A proxy costs between a few cents and a few dollars a month per IP address, or between half a dollar and eight dollars per gigabyte. The type decides which meter applies. Shared datacenter IPs start at 2.5 cents per IP a month. Dedicated datacenter IPs run $1.57 to $3.99. ISP proxies sit at a median of $2.70 per IP a month. Rotating residential traffic has a median entry rate of $4.00 per GB across 21 providers, and mobile traffic $4.50 per GB across 13. Every figure comes from our own price record. We read 862 rows from the pricing pages of 42 providers on August 3 and 10, 2026, and verified 783 of them line by line. Twelve of those pages were re-read on September 2, 2026, and the 21 residential pages on October 22, 2026.
This page prices every type on the same day and by the same rule. It puts the advertised floor next to what a new customer pays. It also puts the free list in the table as the $0 row, with its real costs measured by our own checker. We sell proxies, so our own numbers sit in the same tables under the same rules, drawn from our price catalog rather than typed.
How much do proxies cost?
The entry rate below is the smallest purchase a new customer can make, read from each provider's own page. A median is given only where at least seven providers publish the rate.
| Proxy type | Meter | Entry rates, cheapest to dearest | Median entry | Providers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter, shared IPs | per IP a month | $0.025 to $0.035 | none, three rows | 3 |
| Datacenter, dedicated IPs | per IP a month | $1.57 to $3.99 | none, four rows | 4 |
| Datacenter, metered traffic | per GB | $0.30 to $0.90 | $0.60 | 7 |
| ISP (static residential) | per IP a month | $0.30 to $6.39 | $2.70 | 11 |
| Residential, rotating | per GB | $0.79 to $8.00 | $4.00 | 21 |
| Mobile, rotating | per GB | $1.10 to $8.00 | $4.50 | 13 |
| Mobile, dedicated modem | per month | $130 to $225 | none, two rows | 2 |
| Scraping API | per 1,000 requests | $0.196 to $3.75 | $0.89 | 8 |
| Free proxy list | $0 | paid in time and failed requests | see the $0 row | our checker |
Source: each provider's own pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, stored with its URL in our price record; the residential row re-read October 22, 2026; day-priced rows excluded from the monthly medians. Our own prices appear in each section below.
Two things decide where your job lands in that table. The first is the meter, per IP or per GB. The second is volume, because almost every advertised rate is a volume rate. The rest of this page takes both apart.
Why are residential proxies charged per gigabyte while datacenter proxies are per IP?
People ask this on Quora and BlackHatWorld in almost those words. The answer is that the two products are metered on different things.
A datacenter or ISP proxy is one fixed address that you rent for a period. The address is the unit, so the price is per IP, and the traffic through it is usually not counted. That is cheap for heavy work through a few identities. It gets dear only when you need many identities, because each one is another rent. Our per-IP products are grouped as unlimited proxies for that reason: traffic through a held address is never metered.
A rotating residential proxy is bandwidth through a pool of home connections. There is no single address to rent, because the exit changes underneath you. The provider pays its suppliers per gigabyte, so it bills you per gigabyte. That is cheap when you touch many identities lightly and dear when you move real volume.
The wrong meter is the most common way to overpay. A job that pushes 500 GB through five identities belongs on per-IP pricing. A job that fetches a million small pages belongs on per-GB pricing, because no affordable per-IP fleet has enough identities. We take the trade apart in datacenter vs residential proxies.
How much does a proxy cost per month?
Search Console shows readers reaching this page with "how much is proxy subscription" and "how much it cost monthly". Those are per-IP questions, and the per-IP market has three tiers.
Datacenter IPs: cents for shared, about a dollar and a half for dedicated
Shared datacenter IPs are the cheapest proxies sold. Webshare listed 100 proxies for $2.99 a month, ProxyScrape 1,000 for $25, and Decodo 100 IPs at $0.035 each, all on their pricing pages in August 2026. At 15,000 IPs Decodo falls to 2 cents per IP, and at 100,000 IPs Webshare to 1.8 cents. Shared means other customers use the same addresses, so their reputation is out of your hands.
Dedicated datacenter IPs cost more. IPRoyal listed $1.57 per IP for 30 days, Rayobyte $2.00, Bright Data $2.20 at a 10-IP minimum, and IPFoxy $3.99 for one IP for 30 days, all August 2026. Ours are $1.58 per IPv4 address per month, or $0.10 for IPv6, with unmetered traffic through the address.
Some vendors sell datacenter traffic by the gigabyte instead. Seven did in August 2026, with a median entry of $0.60 per GB, from Rayobyte at $0.30 to YiluProxy at $0.90. Read the unit before you compare. A rate of $0.30 per GB and one of $0.30 per IP are different products, a trap we walk through in how to read a proxy pricing page.
The low price cannot buy trust. A datacenter address announces a hosting network, and a defended site treats that as a signal. Datacenter is the right, cheap choice for open data, most APIs and lenient targets. On a major retailer it gets blocked, and a blocked cheap IP is not cheap.
ISP proxies: a home label on a fixed address
ISP proxies are billed per IP per month like datacenter, because you hold one address. They cost more because the address is registered to a consumer ISP, so websites read it as a home user. Across 11 providers in August 2026 the median entry was $2.70 per IP a month. Webshare was cheapest at $0.30 per IP with a 20-IP minimum ($6 a month). Oxylabs listed $1.60 on a 10-IP plan, IPRoyal $2.70 for 30 days, Rayobyte $5.00 with a 5-IP minimum, and IPFoxy $6.39.
The advertised ISP floors had a median of $1.35, a gap of 1.45 times to the entry rates. Decodo's $0.27 floor appeared only in a comparison table with no plan to buy it at. Ours are $2.70 per IP per month, with unmetered traffic, so a busy storefront pays the same as a quiet one. We cover when a fixed ISP address beats a rotating pool in what is an ISP proxy.
Mobile modems: rented by the day or the month
Some vendors sell a whole 4G or 5G connection rather than gigabytes. IPRoyal listed a dedicated mobile proxy at $130 a month, or $117 a month on a 90-day term. MobileHop listed one 5G modem at $180 a month in one location or $225 roaming, and $8 for a day. MarsProxies listed a single mobile proxy at $8.49 a day. All were read in August 2026. A modem is cheap for heavy, steady use on one identity and dear for light, occasional use.
Why are residential proxies so expensive?
Start at the supply side, because that is where the gigabyte is born. Honeygain's page states that it pays a household $0.10 per GB of shared traffic, and Pawns.app pays $0.20 per GB, both read on August 3, 2026. A provider selling that gigabyte at $8 charges eighty times what the household received. One selling at $1 charges five to ten times. The gap pays for routing, verification, support and the brand, and part of it is margin.
Scarcity does the rest. A hosting company can spin up an address block in an afternoon. A pool of home connections has to be recruited, paid and kept clean. That is why the residential meter runs per gigabyte and why the median entry rate across the 21 providers we re-read on October 22, 2026 was $4.00. Ten of the 21 sat below $4, and the dearest were Bright Data's list rate and Massive's 10 GB plan, both $8.00.
The cheapest entry rates were Geonode at $0.79 for 10 GB a month, Evomi at $0.99 pay as you go from 15 GB ($0.49 on its $49 plan for 100 GB), and DataImpulse and PacketStream at $1.00. Ours is $0.50/GB for a single gigabyte, falling to $0.44/GB from 2,000 GB+, on a balance that never expires. The residential tier gets its own page, expiry traps included, in our residential price study.
Is the advertised price the price you pay?
Rarely, and this is the finding the record was built to show. For 21 residential providers we recorded two numbers from the same page. One is the lowest "from" rate in the marketing. The other is the rate a new customer pays on the smallest purchase. Both were first read on August 3 and 10, 2026, and read again on October 22, 2026; the table shows the October reading.
| Provider | Advertised floor | What unlocks it | Entry rate | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rayobyte | $0.0095/GB | Scale Residential: $5,000 a month for 526,000 GB, no targeting, verified businesses after a compliance review | $3.50/GB, Premium, 1 to 49 GB | 368x |
| Shifter | $0.10/GB | the Non-Geo pool, no targeting: $2,499 a month for 25 TB | $2.00/GB, $10 a month for 5 GB | 20x |
| SOAX | $0.35/GB | Enterprise, $3,000 a month plus VAT, Tier 3 countries | $5.00/GB, Sandbox, Tier 1 countries | 14x |
| Infatica | $0.30/GB | no residential plan reaches it; its cheapest residential rate is $2.08 on a 12,000 GB annual plan | $4.00/GB | 13x |
| IPFoxy | $0.60/GB | custom plans over 1,000 GB | $5.99/GB, 1 GB | 10x |
| ProxyEmpire | $0.75/GB | custom plans from 5 TB, contact sales | $3.50/GB, a promo on a $7 list rate | 4.7x |
| IPRoyal | $1.75/GB | 10 TB on subscription | $7.35/GB, 1 GB pay as you go | 4.2x |
| Thordata | $0.65/GB | 5,000 GB in one purchase, $3,250, at the sale rate | $2.00/GB at the sale rate, $2.85 list | 3.1x |
| MarsProxies | $1.65/GB | 10,000 GB | $4.99/GB | 3.0x |
| Geonode | $0.27/GB | 100 TB a month, $27,000 a month | $0.79/GB, 10 GB for $7.92 | 2.9x |
| Webshare | $1.40/GB | 3,000 GB a month for $4,200, at the sale rate | $3.50/GB, 50 percent off a $7 list rate | 2.5x |
| Oxylabs | $2.50/GB | Enterprise, plans from $2,500 a month, 1,000 GB and more | $6.00/GB, $30 a month | 2.4x |
| Evomi | $0.49/GB | the $49 plan for 100 GB a month | $0.99/GB pay as you go, from 15 GB | 2.0x |
| Decodo | $2.00/GB | the 1,000 GB a month plan, $2,000 | $4.00/GB pay as you go | 2.0x |
| NodeMaven | $2.20/GB | monthly plans (1,000 GB in our October 12 record); custom pricing above 1,000 GB | $4.25/GB, $8.50 a month for 2 GB | 1.9x |
| Massive | $4.90/GB | Pro plan, $490 a month for 100 GB | $8.00/GB, $80 for 10 GB | 1.6x |
| Bright Data | $5.00/GB list | $1,999 a month with 798 GB included | $8.00/GB, or $4 with a three-month code | 1.6x |
| IPBurger | $4.48/GB | Pro plan, $269 a month for 60 GB | $5.90/GB, $59 a month for 10 GB | 1.3x |
| DataImpulse | $0.80/GB | 1 TB for $800 | $1.00/GB, $5 buys 5 GB | 1.25x |
| PacketStream | $1.00/GB | nothing beyond a $50 minimum purchase | $1.00/GB | 1.0x |
| ProxyScrape | none printed | the headline offers "up to 25% off", with no rate | $3.55/GB, 10 GB for $35.50 | n/a |
| HProxy | $0.44/GB | 2,000 GB+ | $0.50/GB | a few cents |
Source: each provider's own pricing pages, read October 22, 2026 (Shifter's Lite and Non-Geo plans, which its page draws by script, from our September 27 read; NodeMaven's plan sizes and Bright Data's code term from our October 12 record); our row renders from our price catalog. Gap is the entry rate divided by the advertised floor.
Across the 21 providers, the median entry rate was $4.00 per GB and the median advertised floor $0.90. For the 20 that print both numbers, the median gap was 2.7 times. In August the same record gave $4.00, $1.15 and 2.05 times. Only PacketStream advertised exactly what a new customer pays. Three floors come with less than the entry plan offers: Rayobyte's belongs to Scale Residential, with no targeting and a compliance review; Shifter's to its Non-Geo pool, with no targeting and a 25 TB monthly plan; SOAX's to Tier 3 countries on a $3,000 monthly plan. Set against its own pay-as-you-go ladder, which reaches $0.50 through sales, Rayobyte's gap is seven times.
Our row belongs in that table for the same reason everyone else's does. We advertise $0.44/GB, and that rate needs 2,000 GB+. The first gigabyte with no plan is $0.50/GB. The distance between the two is a few cents. We would rather show it than leave ourselves out of a table built to expose exactly this.
Prices move. Between the August reads and October 22, 2026, ten rows of the table moved. Five vendors changed what they show: Rayobyte added Scale Residential, which its changelog dates to September 24, and now leads with $0.0095/GB; SOAX's lowest printed rate rose from $0.25 to $0.35; Evomi's plan moved from $49.99 to $49, with pay as you go at $0.99/GB beside it; MarsProxies's homepage now says "Starts from $1.65/GB", the rate its ladder reaches at 10,000 GB; and ProxyScrape's page text no longer prints a "from" rate. Five rows we read more fully than in August, so they may not be new: IPFoxy's custom plans from $0.60/GB, Shifter's Lite plans from $10 for 5 GB and its Non-Geo pool down to $0.10/GB at 25 TB (our September 27 read), Oxylabs's printed Enterprise rate of $2.50, DataImpulse's $0.80 at 1 TB, and NodeMaven's smallest plan, $8.50 for 2 GB. What 10 GB costs at 58 sellers is in the cheapest residential proxies in 2026, and the eight vendors that were discounting without an end date are in the permanent proxy sale.
How much does mobile proxy traffic cost?
Mobile traffic is the dearest per gigabyte. Across 13 providers in August 2026 the median entry was $4.50 per GB. ProxyRack listed $1.10 and Rayobyte $1.25 on a $250-a-month plan with 200 GB. DataImpulse listed $2.00, Decodo $4.00, Oxylabs $7.50 on a $30 plan for 4 GB, and Infatica $8.00. The advertised floors had a median of $2.20 and a median gap of 2.21 times. SOAX's mobile floor of $0.35 sat 14 times below its $5.00 entry rate.
The premium has a technical cause. Mobile carriers put many subscribers behind one public IPv4 address through carrier-grade NAT. RFC 6598, published by the IETF in April 2012, reserves the 100.64.0.0/10 block for exactly that. Block one mobile exit and you block a crowd of real customers, so defended sites hesitate, and that hesitation is the product. Ours is $1.50/GB, on the same balance as our residential traffic. Most jobs never need mobile at all.
How much is a SOCKS5 proxy?
The same as the HTTP version. Providers price by IP type and volume, not by protocol. Oxylabs's SOCKS5 landing page listed residential at $4 per GB on promotion and $8 per GB at list when we read it on August 3, 2026. Those are the same rates as its residential product page. No provider in our record sells SOCKS5 as a separate tier. On our side SOCKS5 carries no surcharge: it comes with Residential Lite and Premium, ISP, IPv4 and mobile, while IPv6 speaks HTTP and HTTPS only.
What does one gigabyte actually buy?
Per-GB prices only mean something once you know your page weight. HTTP Archive's Web Almanac measured the median desktop page at 2,652 KB and the median mobile page at 2,311 KB in October 2024. The HTML document alone was about 18 KB. In our own test, a headless browser fetching a protected page moved 6.54 MB against 340 KB for a solver API. The method is in our headless browser bandwidth study.
| What one request moves | Source | Requests per gigabyte |
|---|---|---|
| 18 KB, the HTML document alone | HTTP Archive, October 2024 | about 55,000 |
| 2,311 KB, a full median mobile page | HTTP Archive, October 2024 | about 430 |
| 6.54 MB, a protected page in a headless browser | our measurement, August 2026 | about 150 |
The arithmetic uses 1,000,000 KB per gigabyte. Blocking images and scripts moves a job from the middle row to the top row, which is the cheapest saving in the whole stack. Measure twenty real requests before you buy, then multiply.
What is the cost per successful request?
A per-GB or per-IP price is the cost of an attempt. What you pay for is a result. The table below turns the page weights above into dollars per 1,000 requests at the August 2026 medians. Our own one-gigabyte rate goes through the same arithmetic.
| Rate | 18 KB requests | 2,311 KB requests | 6.54 MB requests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter traffic, median $0.60/GB | $0.01 | $1.39 | $3.92 |
| Residential, median entry $4.00/GB | $0.07 | $9.24 | $26.16 |
| Mobile, median entry $4.50/GB | $0.08 | $10.40 | $29.43 |
| HProxy residential, one gigabyte | $0.01 | $1.16 | $3.27 |
Source: rates from the price study; page weights from HTTP Archive (October 2024) and our own headless measurement; our row is computed from the live catalog.
Then divide by the success rate, because a blocked request still moves bytes. At $4.00 per GB and 2,311 KB per page, 1,000 successful requests cost $9.24 at a 100 percent success rate, $11.55 at 80 percent, and $18.48 at 50 percent. A cheaper IP that gets blocked half the time can cost more per result than a dearer one that succeeds. This is arithmetic, not a benchmark: we did not measure the success rate of any pool on any target. Test your own target and do the division yourself.
One billing detail matters here. Our scraper APIs bill per successful call, so blocked or errored calls cost nothing. Per-GB proxies, ours included, bill the bytes that move, and a block page is small but not free. Providers that claim otherwise for raw proxies are describing an API.
Are free proxies really free?
Free is the $0 row, and it is the most expensive row for anything that has to finish. Our checker has recorded 748,986 addresses that were ever published as public proxies. On September 2, 2026, 16,367 of them answered, which is 2.2 percent. The figures below are read live on the state of free proxies and move daily.
| What free costs | Measured value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | |
| Addresses that answer | 16,367 of 748,986, 2.2 percent | our checker, September 2, 2026 |
| Median uptime | 28 percent of checks | our checker, September 2, 2026 |
| Median lifespan | 10 days; a quarter gone inside 25 hours | our pool, September 28, 2026, counting addresses with fewer than 20 working proxies, without Amazon's networks or one June evening when our checker failed |
| Median response | 5.5 seconds; the slowest 5 percent above 71 seconds | our checker, September 2, 2026 |
| Reached any of 12 travel sites | 31 of 120 | our test, August 24, 2026 |
| Returned real booking content | 0 of 120 | our test, August 24, 2026 |
| Could carry HTTPS at all, AI sites test | 20 to 27 of 50 | our test, August 24, 2026 |
The largest live networks in the free pool are cloud hosts, led by Amazon with 6,187 live addresses on the day we read it. Cloudflare publishes a managed list of "known open HTTP and SOCKS proxy endpoints" for its firewall customers, updated April 16, 2026. A free address is therefore often blocked by list before it sends a byte. Free is fine for a geo check or a throwaway fetch. It is the wrong tool for a login, a session, or a job with a deadline. Test any address on our free proxy list with the proxy checker before you rely on it.
What is the cheapest proxy?
By sticker, the cheapest verified entry in each tier was the row below, read in August 2026 and, for residential, on October 22, 2026.
| Tier | Cheapest verified entry | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| Shared datacenter | 2.5 cents per IP a month | 1,000 IPs for $25 at ProxyScrape |
| Datacenter traffic | $0.30 per GB | 1 to 50 GB at Rayobyte |
| ISP | $0.30 per IP a month | 20 IPs for $6 at Webshare |
| Residential | $0.79 per GB | 10 GB for $7.92 a month at Geonode |
| Residential, no plan | $0.99 per GB | pay as you go from 15 GB at Evomi |
| Mobile | $1.10 per GB | pay as you go at ProxyRack |
Source: each provider's own pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026; residential rows October 22, 2026.
By result, the ranking changes with the target, and two losers are clear. For a defended site, the shared datacenter IP loses, because a blocked request costs the same as a successful one and returns nothing. For a buyer of 10 GB a month, the enterprise subscription loses, because a $500 plan with 125 GB included is $50 per GB used. The ranked residential version of this section lives in the cheapest residential proxies of 2026.
How not to overpay
Five rules cover almost every case.
- Match the meter to the job. Heavy traffic through few identities belongs on per-IP pricing, datacenter or ISP. Light traffic across many identities belongs on per-GB pricing. Getting this backwards is the largest single overpayment we see.
- Start with the cheapest tier your target tolerates. Try datacenter first. Move to residential only when block rates prove you must. Paying for home IPs on a site that never checks is waste.
- Compare entry rates with entry rates. A deep-volume floor against another vendor's first gigabyte is not a comparison. The table above lists both numbers for a reason.
- Count the strings. A monthly plan, a minimum spend, an expiry date on unused traffic, or a promo that reverts all change the real rate. Any of them can cost more than a higher flat price. Our checklist for vetting a proxy provider covers each one.
- Measure cost per result on your target. Run twenty requests, note the bytes and the success rate, and do the division above before you buy.
When you know the shape you need, our pricing page is the whole menu. Residential is $0.50/GB for a single gigabyte, ISP is $2.70/IP, datacenter starts at $0.10/IP, and mobile is $1.50/GB. All of it is pay as you go on a balance that never expires. The mechanics of that balance, what happens when it runs low and how top-ups work, are in our pricing questions.
How we measured
The price record holds 960 rows from 93 providers. This page uses the 862 rows captured on August 3 and 10, 2026, from 42 providers, of which 783 were verified against the vendor's own page, a share of 90.8 percent. Each row carries the plan name, the price, the unit, the condition that unlocks it, the source URL and the capture date.
For each provider, type and meter we took two rows. The entry rate is the verified row for the smallest purchase a new customer can make. The advertised floor is the verified row for the lowest "from" figure on the marketing page, with its condition. The gap is one divided by the other. We used US dollar rows only and dropped the two providers that had left the market. The supply-side payout rows and the day-priced rows stayed out of the monthly medians. Medians were computed from those rows and are reported only where seven or more providers publish the rate.
On September 2, 2026, we re-read twelve pricing pages and checked the quoted strings in each page's HTML. Seven pages confirmed every figure. Four render their plan grids by script, so only their headlines could be confirmed by text. One, Bright Data, had changed its headline. Honeygain's page timed out, so its payout rate rests on the August 3 read. We did not reach any checkout, request any custom quote, or measure any pool's success rate. Every competitor figure here should be re-read by December 1, 2026, and sooner if a vendor in the tables reprices.
On October 22, 2026, we re-read the residential pricing pages of the 21 providers in the advertised-floor table through our own server and rebuilt that table, its medians and its chart from them. NodeMaven's and Oxylabs' plan grids, Bright Data's code term and DataImpulse's 1 TB tier were cross-checked against our October 10 to 14 records. The datacenter, ISP, mobile and scraping API figures still rest on the August reads.
Sources
- Bright Data, residential proxy pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Oxylabs, residential proxy pool page and SOCKS5 proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Decodo, residential proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- IPRoyal, residential proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Webshare, pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Rayobyte, residential proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Infatica, residential proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- DataImpulse, residential proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Geonode, residential proxies page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- SOAX, pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- Evomi, pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- PacketStream, pricing page, read August 3 and 10, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- ProxyEmpire, ProxyScrape, Thordata, IPFoxy, NodeMaven, Massive, MarsProxies, Shifter, IPBurger, ProxyRack, YiluProxy, MobileHop and the scraping API vendors: their own pricing pages, read August 3 and 10, 2026, stored with URLs in our price record.
- The residential pricing pages of all 21 providers in the advertised-floor table, and the homepages of Infatica, IPFoxy, MarsProxies and SOAX, read October 22, 2026.
- Honeygain, sell internet data page, read August 3, 2026; Pawns.app, SDK page, read August 3, 2026, and September 2, 2026.
- IETF, RFC 6598, "IANA-Reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space", April 2012.
- Cloudflare Developer Docs, "WAF Managed IP Lists", updated April 16, 2026.
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2024, "Page Weight", Dave Smart and Jamie Indigo, data from October 2024.
- HProxy, the state of free proxies, live figures read September 2, 2026; free proxies against 12 travel sites and free proxies against 21 AI sites, both August 24, 2026; headless browser bandwidth cost, August 6, 2026.
- HProxy, pricing and FAQ, read September 2, 2026, the source of our own terms; our prices render from the live catalog.
