Oxylabs is one of the two names that come up in every serious conversation about residential proxies, and the reputation is earned. The company has been selling proxies since 2015, it grew up inside the Lithuanian Tesonet ecosystem alongside Nord Security, and in July 2026 Warburg Pincus put $130 million into it at a $3.6 billion valuation, the first outside investment it had ever taken. That announcement also put a number on the customer base for the first time, over 350,000 accounts.
We compete with Oxylabs, so treat this review accordingly. What we can offer that a neutral roundup cannot is a price check done against Oxylabs' own pages rather than against an affiliate table, on 2026-08-03, across every product line it publishes. That check turned up something worth reading even if you end up buying from them: Oxylabs quotes three different starting prices for the same residential pool, on three of its own pages, and none of the three is what a new account actually pays.
What Oxylabs actually sells
Calling Oxylabs a proxy provider undersells it by 2026. The proxies are still there, in four flavours (residential, ISP, shared and dedicated datacenter, and mobile), but they now sit underneath a data-collection platform that is the real product for most of its larger customers.
That platform is where the money goes. There is a Web Scraper API that handles the request, the retries and the parsing for you, and bills per thousand successful results rather than per gigabyte. There is Web Unblocker, which takes on the anti-bot fight as a managed service. There are prebuilt datasets, so a buyer who wants finished data never has to write a scraper at all. The Warburg Pincus announcement framed the whole company as data infrastructure for AI and agentic applications, which tells you where the roadmap is heading and why per-gigabyte proxy pricing is becoming a side conversation for them.
Worth knowing before you shop: SOCKS5 is not a separate Oxylabs product with its own price, whatever the pricing hub implies. It is a protocol offered on the residential and dedicated datacenter pools, so the price you pay for it is the residential or datacenter price.
Oxylabs pricing, and the three starting prices
The residential product page leads with a rate. The pricing hub leads with a different one. The cheapest tier in the actual table is lower than both. And a new account pays none of them.
| Oxylabs residential | Rate | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| The advertised rate | $4/GB | $500/month (Advanced plan, 125 GB included) |
| What a new buyer pays | $6/GB | $30/month Starter plan (5 GB) - no zero-commitment PAYG is published on the residential pricing page |
| HProxy, for scale | $0.50/GB | Nothing. Top up a balance, and it never expires |
So the headline rate sits behind a monthly commitment in the hundreds, and the entry rate a fresh account starts on is roughly 1.5x that headline. Neither figure is the cheapest number Oxylabs publishes, because the bottom of the ladder needs a four-figure monthly commitment to reach. We lay the full tier ladder out row by row in our HProxy vs Oxylabs comparison if you want to see where each rate sits.
None of that is dishonest, exactly. Every number is printed on a real page and the commitment is stated next to it. But a buyer reading "starting from" reasonably expects that to be the starting price, and at Oxylabs it is the finishing price of a customer spending several hundred dollars a month.
The same pattern repeats across the other lines, and mobile is the sharpest example of it:
| Oxylabs product | Advertised rate | New-buyer rate | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | $4/GB | $6/GB | 1.5x |
| Mobile | $3.50/GB | $7.50/GB | 2.1x |
| ISP, per IP | $1.20/IP | $1.60/IP | 1.3x |
Datacenter is the one genuinely cheap corner of the catalogue, with a shared pay-per-GB pool from $0.59/GB on a modest monthly minimum. The Web Scraper API advertises a floor of $0.25 per 1k requests, but that rate lives on a negotiated Custom contract, so no self-serve buyer can reach it at all.
For a sense of what the gap means on a real month, 50 GB of residential traffic costs $25 with us. At the Oxylabs entry rate that same 50 GB is roughly twelve times more per gigabyte. The multiple is real, and it is also not the whole story, which is what the next section is for.
What Oxylabs is genuinely good at
Network scale that we do not match. Oxylabs advertises 175M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries with country, state and city targeting. If your job needs heavy concurrency in places most providers cannot reach, that scale does real work, and it is bigger than ours.
Success-based billing on the Scraper API. Failed requests in the 5xx and 6xx range are not charged. That sounds like a footnote until you have run a scraper against a target that started returning errors halfway through a job, and watched a competitor's meter keep spinning. Paying only for results you can use is the correct way to bill a scraping API and it is not the industry norm.
A managed answer to anti-bot systems. Web Unblocker exists so you do not have to maintain fingerprinting, header rotation and retry logic yourself. We wrote up the manual version of that fight, and it is genuinely a lot of work. Some teams should buy their way out of it, and Oxylabs sells that.
Paperwork, which is a feature for some buyers. KYC checks and a published 99.95% success rate are friction if you are one developer with a card. If you are procurement at a company that needs proxies signed off internally, they are exactly what makes the purchase possible. An account manager and a number in a contract have real value to the right buyer.
Institutional stability. A $3.6 billion valuation and a large PE backer matter if you are signing a multi-year data pipeline onto a vendor. Proxy companies vanish. We have written a lot of obituaries for ones that did. Oxylabs is not going anywhere.
Where it falls short
Pricing legibility is the weak point, and it is not a small one. Three of Oxylabs' own pages quote three different starting figures for the same residential pool. Worse, the SOCKS5 landing page prices residential with a struck-through list price cut down to a promo rate, a two-number shape that appears nowhere on the residential pricing table, which itself shows no promo at all. Both are live vendor pages on the same domain on the same day. They cannot both describe the current offer, and a buyer has no way to tell which one applies without signing up.
The absence of true pay as you go is the structural issue. Every published residential tier is a monthly plan. If your scraping is bursty, heavy for a week and then quiet for three, you are buying gigabytes you will not pull, and the effective cost per successful request climbs every month you underuse the plan.
Then there is the refund window, which is tight. Self-service products only, requests inside three calendar days, usage under 20 percent, and up to 15 business days to process. If you buy a plan intending to evaluate it properly over a fortnight, you have already lost the ability to change your mind. Test hard in the first 72 hours or not at all.
Trials are gated too. The residential trial is generally granted once and usually runs through a contact form, mobile trials go through sales, and some advanced targeting filters require KYC before they open. For a team that wants to benchmark four providers on a Tuesday afternoon, that is a real obstacle, and it is the opposite of how we think testing should work.
Who Oxylabs is for
Buy Oxylabs if you are moving serious volume and the platform is the point. Concretely: you need hundreds of gigabytes a month or more, so the commitment tiers actually work in your favour rather than against you. You want the Scraper API or Web Unblocker to absorb the anti-bot problem instead of building it in-house. You need prebuilt datasets. Or you work somewhere that will not approve a vendor without KYC, an account manager and a contract.
For that buyer the price buys something real, and a cheaper competitor should not talk you out of tooling you genuinely need.
Who should look elsewhere
Skip it if you are buying proxies rather than a platform. A solo developer, a small team, an agency running price monitoring or ad verification, anyone whose usage swings month to month, anyone who wants to test before committing a cent: none of that is served well by a monthly-plan model with a three-day refund window and a trial you have to request.
That describes most of the people who search for Oxylabs, and it is why the most common expensive mistake we see is a small team buying the enterprise platform, pointing a plain scraper at it, and paying the enterprise rate for plain proxies.
The verdict
Rated as an enterprise data platform, Oxylabs is one of the best in the market. The network is huge, the scraping tooling is real, the billing on the API is fairer than most, and the company just took institutional money at a valuation that says it will still be here in five years.
Rated on price transparency, it is frustrating. The advertised rate is not the entry rate, the entry rate is not the cheapest rate, and one of its own product pages contradicts its own pricing table.
If you need clean residential IPs and nothing else, that gap is worth acting on. Ours are $0.50/GB flat with no plan, no minimum and no expiry on your balance, dropping to $0.44/GB at volume. You can test the network for free on the proxy checker and the free proxy list before you spend anything, then read the full head-to-head if you want the tier-by-tier version of the pricing section above.