An ISP proxy is one fixed address on a consumer internet provider's network. It runs from a server in a data center, and you rent it by the month. A residential proxy sends your traffic out through real home devices, drawn from a pool, and bills you by the gigabyte. The first gives one account a steady home address. The second gives software many addresses that change.
The price gap is large for a single account. In our price records, one ISP IP for a month cost a median $2.60 across 24 sellers. Ten GB of residential traffic cost about $29 at the median of 57 sellers.
Pick an ISP proxy when one account needs the same address every day. Pick residential proxies when a job needs many addresses, rotation or a chosen city.
What is an ISP proxy?
Bright Data's documentation describes the product clearly. Its ISP proxies are "residential IPs bought or leased from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for commercial use". The addresses belong to a consumer provider's range. The machine that answers sits in a data center.
That mix is the whole point. IP databases label an address by the owner of its network, so an ISP range carries the provider's label wherever the server sits. Bright Data's documentation says target sites "classify ISP IPs similar to residential IPs, even though in reality they are actually hosted on servers".
Sellers also call this product a static residential proxy. Ours is one address for the rental period, "registered as residential, hosted in a datacenter", with unlimited bandwidth. Our guide to ISP proxies covers it in depth.
What is a residential proxy?
A residential proxy sends each request out through a device in someone's home. Spur, a company that sells detection data to websites, says residential proxies run "through consumer devices and physical locations like homes and offices".
You reach the pool through one gateway. The gateway can hand each request a new address or hold one for a session. It can also pick a country, a state or a city. Sellers charge for the traffic that passes, by the gigabyte.
What is the actual difference?
| ISP proxy | Residential proxy | |
|---|---|---|
| Exit runs on | a data center server | a device in a home |
| Address | fixed for the rental | from a pool, can change |
| Billed | per IP and month | per GB |
| Traffic | often unlimited | every GB counts |
| Targeting | the seller's ISP ranges | country, state, city |
The exit is the core difference. An ISP proxy answers from a server, so its address stays put. A residential exit is a household's connection, so the pool is large and each address belongs to a real home.
Billing follows from that. Of the 56 ISP sellers in our price records, 55 price per IP, and 19 state unlimited traffic. Eleven of them also sell ISP traffic per GB. Residential sellers charge for every gigabyte that passes.
Which one costs less?
For one account, the ISP proxy wins on price. Its median monthly price, $2.60, sits below the median price of a single GB of residential traffic on a starter plan, $3.50. An account that moves more than about three quarters of a GB a month is cheaper on an ISP IP.
The break-even moves with your own prices. Divide the monthly price of one IP by the price of one GB. The result is the monthly traffic above which the ISP IP costs less. With our prices, that is $2.70/IP a month against $0.50/GB for one GB.
Residential proxies win as soon as a job needs many addresses. Fifty accounts on ISP proxies need fifty IPs, about $130 a month at the median. A residential plan serves all fifty from one pool and bills only the traffic.
What is a rotating ISP proxy?
Some sellers rotate ISP addresses too. Eleven of the 56 ISP sellers in our records bill ISP traffic per GB, the way residential pools are billed. Our own rotating ISP proxies work like this: provider-registered addresses that change per request, billed per gigabyte, with sticky sessions available.
It suits a job that wants many ISP-labeled addresses and no fixed one. You keep no address of your own, so it does not replace a static ISP proxy for an account.
Which one is faster and more stable?
Sellers rate ISP proxies higher on both. Bright Data credits its ISP network with "the high speeds and reliability that are characteristic of high-speed server IPs". A residential exit runs on a household's own connection, which the household uses at the same time. We did not measure either, because HProxy does not test networks.
Stability has a second meaning: whether the address stays. An ISP address stays yours for the whole rental. A residential address can change during a task unless you hold a sticky session.
Which one do websites trust more?
Both carry a consumer provider's label in IP databases, so a lookup of the owner alone treats them alike. Detection companies dig further. Spur sells data "to detect VPNs, residential proxies, and bots". It files ISP proxies as a class of their own: addresses that "appear residential but are hosted in data center environments".
The browser matters as much as the address. Cloudflare looks for "unique fingerprints from the browsing agent" and acts on them "regardless of the IP source". A script that behaves like a script gets caught on either type.
Which one should you use?
- An ISP proxy, when one account needs one address. Social media accounts, seller accounts, ad accounts and logins that a site ties to an address fit here, as does a server that accepts only allowlisted IPs. Ours costs $2.70/IP a month on static ISP proxies.
- Residential proxies, when software needs many addresses. Price checks, search result checks and ad checks across cities spread their requests over a pool. Ours start at $0.50/GB for one GB on residential proxies, with plans on the residential pricing page.
- For large data collection, the ISP proxy is the wrong tool. One fixed address carries every request, and a handful of addresses cannot spread load the way a pool can.
For phones, our comparison of ISP and mobile proxies covers the third option.
What this page could not check
- We did not test speed, success rates or blocks. Speed statements on this page are the sellers' own.
- The ISP median rests on 24 sellers with a per-IP monthly price. Traffic rules differ plan by plan, and we counted what sellers state.
- The 10 GB figure comes from our study of 57 sellers' regular prices, on our page about the cheapest residential proxies.
- Prices change monthly. We will check every number here again by January 22, 2027.
Sources
- Bright Data, documentation, introduction to ISP proxies, read October 22, 2026.
- Spur, "What is the difference between a VPN, residential proxy, and ISP proxy?", updated September 16, 2026, and Spur Docs home page, read October 22, 2026.
- IP2Location, DB23 database documentation, usage type field, read October 22, 2026.
- Cloudflare, "Using machine learning to detect bot attacks that leverage residential proxies", June 24, 2024.
- HProxy, static ISP proxies and residential proxies product pages, read October 22, 2026.
- HProxy price records: per-IP prices from 24 sellers of ISP proxies and per-GB prices from 65 sellers of residential proxies, captured July 20 to October 14, 2026; the billing rules of 56 ISP sellers; the 10 GB study of 57 sellers, October 22, 2026.
