A discount is a claim about time. It says the number on the page is temporary, that a higher number is the real one, and that the gap between them closes on a date.
On 10 August 2026 we re-read the residential pricing page of twenty proxy vendors. Eight were running a discount. One of the eight said when it ends.
The other seven publish everything a sale needs except the part that makes it a sale. There is a struck-through price, a percentage, in two cases a coupon code, and no date anywhere: no expiry, no countdown, no seasonal name, no small print putting a limit on it. What is left is simply what the product costs, drawn to look like a favour.
Eight sales, one deadline
Bright Data's RESIGB50 code halves residential to $4/GB and states plainly that it runs three months, after which the rate returns to $8/GB. The other seven discounts we found on 10 August 2026 state nothing at all. Webshare, ProxyEmpire, Thordata, Proxy Cheap, NodeMaven, IPBurger and Shifter each publish a struck-through price with no date beside it.
The eight discounts, and what they are struck against
Every figure below was read off the vendor's own page on 10 August 2026. Six of the eight discount a per-gigabyte rate. Two of them, IPBurger and Shifter, discount a monthly plan instead, so those rows carry plan prices rather than rates.
Live residential discounts, 10 August 2026
| Vendor | On sale at | Struck against | End date on the page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | $4/GB | $8/GB | Three months, stated |
| Webshare | $3.50/GB | $7/GB | None stated |
| ProxyEmpire | $3.50/GB | $7/GB | None stated |
| Thordata | $2/GB | $2.85/GB | None stated |
| Proxy Cheap | $0.78/GB | $2.60/GB | None stated |
| NodeMaven | $4.10/GB | $5.13/GB | None stated |
| IPBurger | Plus, $149/month | $185/month | None stated |
| Shifter | Starter, $50 | $175 | None stated |
Each vendor's own pricing page, read 10 August 2026. Bright Data's discount requires code RESIGB50 and ProxyEmpire's requires EMPIRE50.
The one vendor that put a clock on it
Bright Data is the largest company in that table and the only one that dated its own promotion. Code RESIGB50 takes pay-as-you-go residential from $8/GB to $4/GB, the terms say three months, and the rate reverts afterwards. Our price study of 3 August 2026 recorded the same three-month term against its committed tiers, so this is a standing practice rather than a one-off.
That settles a question the other seven leave open. Publishing a term is not difficult, not unusual, and not something this market punishes, because the biggest vendor in the set does it on the same product on the same kind of page.
It is also the only discount here you can budget against. In month four, residential doubles from $4/GB to $8/GB, which is unwelcome and knowable, and knowable is the property that matters.
At Webshare, the discount is the product
Webshare's residential page does not carry a sale. It is one. The page title, the string that sits in the browser tab and in Google's results, was "Buy Residential Proxies - 50% Off Sale" when we read it on 10 August 2026.
Their entry rate is $3.50/GB, marked as half of a $7/GB regular price. On its own that is the same shape as ProxyEmpire's EMPIRE50 code, which cuts the identical $7 list to $3.50/GB.
The volume ladder is where Webshare becomes something else. Its regular price is $7/GB flat at every volume, with no bulk tier of any kind. What changes as you buy more is the size of the discount: 50% off at one gigabyte, rising to 80% off at 3,000 GB, which is the $1.40/GB sitting at the bottom of the ladder.
Read that as a mechanism rather than as a price. At Webshare the volume discount and the promotion are the same object. Strip the sale out and no ladder remains, only $7/GB at one gigabyte and $7/GB at three thousand. A customer buying 3,000 GB at $1.40/GB is not on a bulk rate that a promotion happens to improve. They are on a promotion, and the end of it would multiply their bill by five.
That is where a missing date stops being a marketing detail. The larger the Webshare account, the more of its price depends on an offer with nothing attached to it.
A list price that breaks the vendor's own arithmetic
There is a way to test which of the two numbers a vendor is really working from, and it does not require trusting anybody.
A price a company actually charges has to be internally consistent, because real customers sit at every point on the ladder and would notice if it were not. A number that exists only to be crossed out has no such pressure on it. So read the un-discounted column on its own terms and check whether it obeys the rules a real price list has to obey.
Two of the eight fail that check.
Thordata. Its residential page shows a sale rate beside a regular rate at each volume tier. On 10 August 2026 that regular column read $1.50/GB at 150 GB and $1.70/GB at 350 GB. A volume ladder cannot go up. No vendor charges more per gigabyte for buying more of it, and no customer would ever climb a tier to pay a higher unit price. Whatever that column is, it is not a schedule Thordata has charged, because at 350 GB it prices above its own 150 GB tier.
IPBurger. The same fingerprint, on plans rather than rates. Plus is $149 a month against a stated standard of $185. At that standard price the plan works out at $6.17/GB, and IPBurger's smaller Starter plan is $5.90/GB. So if the promotion lapsed as written, IPBurger's middle tier would cost more per gigabyte than the tier beneath it and the ladder would invert.
Two vendors, two independent contradictions, both of them in the un-discounted column and neither in the sale column. The sale prices descend as volume rises, the way a price list does. The prices they are struck against do not. On this evidence the promotional number is the designed one, and the regular number was fitted around it afterwards.
Three numbers for one product
NodeMaven does not contradict a ladder. It contradicts itself.
On 10 August 2026 its pricing page listed residential pay-as-you-go at $4.50/GB. Its residential product page, on the same domain and read the same day, showed $4.10/GB struck from $5.13/GB. Three numbers for one product, on two pages, on one day, with nothing indicating which is the standing rate and which is the offer.
What a missing end date costs you
The first cost is that you cannot plan against it. Webshare and ProxyEmpire both double if their sale ends. Proxy Cheap goes from $0.78/GB to $2.60/GB. Shifter's Starter tier is $50 for 50 GB, which is $1/GB, against a $175 standard for the same 50 GB, or $3.50/GB. None of those pages tell you whether that happens next quarter or never, so the exposure is real and its timing is unknowable.
The second cost is quieter and does more damage. Half of this market quotes a sale price and half quotes a standing one, so the figures in any comparison are not the same kind of figure. A ranking that puts Proxy Cheap's $0.78/GB against a vendor which has never discounted is setting a temporary number beside a permanent one without saying so, because the page it was copied from did not say so either. Most cheapest-proxy listicles are assembled out of exactly that mixture, which is why our own price records store whether a rate is promotional in the same row as the rate.
None of this requires anybody to be lying. A permanent sale can be perfectly truthful about what you will pay: if the discount never ends, the sale price is the price and the customer is fine. What suffers is the comparison, and the vendor's own claim about what the product is worth. A company that has sold at half price continuously has told you what its product costs, and the crossed-out number is a marketing device rather than a rate anyone was charged.
Four questions to ask a sale price
- 1
Look for the date, not the percentage
The percentage is always printed, in large type, near the top. The date is the part that makes it a discount rather than a price. If neither the page nor its terms state an end date or a duration, treat the sale figure as the real price and the struck-through figure as decoration.
- 2
Read the un-discounted column across every tier
The regular prices should fall as volume rises, because that is what a price list does. If they rise anywhere, as Thordata's did between 150 GB and 350 GB on 10 August 2026, or if they invert the vendor's own plan order, as IPBurger's would, that column is not a record of anything ever charged.
- 3
Cost the reversion, not the promotion
Take the struck-through rate and price your real monthly volume at it. That number is your exposure, and at half the vendors here it is double what the page is showing you. If the reversion would break your budget, the sale price is not the price you should be planning around.
- 4
Label promotional prices before you rank anything
When you line vendors up, mark which quotes are sales and which are standing rates. Sorting a mixed column produces a ranking of who is currently discounting hardest, which is a different question from who is cheapest, and it changes without notice.
Our own price
HProxy runs no promotional pricing. Residential is $0.50/GB from the first gigabyte, falling to $0.44/GB at 2,000 GB+. There is no code, no clock, and no struck-through number beside it.
That is a statement about our own page rather than a verdict on anyone else's. Several of the eight discounts above may well be permanent, in which case their customers are paying exactly what they expect to pay.
What we could not check
We read published prices. We did not reach a checkout, so we can report what each page states and not what an invoice says in month four.
We also cannot know whether these seven sales ever end, and that is the finding rather than a gap in it. A discount with no stated term cannot be verified by anyone outside the company, which is precisely what makes it unlike a discount.
One piece of duration evidence exists. Our 3 August 2026 price study already recorded ProxyEmpire's entry rate as a 50% promotion against a $7 list price. On 10 August 2026 the same promotion was on the same page at the same price. A week is not long, and it is the only measurement of duration we have for any of the seven.
Two limits on the comparison itself. IPBurger and Shifter discount plan prices rather than per-gigabyte rates, so their discounts are not directly comparable per gigabyte with the other six. And twelve of the twenty vendors we re-read on 10 August 2026 were not discounting at all, so an undated sale is a habit of part of this market and not of all of it.
If you want the full price ladder rather than the promotions, our residential price study compares what sixteen vendors advertise against what they charge a new customer. For the same treatment applied to credit-based billing, scraping API credit multipliers covers the vendors who charge you 1 to 75 credits for the same request.
Sources
- Bright Data residential pricing, read 10 August 2026: brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network/residential-proxies
- Webshare pricing, read 10 August 2026: webshare.io/pricing
- ProxyEmpire pricing table, read 10 August 2026: proxyempire.io/pricing-table/
- Thordata pricing, read 10 August 2026: thordata.com/pricing/
- Proxy Cheap pricing, read 10 August 2026: proxy-cheap.com/pricing
- NodeMaven pricing and residential product pages, read 10 August 2026: nodemaven.com/pricing and nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/
- IPBurger pricing, read 10 August 2026: ipburger.com/pricing/
- Shifter residential pricing, read 10 August 2026: shifter.io/pricing/residential-proxies
- Our own residential pricing, the source of every HProxy figure above.