A buyer shopping for residential proxies lands on Infatica's site. The navigation dropdown reads "Residential IPs from $0.3 per GB". The pricing page shows a per-gigabyte ladder stepping down $0.60, $0.58, $0.53, $0.43, $0.37, and finally $0.30/GB at 2,000 GB for $599, with a Buy now button underneath it. Every rung on that ladder is real, published and purchasable. That buyer will transact at $4/GB, a gap of 13.3x between the number that brought them to the page and the number on the invoice, and at no point will anyone have lied to them.
The ladder ending at $0.30/GB sits under a heading that reads "Shared Datacenter IPs" (verified 10 August 2026).
We re-checked 20 proxy vendors against their own pricing pages on 10 August 2026, and this was the failure that kept repeating. Not invented prices. Real prices attached to a product the reader was not shopping for. A modern proxy vendor sells four to eight products, several of them metered in the same unit, stacked on a single page under headings that people skim past on their way to the numbers. The cheapest figure on such a page is the cheapest product on it, and the cheapest product is almost never the one you came for. This guide is about the reading mistake, not about what proxies cost, which we cover separately in how much do proxies cost.
The number is real and it belongs to something else
Infatica is the cleanest example because both ladders are printed on the same page in the same unit. The datacenter ladder runs from $0.60 down to $0.30/GB at 2,000 GB for $599. The residential ladder is a different animal entirely: $4/GB pay as you go, falling to $2.60/GB only at 1,000 GB a month, which is a $2,600 monthly plan, or $2.08/GB if you also flip the annual "-20% off" toggle (verified 10 August 2026).
So the cheapest residential rate that exists anywhere on Infatica's page is $2.08/GB, and it costs a year of commitment and a thousand gigabytes a month to reach. That is still nearly seven times the figure the navigation dropdown advertises. The dropdown is not quoting a deep-volume residential rate that a big enough buyer might one day reach. It is quoting the datacenter number beside the word residential.
Nothing on that page is false in isolation. The $0.30 is a genuine datacenter rate. The word residential describes a genuine product. They are simply not describing each other, and the page never has to say so, because a reader who takes the smallest number as "the price" does the work of connecting them without any help.
Eight products, five meters, one page
Rayobyte's page is the most demanding one in the set, and it is a good place to practise. Eight products, five of them priced per gigabyte, two priced per IP address, and one priced per scrape.
Rayobyte's pricing page, product by product
| Product | Meter | Entry rate | Deepest published rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web Unblocker | Per GB | $6.00 | $2.50 |
| ISP rotating | Per GB | $3.75 | $2.50 |
| Residential rotating | Per GB | $3.50 | $0.50 |
| Mobile rotating | Per GB | $1.25 | $0.50 |
| Datacenter rotating | Per GB | $0.30 | $0.23 |
| ISP static | Per IP | $5.00 | $4.60 |
| Datacenter static | Per IP | priced per address | not comparable |
| Scraping API | Per scrape | priced per scrape | not comparable |
Rayobyte pricing page (rayobyte.com/pricing), read 10 August 2026.
Two collisions in that table are worth sitting with, because they are what make the page genuinely hard rather than merely long.
$0.50 per GB is reachable three different ways. It is the residential Enterprise rate at 5,000 GB a month. It is also the mobile Enterprise rate. It is also available on a mobile trial. Three products, three sets of conditions, one number.
$3.50 per GB is two different things at once. It is Rayobyte's residential entry rate, the price a new buyer pays for the first 49 gigabytes. It is also the second rung of the ISP rotating ladder, which starts at $3.75 and runs down to $2.50.
Neither number can be identified from its value. A screenshot of "$0.50/GB" or "$3.50/GB" with the heading cropped off carries no information at all about what you would be buying. The heading above the number is not decoration on a pricing page, it is the part that says which product the number belongs to, and it is the first thing a skimming reader drops.
The residential ladder underneath, for reference, runs $3.50/GB for 1 to 49 GB, $2.00 for 50 to 249, $1.50 for 250 to 999, $0.70 for 1,000 to 4,999, and $0.50/GB above 5,000 (verified 10 August 2026). Five rungs, and the one that appears in most third-party comparisons is the last.
Two ladders wearing the same rungs
IPBurger shows the same problem in a quieter form. Its residential and mobile products are sold in identical 10, 30 and 60 gigabyte bundles, so the two pricing tables have the same shape, the same row labels and the same layout. They differ only in the numbers inside them.
IPBurger residential and mobile, the same three bundles
| Bundle | Residential plan | Residential $/GB | Mobile plan | Mobile $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 GB | $59 | $5.90 | $69 | $6.90 |
| 30 GB | $149 | $4.97 | $185 | $6.17 |
| 60 GB | $269 | $4.48 | $359 | $5.98 |
IPBurger pricing page (ipburger.com/pricing), read 10 August 2026.
A reader who has scrolled past one table and lands on the other has no visual cue that the product changed. The bundle sizes are the anchor the eye holds onto, and the bundle sizes are identical. Only the price column moved, from $5.90/GB at the entry rung to $6.90/GB, and a price moving is exactly what a reader expects to see when they scroll a pricing page. The signal that would tell them they are now looking at mobile is the heading, which is the one element the repeated layout trains them to stop reading.
Per IP and per GB are different axes
The unit is the second thing that gets dropped, and dropping it produces errors far larger than any price difference on this page.
Rayobyte sells ISP proxies on both meters simultaneously: $5/IP per month for a static ISP address, and $3.75/GB for a gigabyte through the rotating ISP pool (verified 10 August 2026). The word ISP is doing no work at all in telling those apart. A per-IP price rents you one address for a month and the traffic through it is not metered, so its cost per gigabyte falls the more you use it. A per-GB price buys one gigabyte once, and its cost is the same on your first gigabyte and your ten thousandth.
The practical test is a single question: what does one unit of this buy me, an address for a month or a gigabyte once? Until that is answered, two numbers on the same page are not comparable to each other, no matter how similar they look.
One brand, two grades, one name
The last variant is the one that survives even careful reading, because it defeats the shortcut of trusting a brand name.
Evomi sells Core residential at $0.49/GB, behind a $49.99 monthly plan with a 100 GB minimum, and Premium residential at $3.98/GB pay as you go. DataImpulse sells residential at $1/GB and a separate Premium Residential product at $5/GB (all verified 10 August 2026).
Both brands are widely quoted at their cheaper figure, including in comparison articles that then rank the whole vendor on it. "Evomi is $0.49" and "DataImpulse is $1" are true statements about half of what those companies sell, and the half they describe is not always the half that would work on your target. A grade name like Core or Premium sitting in front of the word residential is a product boundary, not an adjective.
The $0.30 tell
One pattern from the 10 August 2026 sweep is reliable enough to use as a first-pass filter. A per-gigabyte price near $0.30 is almost always datacenter. Residential does not go there.
Infatica's datacenter floor is $0.30/GB. Rayobyte's datacenter rotating entry rate is $0.30/GB. Neither is a residential rate, and neither vendor publishes a residential rate within an order of magnitude of it. The cheapest genuine residential figure anywhere in the twenty vendors we checked was Evomi's $0.49/GB, and that one carries a $49.99 monthly plan with a 100 GB minimum attached to it.
So when a page, a dropdown or a comparison article shows you roughly thirty cents a gigabyte next to the word residential, that pairing is the thing to verify first. It is not proof of anything on its own, but it has been wrong often enough that it earns a second look every time.
Five questions that make a pricing page readable
Run these in order against any vendor page, including ours.
- What does the heading directly above this number say? Not the page title, not the tab you clicked from, the nearest heading above the ladder itself. On Infatica that heading is the entire difference between $0.30 and $4 per gigabyte.
- What is the unit? Per IP per month, per gigabyte, per scrape, per port. Two numbers on different meters cannot be compared, and one vendor selling the same proxy type on two meters at once is normal rather than unusual.
- What volume unlocks it? The condition is nearly always printed on the same row as the rate. If it says 5,000 GB and you are buying 10, the rate is real and it is not yours.
- Is it a promotion or a toggle? An annual billing switch, a new-customer discount or a trial rung all produce genuine numbers that stop being available later. Infatica's $2.08 per GB exists only with the annual toggle flipped.
- Does this brand sell two grades under one name? Core against Premium, standard against Premium Residential. Check for a second ladder for the same proxy type before you take a single figure as the brand's price.
None of that requires trusting the vendor or distrusting them. It requires reading four words above a number instead of only the number, and it is the difference between the pricing surprise this guide opened with and none at all.
Our page has the same problem
The checklist catches us too, which is the point of publishing it rather than a comparison table.
Residential is $0.50/GB on the first gigabyte and steps down to $0.44/GB at 2,000 GB+, so we publish a volume floor exactly like everyone else on this page. ISP is $2.50/IP per month. Datacenter starts at $0.10/IP per month for IPv6. Mobile is sold per dedicated modem at $25/month. That is four products on one pricing page across two different meters, and a reader who takes the smallest number on it as the price of the thing they came for will be wrong here in the same way they would be wrong anywhere else.
The unit collision lands on our own page in its sharpest form. A dedicated IPv4 datacenter address from us is $0.30/IP per month. Rayobyte and Infatica both publish a datacenter rate of $0.30 per gigabyte (10 August 2026). Same three digits, same product category, and the two numbers have no relationship a comparison could survive. One rents an address for a month with unmetered traffic through it. The other buys a single gigabyte.
If you want the per-tier version of what these products actually cost across the market, how much do proxies cost is the companion piece, and how to vet a proxy provider covers the strings that sit behind a rate once you have identified which product it belongs to.
Sources
- Infatica residential proxies, for the residential ladder, the pay-as-you-go entry rate, the annual discount toggle and the navigation dropdown wording, read 10 August 2026.
- Rayobyte pricing and Rayobyte residential proxies, for the eight-product page, the five per-gigabyte ladders, the ISP static per-IP ladder and the scraping API, read 10 August 2026.
- IPBurger pricing, for the residential and mobile bundle ladders, read 10 August 2026.
- Evomi pricing, for Core and Premium residential rates and the 100 GB plan minimum, read 10 August 2026.
- DataImpulse residential proxies, for the residential and Premium Residential rates, read 10 August 2026.