Residential proxies cost anywhere from about $0.44 per gigabyte to several dollars per gigabyte in 2026, and that spread is not random. It tracks three things: how the provider sources its IPs, how the plan is structured, and how much of the price is the logo on the invoice. This page prices residential specifically; every proxy type side by side lives in how much proxies cost, and the bargain-hunting angle has its own page in cheapest residential proxies. We sell residential proxies ourselves and publish every price, so this guide gives you the actual market numbers, what drives them, and the fine print that decides what you really pay per gigabyte you use.
The pricing model: why you pay per gigabyte
A residential proxy is bandwidth through a pool of household IP addresses. Your requests exit through different real-home connections drawn from that pool, which is the whole reason websites treat the traffic as normal visitors. Because the IPs rotate underneath you, there is no single address to rent by the month. What the provider can meter is the data you move, so the unit of pricing is the gigabyte.
That one fact explains most of what follows. It is why headline prices are per GB, why your real cost depends on what you fetch, and why the cheapest plan on paper can end up expensive if the gigabytes vanish before you use them.
What a gigabyte actually buys you
Plain HTML pages are small, usually tens to a few hundred kilobytes, so a gigabyte spent on page fetches alone covers thousands of loads. Turn on images, run a full headless browser that pulls every script and stylesheet, or touch video, and the same gigabyte collapses to a few hundred loads. Two practical consequences:
- Block what you do not need. Disabling images and media in a scraper routinely cuts data use by well over half. It is the cheapest optimization in the whole stack.
- Estimate before you buy. Run twenty representative requests through any proxy, read the data used, and multiply. Twenty minutes of measuring beats a month of guessing.
What the market charges in 2026
These are advertised entry prices, taken from the providers' own public pricing pages as of September 2026. Advertised means the best-case number on the page: minimum spends, bundle sizes and renewals sit behind some of them.
| Provider | Advertised entry price | Model |
|---|---|---|
| HProxy | $0.44/GB | Pay as you go, balance never expires |
| Evomi | $0.49/GB | Pay as you go |
| PlainProxies | €0.55/GB | Tiered per GB |
| Proxy-Seller | $1.30/GB | Individual plans |
| Byteful | $1.75/GB | Per GB |
| Decodo | $2.00/GB | Subscription tiers |
Above this tier sit the enterprise names, whose per-GB rates on small plans run several times higher. What you get for that is scale, account management, and compliance paperwork, which matters to a Fortune 500 procurement department and rarely matters to an individual operator watching cost per successful request.
The honest read of the table: the budget tier has converged hard. Once several providers sell working residential bandwidth for under a dollar per gigabyte, paying multiples of that only makes sense if you have measured something specific that the cheaper pool cannot do on your target.
Why prices differ this much
Pool sourcing and quality
Residential IPs come from somewhere: bandwidth-sharing apps, SDK partnerships, reward programs. Consent-based sourcing costs the provider real money per IP, and that cost reaches the price. Pools built loosely are cheaper and it shows in success rates, because dirty or overused exits get challenged more. This is why the true comparison metric is never price per GB alone but price per successful request on your actual target.
Plan structure: subscription against pay as you go
Subscriptions price the gigabyte lower and bill you whether you used the volume or not. Pay as you go prices the gigabyte flat and only charges for what you move. Which one wins is pure arithmetic on your usage pattern: steady heavy volume favors a subscription, spiky or small usage favors pay as you go. We wrote the full worked comparison in pay as you go residential proxies.
Brand, support, and paperwork
Some of the spread is simply positioning. The product underneath, bandwidth through household IPs, is more similar between tiers than the pricing suggests, which the budget-tier convergence in the table makes plain.
The traps that change the real price
The advertised per-GB number is the start of the calculation, not the end of it. Four patterns quietly raise what you actually pay:
Expiring gigabytes
Many providers lapse prepaid traffic after 30 to 90 days, or on subscription renewal. Every gigabyte that expires unused raises the effective price of the ones you did use. If you buy 10 GB and use 5 before expiry, your real price doubled. Read the expiry line before the price line. Our wallet balance never expires, and we consider that a pricing feature, not a footnote.
Minimum spends and top-up floors
A low per-GB price behind a $50 minimum is a $50 product. Check the smallest amount a provider will actually take. Payment processors also impose small floors per method, a few dollars for cards or crypto, which is normal; a high provider-side minimum is the thing to notice.
Charging for failed requests
Policies differ on whether blocked or failed requests count against your traffic. On a hard target where half your requests get challenged, that policy is worth more than a small per-GB difference.
The rotate-versus-sticky detail
Sticky sessions (holding one exit IP for minutes) and per-request rotation usually cost the same per GB, but a scraper misconfigured to open a fresh session per request burns pool trust and data alike. Configuration, not the price sheet, decides this cost.
How to pay less without getting burned
- Measure your job first. Twenty test requests tell you your data per request. Multiply by your monthly request count and you know your real GB need before anyone's pricing page can anchor you.
- Start pay as you go. Commit to a subscription only after a paid month proves your volume is steady enough to justify it.
- Test the pool on your target before scaling. A proxy checker verifies the exit is what it claims; a handful of real requests against your actual target verifies the pool works where it counts.
- Cut data at the client. Block images and media, cache what repeats, and fetch APIs instead of rendered pages where they exist.
- Check the expiry policy. The cheapest gigabyte is the one that does not evaporate.
Where we sit, stated plainly
Our residential proxies start at $0.44 per GB, pay as you go, with no KYC. You top up a wallet from $2 by card, PayPal, Alipay or crypto, the balance never expires, and subscriptions exist only as an optional discount on top. We verify the pool continuously, 129,131,311 checks and counting across our free infrastructure alone, because measurement is the house habit. If your job needs a different shape of network, a static ISP proxy or a mobile pool, the same wallet covers those too. The full price sheet is on the pricing page, with nothing behind a sales call.
A note on the numbers
Every competitor price in the table was read from that provider's own public pricing page in September 2026, quoted as advertised. We deliberately do not link out to them; the names are easy to find, and prices drift, so treat the table as a snapshot and re-check any number before you budget around it. Our own prices come from our pricing page through the same tokens the site renders, so they stay current automatically.