A residential VPN and a residential proxy both send your traffic out through an address that an internet provider gave to a home. A residential VPN carries all traffic on your device through one encrypted tunnel to that address. A residential proxy carries only the programs you point at it, usually through a pool of many home IPs. It is billed by the gigabyte.
Few VPNs sell residential addresses at all. Windscribe charges $96 a year for one, and TorGuard listed one for $19.99 a month. The proxy market sells one fixed IP on a home provider's network as a static residential proxy. Across the 24 sellers in our price records, it cost a median $2.60 a month.
Pick a residential VPN when one person wants one device to look like a home connection. Pick residential proxies when software needs many addresses, rotation or a chosen city. The sections below show where each fact comes from.
What is a residential VPN?
The US standards body NIST gives a short definition. A VPN is "a virtual network built on top of existing networks" (NIST). It secures the traffic sent between those networks. A residential VPN is a VPN whose exit address belongs to a home internet connection. Websites see that home address and the consumer provider behind it.
Two kinds are on sale:
- A fixed residential address, rented to you. Windscribe sells a residential static IP as an add-on to its plans. TorGuard sells a residential IP VPN, with addresses listed in Los Angeles, Delaware, Seattle and Ashburn, Virginia.
- A peer-to-peer network. Mysterium calls its service "a true hybrid of a residential and a regular VPN". Its users "pay peers within the distributed network to connect to their residential IP addresses", across what it says are over 19,000 nodes.
Most large VPNs sell no residential IP. Private Internet Access writes that "PIA doesn't offer residential IP addresses". Surfshark writes that it "doesn't use residential IP addresses". NordVPN sells a dedicated IP that "belongs to you and you alone", and its help page does not call that address residential.
What is a residential proxy?
A proxy is a relay that a program sends its requests through. A residential proxy is one whose exit is a home connection. You set your browser, script or app to use the provider's gateway. The gateway sends each request out through a device in its pool.
Three things set it apart from a VPN. It carries only the traffic of the programs you configure. It can give each request a new address, or hold one address for a whole session. It also lets your code pick a country or a city for each connection.
The proxy market sells a single fixed address too. Spur sells data that companies use to detect VPNs and residential proxies. Spur's documentation calls these ISP proxies addresses that "appear residential but are hosted in data center environments". Sellers usually call them static residential proxies, and they price them per address and month.
What is the actual difference?
| Residential VPN | ISP proxy | Residential proxy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carries | the whole device | apps you set | apps you set |
| Addresses | one at a time | one per IP bought | a pool |
| Exit sits in | data center or home | data center | homes and offices |
| Billed | per month | per IP and month | per GB |
| HTTPS content | encrypted | encrypted | encrypted |
A VPN works at the level of the device. Once it is on, every app's traffic leaves through the same exit, even apps you never set up. A proxy works at the level of the program. Two browser profiles on one laptop can use two IPs at the same time.
Spur puts the three products in three places. It files VPNs and ISP proxies as "typically hosted in data centers". It says residential proxies run "through consumer devices and physical locations like homes and offices".
Billing follows the design. A VPN address is priced per month or per year. A rotating residential proxy is priced per gigabyte, because one plan can reach a whole pool of addresses. An ISP proxy is priced per address and month.
Is a proxy less private than a VPN?
The HTTP standard shows what happens to the pages most people visit. A program that opens an HTTPS site through a proxy asks it for a tunnel. The proxy then performs "blind forwarding of data, in both directions" (RFC 9110). The standard adds that such a tunnel is "secured using TLS" between your program and the website.
The proxy still learns which site you asked for, because the tunnel request names it. Plain HTTP pages, the ones without the S, cross the proxy as readable text.
A VPN encrypts the stretch from your device to its server, as the NIST definition describes. It protects apps that never use HTTPS as well. That is the real privacy gain of a VPN on public Wi-Fi. A regular VPN gives it just as much as a residential one.
What does a residential IP cost?
| Offer | Per month | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| TorGuard | $19.99 | month to month |
| TorGuard | $10.83 | yearly plan |
| Windscribe | $8.00 | Pro plan needed |
| ISP proxy | $2.60 | median, 24 sellers |
TorGuard's figures come from its page as the Internet Archive kept it on June 3, 2026, because its live site refused our reader. Windscribe bills $96 once a year per residential address, which is $8.00 a month. Its data center static IP costs $24 a year, its help center said on March 18, 2026.
The ISP figure is the median of each seller's cheapest monthly price for one IP. It covers 24 sellers in our price records, captured from July 20 to October 14, 2026. The middle half of those sellers asked between $1.68 and $3.05.
Rotating residential traffic is priced differently. Across 65 sellers in the same records, the smallest plan cost a median $3.50 per GB, and the largest plan $1.00 per GB. HProxy sells one GB for $0.50/GB, falling to $0.44/GB at volume, and a static residential IP for $2.70/IP a month.
Where do residential VPN addresses come from?
Neither Windscribe's help article nor TorGuard's page says where its residential addresses are hosted. Spur's description of ISP proxies covers one common kind: addresses on a consumer provider's network, run from a data center. Ask a seller which kind its address is before you pay for a year.
Peer-to-peer networks route your traffic through other people's homes, and often route other people's traffic through yours. Hola says so in its FAQ. Its free network "works by sharing the contributed resources of its users", also "for business use by Bright Data". A paying Hola Premium user is not used as a network node, according to the same FAQ.
Free VPN apps are also one of the main ways residential proxy networks find addresses. Cloudflare wrote in 2024 that such IPs are "most commonly" sourced "by partnering with free VPN providers" (Cloudflare). Proxy code inside browser extensions and mobile apps is the other main source, it added.
In January 2026, Google named three VPN brands controlled by the operators of the IPIDEA proxy network. They were Door VPN, Galleon VPN and Radish VPN. Many of the apps it analyzed "did not disclose that they enrolled devices" into that network.
Before you install a free residential VPN, search its terms for the words "peer" and "node". If they appear, your own connection may carry strangers' traffic.
Can websites still tell?
A home address removes one signal: the data center that owns a typical VPN address. It leaves the others in place. Cloudflare measured that "4 out of 5 requests" from addresses in residential proxy networks came from the households themselves.
Blocking those addresses would block real customers, so Cloudflare works from the browser instead. It looks for "unique fingerprints from the browsing agent" and tracks them "regardless of the IP source". Cookies, logins and that fingerprint pass through any VPN or proxy unchanged.
Spur's own product points the same way. It sells companies data to detect VPNs, residential proxies and bots, so the type of an address is something a site can buy.
Which one do you need?
- A regular VPN, for privacy on public Wi-Fi. It encrypts the device's traffic up to its server. A residential exit adds nothing to that protection.
- A residential VPN, for one person on one device. It suits a service that refuses data center addresses, for everything you do on that device. Expect $8.00 to $19.99 a month for one address from the two sellers that publish a price.
- A static residential proxy, for one fixed address per account. Set it in one browser profile or one program and keep it for months. The median seller asks $2.60 a month, and ours costs $2.70/IP a month on static ISP proxies.
- Residential proxies, for software. Scrapers, price checks, ad checks and account tools need many addresses, rotation and a chosen city per request. A residential VPN is the wrong tool there: one address at a time, switched by hand, priced per address. Our residential proxies start at $0.50/GB for one GB, and the plans are on the residential pricing page.
Our guide on checking whether an IP is residential shows the lookups that sites use to tell.
What this page could not check
- We did not test speed, blocks or detection for any service. HProxy does not test networks, its own or anyone else's.
- Mysterium's and StarVPN's price pages and NordVPN's blog refused our reader, so they carry no price here. TorGuard's prices come from the Internet Archive's copy of June 3, 2026.
- The ISP median covers 24 sellers whose records carry a monthly price per IP. Sellers that list only weekly or multi-month plans are not in it.
- Prices and offers change. We will check every number on this page again by January 22, 2027.
Sources
- NIST Computer Security Resource Center, glossary entry "virtual private network", read October 22, 2026.
- IETF, RFC 9110, "HTTP Semantics", June 2022, sections 3.7 and 9.3.6.
- Spur, "What is the difference between a VPN, residential proxy, and ISP proxy?", August 7, 2026, updated September 16, 2026; Spur Docs home page, read October 22, 2026.
- Windscribe help center, static IP billing article, March 18, 2026, and Windscribe's static IP page, read October 22, 2026.
- TorGuard, "Residential IP VPN" page, as archived by the Internet Archive on June 3, 2026.
- Mysterium Network, "Mysterium VPN" page, read October 22, 2026.
- Hola, FAQ, read October 22, 2026.
- Private Internet Access, "Residential VPN: What Is It and Do You Need One?", updated October 9, 2026.
- Surfshark, "Residential VPN: benefits, use cases, and alternatives", updated September 15, 2026.
- NordVPN support, "Dedicated NordVPN IP addresses", read October 22, 2026.
- Google Threat Intelligence Group, "Disrupting the World's Largest Residential Proxy Network", January 28, 2026.
- Cloudflare, "Using machine learning to detect bot attacks that leverage residential proxies", June 24, 2024.
- HProxy, residential proxies product page, 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.
