Every residential proxy provider publishes a price. Almost none of them publish the price you will pay.
On 3 August 2026 we read the pricing page of every residential proxy provider we track, and recorded two numbers for each: the "from" rate on the marketing page, and the rate a brand new customer pays for one gigabyte with no plan, no commitment and no promo code. Sixteen providers published both. This is what we found.
The short version
Fourteen of the sixteen providers advertise a price lower than the one they charge a new customer. The median provider's headline is three times lower than its real entry rate. The widest gap we measured is SOAX, whose $0.35/GB headline sits 14 times below the $5.00/GB a new Tier-1 buyer pays, on a pricing page that reads "No sales theatre. No pricing games."
The full table
Every figure below was read off the provider's own page on 3 August 2026. "Advertised" is the lowest per-gigabyte number on their marketing page. "New customer" is what one gigabyte costs with nothing signed.
Residential proxies: advertised rate vs what a new customer pays
| Provider | Advertised | New customer | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOAX | $0.35/GB | $5/GB | 14.3x |
| Infatica | $0.30/GB | $4/GB | 13.3x |
| Rayobyte | $0.50/GB | $3.50/GB | 7x |
| ProxyEmpire | $0.75/GB | $3.50/GB | 4.7x |
| IPRoyal | $1.75/GB | $7.35/GB | 4.2x |
| Bright Data | $2.50/GB | $8/GB | 3.2x |
| ProxyScrape | $1.15/GB | $3.55/GB | 3.1x |
| Thordata | $0.65/GB | $2/GB | 3.1x |
| Geonode | $0.27/GB | $0.79/GB | 2.9x |
| Webshare | $1.40/GB | $3.50/GB | 2.5x |
| Decodo | $2/GB | $4/GB | 2x |
| NodeMaven | $2.20/GB | $4.50/GB | 2x |
| Massive | $4.90/GB | $8/GB | 1.6x |
| Oxylabs | $4/GB | $6/GB | 1.5x |
| DataImpulse | $1/GB | $1/GB | 1x |
| PacketStream | $1/GB | $1/GB | 1x |
| HProxy | $0.44/GB | $0.50/GB | 1.1x |
Each provider's own pricing page, read 3 August 2026. Stored with the source URL for every figure.
What the gap is made of
The gap is never a lie exactly. Every one of those advertised numbers is real, and every one is reachable by somebody. What the headline leaves out is the condition attached to it, and the conditions fall into four shapes.
A volume floor. The rate exists at the bottom of a ladder most buyers never climb. Rayobyte's $0.50/GB is real, and it arrives at 5,000 GB a month. A new buyer pays $3.50/GB, which is 7x the headline.
A monthly commitment. The rate is a subscription tier, not a price. Bright Data's $2.50/GB needs $1,999 every month whether you use it or not.
A promotional rate that reverts. The number on the page today is not the number in month four. ProxyEmpire's entry rate of $3.50/GB is itself a 50% promo against a $7.00 list price, so its headline-to-list gap is wider than the table shows.
A geography gate. This one is rarer and the most effective, because it is invisible. SOAX advertises $0.35/GB, and reaching it requires the $3,000 monthly plan and traffic restricted to Tier-3 countries. A buyer who needs US or UK addresses cannot reach that price at any level of spend. The best a Tier-1 buyer ever gets is $0.85/GB, and a new one pays $5/GB.
The two providers who advertise their real price
Two of the sixteen have no gap at all. DataImpulse advertises $1/GB and charges $1/GB. PacketStream advertises $1/GB and charges $1/GB. In both cases the marketing number and the invoice number are the same number, which is worth saying plainly because it is rare.
Neither is the cheapest option in the table, and that is the point. They are the two you can plan a budget against without reading a tier table first, and there is real value in that even at a higher rate. If you have ever been surprised by a proxy invoice, a flat advertised rate is worth more than a low unreachable one.
Where we sit, including the part that does not flatter us
We advertise $0.44/GB, and that is a volume floor too: it needs 2,000 GB+. What you pay on your first gigabyte with no plan is $0.50/GB. So we have a gap as well, and we put ourselves in the table rather than leaving ourselves out of a study designed to expose exactly this.
Two things are true about it. Ours is the smallest gap in the table, a few cents between the headline and the invoice against a median of three times. And our no-commitment entry rate of $0.50/GB was the lowest entry rate of any provider we measured, below the cheapest competitor entry of $0.79/GB. Fifteen of the sixteen cannot match $0.50/GB even with their best advertised volume floor, which is the comparison we think actually matters: their deepest discount against our starting price.
We would rather publish that with our own gap visible than claim a perfection nobody can verify.
How to read any proxy pricing page after this
Four questions turn a headline into a real number, and they take about a minute.
- 1
Find the condition attached to the headline
It is almost always in small text, a tier table, or a tooltip. Volume floor, monthly commitment, promo code, or geography. If you cannot find the condition, that is itself informative.
- 2
Find the price of one gigabyte
Not the plan, not the bundle. What does a single gigabyte cost with nothing signed? Some providers do not publish this anywhere, which tells you something.
- 3
Check whether the rate reverts
A struck-through price beside the headline means you are looking at a promo. Ask what happens in month four, because that is the price you will actually live with.
- 4
Price your real volume, not their example volume
Take the gigabytes you actually expect to pull and cost them at every provider's rate for that band. The winner at 10 GB is frequently not the winner at 1,000 GB.
Method, and what we could not verify
Every number here was read off the provider's own pricing page on 3 August 2026 and stored alongside the exact URL it came from. Where a provider's page disagreed with itself we recorded both and used the product page over the homepage. Third-party review sites were used only to know where to look, never as a source for a price.
Three honest limits on this study:
- Two providers publish no pay-as-you-go rate at all. Evomi and Proxy Cheap both market a low per-gigabyte headline without publishing what a no-commitment gigabyte costs. Confirming those would mean reaching a checkout, so they are not in this table rather than being estimated into it.
- This is a snapshot, not a feed. Proxy vendors reprice, and a figure read in August is a figure read in August. Every number here is stamped with the date it was captured, and the article renders them from that record rather than from words typed into the page, so when the research is refreshed the table moves with it.
- One provider left the market during the research. NetNut's domain now serves an FBI seizure notice, so it has no current price to publish and is excluded. We wrote about that separately in the NetNut botnet takedown.
If you want the same breakdown by proxy type rather than by provider, how much do proxies cost covers datacenter, ISP, residential and mobile side by side. If you only care about the cheapest residential option, the cheapest residential proxies of 2026 is the ranked version. And if you want to check a provider before you buy, our free proxy checker will tell you what a given proxy actually is.