Every residential proxy is somebody's home internet connection. That is the whole product: the reason a residential IP works is that it belongs to a real household in a real place, and the reason it costs more than a datacenter IP is that households are harder to acquire than servers.
Which raises a question the industry rarely puts a number on. If you are paying for a gigabyte of somebody's home bandwidth, how much of that reaches the person whose connection carried it?
On 3 August 2026 we read the published payout rates of the bandwidth-sharing apps that buy consumer connections and sell them into this market.
The short version
Honeygain publishes $0.10 per GB. Pawns.app publishes $0.20 per GB. Residential providers sell that same gigabyte for between $0.50 and $8.00. At the top of that range the buyer pays roughly eighty times what the household received.
What the supply side actually pays
These companies are not proxy sellers. They are buyers. They distribute an app, pay people for idle bandwidth, and sell the aggregate into the proxy market.
Published payouts to the person sharing their connection
| App | Pays per GB | Minimum payout | Publishes the rate? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honeygain | $0.10 | $20 | Yes, on its own support pages |
| Pawns.app | $0.20 | $5 | Yes, though on a page aimed at SDK publishers |
| Repocket | not published | disputed | No rate anywhere on its site |
| Peer2Profit | n/a | n/a | Domain no longer resolves |
Vendor pages read 3 August 2026. Repocket's rate is absent from its own site; Peer2Profit's domain was unreachable.
Two of those rows deserve their own sentence.
Repocket publishes no rate at all. Every competitor in this table tells a prospective supplier what a gigabyte earns. Repocket's public site does not, and third-party figures for it disagree with each other. Asking someone to install software on their home network without publishing what it pays is a strange way to run a marketplace.
Peer2Profit has gone. Its .com no longer resolves and returned no response at all when we checked. Its .io domain now redirects to an unrelated gambling site, which is what usually happens to an expired domain with residual traffic. Anyone still running that app is running software whose vendor has left.
The spread
Put the two ends of the chain on one axis. The payout figures come from the apps' own pages, and the selling prices from our study of sixteen residential providers, all read the same day.
At the far end of that chart, a gigabyte bought for ten cents is sold for eight dollars. The household running the app earns about 1% of what the buyer pays for the traffic it carried.
We should say plainly where we sit on it. Our $0.50/GB is a much smaller multiple of those payout rates than the enterprise end, and it is still a multiple. Anyone selling residential bandwidth is buying it for less than they sell it for, ourselves included, and a provider claiming otherwise is not being straight with you.
What the gap pays for is real work, and it is worth naming rather than waving away: acquiring supply, verifying that addresses are alive and clean, routing traffic, replacing IPs as they burn, absorbing the ones that get blocked, and supporting people whose jobs depend on it. None of that is free. The question is not whether a margin exists. It is how large it is, and what the person at the other end knew.
The part that matters more than the money
The payout is only half the story, and the smaller half. The other half is whether the person supplying the bandwidth agreed to it.
That runs along a spectrum, and the money looks similar at every point on it:
- 1
Paid, opted in, disclosed
Someone installs Honeygain or Pawns.app deliberately, knows their connection is being resold, and is paid for it. An ordinary commercial arrangement, and the honest end of this market.
- 2
Bundled into other software
A proxy SDK ships inside a free app or a browser extension, disclosed somewhere in a terms document nobody reads. Technically consented to, practically not. This is the model behind several networks we have written about.
- 3
Installed without consent
Malware turns a device into an exit node and the owner never knows. NetNut's network was tied to the Popa botnet across roughly two million compromised devices, and its domains were seized by the FBI on 2 July 2026.
- 4
Industrialised, at scale
911 S5 sold access to around nineteen million hijacked residential IPs, distributed through fake free VPN apps, until it was taken down. The buyers were ordinary businesses who thought they were buying residential proxies.
From the buyer's side, all four look identical. The IP works, the price is per gigabyte, the dashboard is the same. That is precisely why the question has to be asked before purchase rather than after, because nothing in the product surface reveals which one you are using.
What to actually ask a provider
The word "ethically sourced" appears on nearly every residential proxy site, including some belonging to networks later taken down for botnet sourcing. It has no agreed definition and no verification behind it.
A better test is mechanical. Ask a provider how an IP joins its pool, and see whether you get a mechanism or an adjective.
- A mechanism sounds like: users install our app, are paid this rate, and can uninstall it. IPRoyal owns Pawns.app and says so, which makes its chain unusually checkable, and it deserves credit for that whatever you think of its prices.
- An adjective sounds like: our pool is ethically sourced from consenting users. That is a claim about itself, with nothing attached you can verify.
Neither answer proves anything on its own. The difference is that the first one can be checked and the second one cannot.
Method, and what we could not establish
Payout figures were read from each app's own pages on 3 August 2026. Honeygain's $0.10 and Pawns.app's $0.20 are on vendor-owned pages, though Pawns' is addressed to SDK publishers rather than to consumer users, and we could not find a consumer-facing page stating the same rate. Repocket's rate appears nowhere on its site, so we have published none for it rather than repeat a third-party figure. Peer2Profit could not be reached at all.
Selling prices come from our residential price study, where every figure was read off the provider's own pricing page the same day.
One limit worth stating clearly: we have not traced any specific provider's pool back to any specific supply app, and we are not implying a link that we cannot evidence. What this study establishes is the shape of the market, the published price of consumer bandwidth at one end and the published price of a residential gigabyte at the other. Who buys from whom is a separate question, and one most of this industry declines to answer.
If you want the other half of this, does your proxy provider resell someone else's network traces the storefronts sharing one pool, and the NetNut botnet takedown is what happens when nobody asks the sourcing question hard enough.