPs. We cover exactly what this tier is and when it beats a rotating pool in what is an ISP proxy.
Residential proxy cost: the per-GB spread
Residential proxies are where the money is, and where the marketing is least honest. They are billed per gigabyte, because you draw from a shared pool of real home connections rather than renting one fixed address, and the price of that gigabyte swings enormously across the market, from about $0.49 to $8 depending on the provider and, just as often, on how you read the pricing page. Ours is $0.65/GB, flat, pay as you go, with no minimum.
That swing is not really about the gigabyte, which is physically the same traffic everywhere. It comes down to two things. The first is what gets wrapped around the bandwidth: the enterprise providers (Oxylabs, Bright Data, and the like) price a whole platform of compliance, account management, and scraping tools on top of the IPs, while budget providers sell the bandwidth and little else. The second, and the one that trips up the most buyers, is that the headline per-GB rate a provider advertises is usually not the rate you actually pay. That gap is big enough, and common enough, to deserve its own section.
The starting-price trap: why "from $X/GB" is rarely the price you pay
There is a pattern in how residential proxies are advertised, and once you notice it on one pricing page you see it on nearly all of them. The big headline, the "from $X/GB" that pulls you in, is almost never the rate a new customer pays. It is the floor of a deep-volume ladder or the bottom rung of a monthly commitment, reachable only at a spend most buyers never come near. The price you pay to start sits several times higher, and the distance between the two is the trap.
We put each provider's advertised headline next to the rate a fresh account actually starts at, checked against their own pricing pages on July 17, 2026.
Infatica is the clearest case. Its page advertises residential proxies "from $0.3/GB", but its own published tiers never reach that number. The cheapest rate it will sell you is $2.08/GB, and that one needs a 12,000 GB plan at $24,960 a month. Pay as you go, a new customer starts at $4.00/GB. So the headline is not a price you climb toward, it is a number the published ladder does not contain, and even that near-$25,000 monthly spend only reaches $2.08, still seven times the advertised figure.
The rest run the same play. Rayobyte advertises "as low as $0.50/GB", a real rate, but only at 5,000 GB a month and up, while the pay-as-you-go entry rate is $3.50/GB. Webshare advertises "starting at $1.4/GB", reached only at 3,000 GB a month, against a $3.50/GB entry rate. IPRoyal advertises "$1.75/GB", a bulk-volume floor, while the first gigabyte pay as you go is $7.35. Oxylabs advertises "from just $4/GB", but $4 needs its $500-a-month plan and the Starter rate is $6/GB, with the cheapest $2.50/GB gated behind a $2,500 monthly commitment. Bright Data's residential page leads with $2.50/GB, which needs a $1,999 monthly commitment plus a promo that halves the rate for three months and then reverts, while a new account pays $8/GB pay as you go.
Now put our own name on the same axis. HProxy advertises $0.65/GB, and $0.65/GB is exactly what you pay on your first gigabyte, pay as you go, with no plan to reach it and no volume to hold. The two bars are the same height because there is no gap to draw, which is the whole reason we put ourselves in a chart built to expose the trick. None of this makes the enterprise providers frauds. If you genuinely move terabytes every month, those deep floors are real and you will reach them. The problem is only the headline, which quotes a deep-volume floor to a reader about to buy 10 GB. When you weigh "from $X" numbers across providers, the honest comparison is the rate you will pay at your volume, which for most buyers is the entry rate, not the floor.
Mobile proxy cost: the premium tier
Mobile proxies route through cellular carrier IPs (4G and 5G), and they are the most expensive tier because they are the hardest to block. A whole neighborhood of real subscribers can sit behind one carrier IP thanks to carrier-grade NAT, so a site that bans that address risks banning hundreds of innocent users, which makes carriers extremely reluctant to block. That reluctance is the product, and it commands a premium.
Mobile is priced two ways, and the unit matters. Per gigabyte, it runs above residential: DataImpulse lists mobile from $2 per GB dropping to $1.60 at volume, Evomi from about $2.20 per GB, and the enterprise providers well north of that. Alternatively, some providers (us included) sell mobile per dedicated modem, $50 per modem per month in our case, which gives you a whole 4G/5G connection with unmetered bandwidth and control over when it rotates. Per-modem is cheaper for heavy continuous use; per-GB is cheaper for light, occasional use. Most jobs never need mobile at all; it is the last-resort tier for the most aggressively defended targets, and paying for it on anything less is waste.
The number that actually matters: cost per successful request
Here is the part the pricing pages bury, and it is the most important idea in this guide. The sticker price is cost per gigabyte or cost per IP. What you actually care about is cost per successful request, and on a defended target those two numbers can be miles apart.
Work it through. Say a cheap datacenter IP costs a fraction of a residential one, but on your target it gets blocked 60% of the time. You now send every request 2.5 times on average to get one success, so your real cost per useful result is 2.5 times the sticker, plus the engineering time to handle all those retries, plus the risk that the retries themselves get you rate-limited. A residential IP at a higher sticker price that succeeds 95% of the time can easily be cheaper per successful request, because you are paying for outcomes, not attempts. The cheapest proxy that does not work is infinitely expensive, because it never delivers the result at any price.
This is why "what is the cheapest proxy" is the wrong opening question and "what is the cheapest proxy that succeeds on my target" is the right one. It is also why we do something specific about it: on our network, blocked or errored requests cost nothing. You pay for successful results, not for the failures, which removes the hidden multiplier from your bill entirely. When you compare providers, do the arithmetic on your own success rate against your own target, not on the number in the marketing headline.
How not to overpay
Five rules cover almost every case:
- Match the meter to the workload. Heavy bandwidth, few identities: per-IP (datacenter or ISP). Light bandwidth, many identities: per-GB (rotating residential). Getting this backwards is the biggest single overpay.
- Start with the cheapest tier your target tolerates, and escalate only on evidence. Try datacenter first. Move to residential only when block rates prove you must, not because a guide told you to. Paying for residential stealth on a site that never checks is pure waste.
- Compare like tiers. A budget provider's deep-volume floor against another's entry rate is not a real comparison. Line up pay-as-you-go against pay-as-you-go, and commitment against commitment.
- Count the strings, not just the price. A lower per-GB number attached to a monthly commitment, a KYC process, a minimum spend, or a promo that doubles in three months is often more expensive in practice than a slightly higher pay-as-you-go rate with none of that.
- Measure cost per success, and use free tools first. Test a target on our free proxy list and proxy checker before spending, then buy the shape your real workload revealed. A balance that does not expire means a paused project never torches prepaid credit.
Do those five and you will consistently land near the bottom of the right range instead of the top of the wrong one. When you know which shape you need, our pricing is the whole menu on one page: residential at $0.65/GB, ISP at $1.80/IP, datacenter at $0.90/IP, and mobile at $50/modem, all pay as you go, no KYC, and a balance that never expires. If residential is specifically what you are costing out, the cheapest residential proxies of 2026 is the detailed version of the comparison above.
Sources and further reading
- AIMultiple, "Proxy pricing comparison", for the overall market range and cross-provider context. The individual provider rates in the tables above are cross-checked against each provider's own pricing page, verified July 17, 2026.
- Webshare pricing, for datacenter per-IP, ISP per-IP, and residential per-GB rates, accessed July 2026.
- DataImpulse pricing and Evomi pricing, for budget datacenter, residential, and mobile per-GB rates, accessed July 2026.
- IPRoyal residential proxies, for the pay-as-you-go versus committed per-GB difference, accessed July 2026.